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I own Ostfront and will pay another 25.00 for a version of Ostfront sans Steam

I own Ostfront and will pay another 25.00 for a version of Ostfront sans Steam


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Personally, that auto-update feature is more than enough for me to be happy with Steam. I -hate- hearing from someone (or learning when I try to play online, it tells me to get the patch off a website rather than delivering a link or anything) that I need the "latest patch." Especially with the wide variety of games I have planted on this Machine.
 
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Piemaster said:
I am still confused as to why everyone hates steam. It's not like steam itself is taking up that much room on your hard drive, it's pretty easy to remove if you ABSOLUTELY need to, and it makes getting patches and updates EXTREMELY easy. I have never had a problem.

I like steam because it keeps all the games up to date. The only drawback is that once you buy a game, it's yours. You can't sell a game if you don't like it. Hopefully Steam will find a way to transfer licences to other accounts.
 
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This game wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for steam allbeit without some remortaging by the devs.Took a small fresh dev team and gave them mass distribution at little cost.

I also like the idea that 3d party devs can have a crack at the bigtime...big publishers seem to just choke the industry these days.

Steam has so many positives i cant write them all.
 
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What I like about Steam. Well how about the I fried my computer. Built me a new one. Logged on to Steam and started downloading all my games. Went to bed, went to work next morning. Came home after work and was able to play all my games again. Well all those that were on Steam. All my other games I had to dig up all my CDs and try to find my activation codes again :mad:
 
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Piemaster said:
I am still confused as to why everyone hates steam.

It's mostly just the principle of it for me. It just makes it so obvious that the companies that distribute through Steam don't trust their customers. I payed for the game. I don't need Valve's little digital nanny watching to make sure I payed for the game. Practically speaking, the fact that it's a TSR program that doesn't shut off when you shut down the game is kind of annoying. The news updates (though they can be disabled) are almost as annoying. When I downloaded Ostfront, Steam didn't even ask me where I wanted to put it.

That said, I do appreciate the automatic updates, and I've yet to see any cheating in RO:Ostfront. I guess my big gripe is just that Steam should have been part of Ostfront, not a seperate program from it. If they built in the ability to autoupdate the game in to the game EXE along with some invisible copy and cheat protection, it would have been fine and they wouldn't have had to use Steam.
 
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Piemaster said:
I am still confused as to why everyone hates steam. It's not like steam itself is taking up that much room on your hard drive, it's pretty easy to remove if you ABSOLUTELY need to, and it makes getting patches and updates EXTREMELY easy. I have never had a problem.

Allow me to past this from another forum to help un-confuse you:

"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"."

Keep in mind that I did not post the above. But I do understand why people do not like STEAM. I for one would like to go back to the old days when software was less intrusive and you felt like you owned what you payed for.
 
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gonzo, the guy that posted that has some points but lets look at them realisitically.

Virtually every one of them is negated by the fact that if Valve and steam ****s up, by giving out personal data, or taking someones games away, etc. then they have just killed their market FOREVER. End of story.

Dont forget the guy is also a conspiracy theorists who has no idea what customer satisfaction means.... There is a natural order that prevents all of those things from happening.

On the major plus side steam makes it about 1000x eaiser for developers to stay connected with their players, which is good for everyone.
 
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RO exists now because of Steam. Why would you want to take that away? Except for the Linux/Mac people I can't understand why most people would have any problems with Steam these days. Sure...there was a time when it was a pretty big piece of junk that had all sorts of issues, but for the most part these days it's just a nice tool for managing games. But I digress...there are those who have issues with it whether they are legitimate or not the bottom line is that without steam...we probably wouldn't be playing right now.

Monk
 
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I'm the guy who posted the stuff Gonzo quoted here.

And no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I just belive in having control over the stuff I pay for. Steam puts someone else in control of the games I paid for. I can't make the point any simpler than that.

Arguable, it turned out that for a boxed copy, they don't need many personal details, only an email adress. So that point is less of a bother now.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the long load times this game now has, compared to the mod, is due to the steam .gcf file structure which is basically a file system within a single file. Unpacking and loading all the stuff into memory just takes a lot longer than a standard harddrive installation. It also makes modding harder and more complicated.

Start-up time has increased too since steam needs to be loaded first and then needs to unpack the game content before you even see the main menu.

Patches and Updates I can easily get from a download link, usually provided on the game's home page. Like I wrote above, I don't want patches to be automatically applied unless I've seen people say they are good and an improvement - for example, if in the future it turns out ROOST is not selling enough units, do you guys want to download the patch that will make ROOST more of an arcade game because Valve wants more customers? Things like that DO happen.

All in all, it doesn't have any advantages I could see. So yes, if there ever would be an Ostfront version that does not authenticate with Steam, I'd buy it again.
 
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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.

The 'technical problem' issue is certainly real, I've had matches cancelled because UBI.com was down. The publisher getting bought out... that's just ridiculous tin-foil hat paranoia. Valve isn't going anywhere.

As for the publisher disabling my game... They only have the right to do that if I breach the license agreement. Doing so for any other reason is actionable and would land them in court with a class action suit.

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.?

Consider yourself corrected. You're wrong. The only personal details it collects that are required are related to your credit card, which are the same questions any online credit card purchase requires as part of the confirmation and fraud protection.

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.

Corrected again, you're wrong. You can turn off auto-updates of any game that runs through steam and it does not force clients or servers to update to the newest version.

The last point made I'll concede is valid as it stops people from transfering a license to another person without paying for it, though I've never tried over steam so I cannot confirm if that $10 figure is true or not.
 
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