I hate steam, as the title suggests. Specifically the software, though sometimes the rather hot H20 as gas has burned me almost as bad as Valve's little experiment.
"But hang on;" you interject, "I love steam... I can get games easily and quickly, sometimes cheap too! I can talk to my friends..." blah blah blah. Yes, Steam now is a very good piece of software. Heck, it's been very solid for years now. But I still hate it, you know why?
The way they introduced it.
"Psssh, you're just being bitter;" you snidely reply "What possible reason would you have to rant on this now?"
Well my friends, two reasons. First, just because it's good now doesn't erase the bad PR, lies, frustration and lost time when Steam was a horrible failure; and second the recent release of a 'new and improved steam' made me very nervous. It has since passed with only cosmetic changes... but it still brought back those memories.
The fact I reacted with nerves suggests the introduction of steam had a lasting impression, one worth discussing.
Let me end my introduction with a disclaimer: I love the Steam of 2010, it's very good for a number of reasons... everything following is about the Steam of 2003-2006.
With that out of the way, let's get into why it was so bad...
First: It didn't work for years
It simply failed to work. Even now, Steam crashes often for no apparent reason; though it's not as bad as it was back then. But on top of that, downloads would be slow, corrupted and lost... and the Valve Anti Cheat system was a joke. In short...
BASIC OPERATION FAILED; repeatedly and abysmally.
Animated! Open in a new tab/window and watch the fun...Second: Steam was used as a tool to eliminate the old WON net servers.
Before steam, we authenticated via the WON net servers. It worked well enough and the users were happy. Valve however, was not. I personally wouldn't have minded switching from WON net to Steam, if it didn't increase the system requirements for Half Life by 400%!!! All of a sudden, a bunch of players at the low end of the spectrum couldn't play the game they had paid for years ago and played fine until that point... It was a slap in the face and was unnecessary.
Third and finally: Valve lied about the features that would be available.
Several carrots were used to entice people to use Steam. One being able to chat to your friends through a friends list and the all new Steam community! These sounded cool, and players couldn't wait. They didn't include it in the initial release but we were assured it would come soon.
Yeah... in 2008, 5 years after Steam was released.
FAIL
As I said above, Steam is great now and it's awesome how it seems to be promoting and aiding small independent publishers. But the way users were dragged into beta testing... no, wait... that's far too kind; Alpha testing their horrendous 'Content Delivery' system is a stain on the company and one I'll never forgive or forget.
And I'm perfectly fine being a minority on that score, if that is indeed the case.
Now... anyone for some Team Fortress 2?
Actually I hate the Steam of 2010 not just the old one. Letme share the story why. A new RTS game by square enix came out called Supreme Commander 2 it looked brilliant, vibrant, and wonderful and being a fan of previous square enix titles I thought I bought a winner for sure. I go home and install the steam software and as soon as it gets going it has to download 6 GIGS OF FILES WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! why the hell would it need to update 6 gigs of files for supreme commander 2 when according to the box the game came in it was only going to require 6 gigs of hard drive. I went to looking around and did some searching come to find out square enix originally hadn't set it up with valve to use the steam software but when projected release times was going to cause the game to be pushed back again for a couple months they signed up with valve put a non working game on the pcdvd with the good steam software and prepped the game for sales in the stores not getting the game actually complete till about 3 days before the stores could start selling it and relying on the steam software to give everybody a correct version of the game. This also vexxed me farther as the steam servers kept crashing and after 3 days of attempting to get the game installed I called up Mike the local gamestop manager ( I love mike he's super cool ) and explained this to him. Wanting me to stay happy he letme return the game to the store with full store credit for any other game I wanted. Lesson learned and now I avoid steam like the plague.
ReplyDeleteHoly crap! That's the worst story I've heard about Steam of late. Sounds almost as if they were complicit in fraud perpetrated by Square Enix. Still, there are issues with steam as I said including just random bugs and questionable ethics in regard to some releases... So I'm not surprised.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, even with those issues... Steam 2010 >> Steam 2003-2006. It's waaaaay better than it used to be.
heh even if it is an improvement to older versions anything with steam on it is off limits to my computer LOL
ReplyDeleteI get a few games through Steam. It may have been terribad back in the day, but now they seem to have worked past a lot of the issues. Something I can respect. They could have easily just forgotten about the whole thing and moved on (screwing over anyone who ever used it).
ReplyDeleteNow they're even working on making it cross-platform. Some of the early beta Mac versions had files that hinted at a future Linux version. I doubt ALL games on Steam will be made cross-platform, but it's a fair bet that most of the Valve games will be.
I'm not Steam's biggest fan in the world, I just think that most things (and people) deserve a shot at a second chance. After reading Eric's story I would avoid Square Enix products more than Steam, but that's just me.