I've looked around online for details and all I've found is ~85% fans saying everything is fine regardless of anything because Gabe Newell and Steam are heroes beyond reproach, something like Father Christmas and Superman, ~10% opposition saying that it's utterly terrible under any circumstances and the remainder saying that this sort of DRM is unavoidable, Steam works well enough and Valve haven't got a history of being incompetent or malicious. It seems to be rather polarised and rather short of actual information.
It's not really polarised at all. There are very few people who have used steam who hate it. There are some forums where people who have never used it, and are paranoid about it, are basically regurgitating paranoid fears back from 2003-4. And there are people who just wont accept DRM on principle.
I do understand the dislike of DRM on principle. I dont like it either. Steam is the only DRM service which actually adds value, and on-balance, the trade-off is worth it. It gives a lot of features which you may not care about, but which add a lot of value to most users:
* autopatching. You never have to manually update a game again. For some games where, after installing, you have to hunt down patch 1.1, then 1.11. then 1.2, and install them each in order, what a hassle.
* Incredibly easy transferral of your entire steam catalog from one computer to another. (just copy the steam folder then double click steam.exe, and a couple of minutes later you're up and running). With steam you just forget about it and it's done.
* A central games launcher. If you have a lot of games installed, you dont have to have a couple of dozen or hundred shortcuts scattered across your desktop. Just open steam, and double click the game you want to run.
* steam sales, especially the summer and winter events. Really, any pc game user who has missed out on these doesn't know what he's been missing.
* most games on steam have dedicated forums in the steam community site. This is an excellent resource for if a game has problems, and for fixes.
* the cloud save feature of steamworks games allows you to pick up a game where you left off on any computer you own. I have a media centre PC and a desktop, and for those games, I can play the same campaign on either computer, and dont have to finagle a way to swap svage games from one to the other.
* indie dev support. So many indie devs have said they wouldn't have succeeded, without steam's active support and easy distribution network.
There's a bunch of community features, achievements, the game overlay, and other stuff, that don't particularly excite me, and of course offline mode, but the bullet point list above are all killer features IMO.
I'd also like to come back to this: "~85% fans saying everything is fine regardless of anything because Gabe Newell and Steam are heroes beyond reproach, something like Father Christmas and Superman"
There is a good reason for this. Steam and Valve are popular, because they are a
good company. Most gaming companies are publicly owned, so have to make decisions that satisfy both shareholders and customers. Valve is privately owned, and only have to concern themselves with keeping their customers happy. Their company structure allows them to continue releasing free product for their games and keep multiplayer servers running years after the EA's, Activision and Ubisofts would have shut their servers down and started charging ridiculous prices for add-on map packs, etc.
So, valve have earned the popularity they have. That said, they aren't perfect. Their customer support is slow, there are features steam doesn't have but should, and most steam users are aware of their faults. Their popularity is not a case of blind groupthink. It's just people recognising a good service when they see it.
) Steam will be around for a long time as it's competitors are so far behind.