View Single Post
Old 02-29-2012, 12:45 AM   #32
ozzie
Senior Member
 
ozzie's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Germany
Posts: 726
Default

Sorry, but that's a whole other issue. I like the trend to digital distribution. Physical copies on optical mediums are rather impractical. They take lot more space away and aren't as easily copied. You can't take your whole game collection on optical mediums with you around as easily as you can with digitally distributed files that you, under ideal circumstances, can simply copy on a hard drive. Digital distribution is a wonderful economic, cheap and simple form of delivery. There's no need anymore for boxes and CDs to be manufactured, to be shipped to a store where costumers have to go to buy the games.

While digital distribution takes the ability away to sell used games, it can, under ideal circumstances, make it much easier to backup your whole game collection.
But with Steam, you're always reliant on Steam. You can backup the game data, but you will still need Steam to run the games again. The offline mode works unreliably. When I was at my parent's home I had some trouble playing my games on Steam when the internet connection was flaky. And while Valve Software may honestly want to offer a good service to their costumers now, I would have to rely on good faith to not believe that this could change any day. I don't want to be reliant on Steam and I hate the trend of digital distribution that with this easy form of delivery come all kinds of restrictions that make the whole process rather impractical.

Steam is certainly not as bad as other digital stores or other forms of DRM, but that's not good enough for me. When I buy a game I don't want any DRM at all.
That doesn't mean I'll avoid Steam entirely. The games you buy on Steam are offered to you as a service, but you don't own them. I just keep that in mind and ask myself how much such a service is worth to me.
ozzie is offline