Valve / Steam Dominance Over Digital Distribution

I'd probably say steam pioneered digital distribution for pc games, in the same sense of the likes of napster/itunes doing simular things for music

Number one issue : security + support
You have £100's if not £1000's tied to an account, and the technical support is very outdated, has not aged well in line with the rest of the service.

Tech support wasn't really an issue until they started signing up the likes of ubisoft who as useful supporting of their own games as a condom with a hole in it - If you've had a negative experience of Settlers 7's or other Ubisoft titles with the new DRM you'll know what I mean

I do think they need to make a bit more effort to quality control who they are signing up, another example would be our beloved Team 17 that passed off the new Alien Breed + Worms games for PC use when they were really just lazy console ports

I think in a sense being involved with steam actually forced them to listen to the customers and make an effort fixing stuff though as they've been working on the worms game since pushing it out

My other little nag is my isp (like many in the uk) doesn't like things like steam and treats it as peer to peer with traffic shaping and so on.. I can only really download my games from steam during the night because otherwise I risk going into one of the fair usage slots and being stm'd

I'm definatly convinced if not for the likes of steam I wouldn't had spent 1/4 of the cash I've laid out on games in the last 5 years... I tend to keep an eye for the weekly/monthly/seasonal sales and pick up the odd game here and there, it adds up eventually..
 
EdwardTeach said:
Yeah steam customer service should deffinately be improved. They need to hire more staff maybe.
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I e-mailed Gabe directly about an account issue, who responded within 2 hours and had put another person on the job who had fixed it that day.

I don't think I could have asked for more than that :p
 
Lemin said:
No, simply for logging in in another location, when i was already on. So after explaining what happend to them, i had to prove purchase to get it back.
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How bizarre. I've done that many a time. Sometimes Steam doesn't shut down on my notebook (window's gone but process is running) and when I log in elsewhere it just tells me that the other computer will be logged out and I carry on as normal.
 
Sundance said:
If valve go bust could we potentially lose all our games/money invested into it?
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Although they're under no obligation to do so, they did say they would provide a key to unlock the Steam DRM on all the purchases you've made. But that was years ago.

I make sure I keep a backup of the games in the common folder just in case.
 
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