I just wrote this in another thread: My dislike of Steam is not for performance or playability reasons.
Steam is a GIANT step towards giving publishers more control over every single customer. The dream of every digital content creator, total digital rights management.
Basically they can do the following with it, which they always wanted but never managed in other ways:
1) Publisher can at any time disable your game and deny you the right to play what you already paid good money for. If the publisher has technical problems or gets bought out, your game may be disabled as well. You never really have the right to play the game - you always need to ask Steam first if you may.
2) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess Steam wants a lot more personal details for an account than any standard WindowsXP activation? The game publishers never managed to enforce mandatory registration of software (things like "tech support only for registered users" could be considered illegal) but with Steam, they can now do that.
So that gives them a completely legal way to create a large data mining opportunity for their own marketing and other purposes. Who says they aren't going to sell this data or use it for their own unsolcited advertising etc.?
3) As far as I'm aware, Steam forces you to download every patch if you want to play online, at least. Fans of SWAT4 weren't too happy about the 1.1 patch introducing product placement ads into the game, but at least they could chose to not apply the patch. Fans of the old DoD 1.3 back in the days didn't like the direction DoD 2.0 took, so they just kept playing version 1.3. For IL-2:Forgotten Battles a few patches were released that, to some people made things worser - so some people simple didn't download them and kept the previous version.
With Steam, you don't have that choice. You'll be forced to add every patch/feature etc. to your game. So in theory, if in half a year the publisher wants the devs to reduce game realism to make it "more accessible to newcomers" - you'll be forced to download these "updates" trough Steam.
4) Game Publishers are starting to hate the second-hand game market. They are releasing more and more crappy games with ever shortening play-times (below 10 hours for some titles) and then they hate it when customers re-sell their used games.
With Steam, they found a way to fix that - last I heard it costs you 10 bucks to sell a Steam-authenticated game, otherwise they won't transfter the account for you. Great, now they can force their way into the Second Hand games market too.
In summary: Digital Rights Management is the dream of every big greedy company these days. Step by step, things like Steam prepare the way for total control of users and their computers.
Now Sony is already contemplating a system that will tie every sold Playstation3 game to the hardware it is first played on, making it impossible to swap, trade or play games at your friend's place.
The more we accept this stuff, the cockier the companys get. Every game sold over Steam is another sign that says "yes, please screw with our customer rights because we are willing to give you control over our paid-for content".
If the release isn't 100% better than the mod, I'll stick with Ro 3.3
As you can see, I dont use it much anyway.
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