It's a well known fact you guys are ripped off when it comes to video games at least plus I hear your have some nice censorship too. :/

My friends tell me it is much cheaper to order a retail game from abroad and pay for postage of an individual item, rather than buy locally. Middlemen in Australia are making a lot of money. Dishonestly.

Steam gave me a prompt demanding that I willingly abandon some of my legal rights, on threat of denying access to my past purchased games, even those already installed.

Yeah, I've heard and I have to say I'm not sure "much cheaper" is really fitting here. Then again it's subjective of how much cheaper it really is.

Eh? And you just gave up with 300 games?! I'm sorry, doesn't it make more sense to at least use those 300 games and stop paying for more.

You should find someone who you trust in a region that avoid censorship and ridiculous prices (US?) then gift the games to you and you pay them back some other way. I guess finding someone who you trust is harder than it looks if you don't know anyone in that area already.

That's how it works in every "free" for-profit social network: people get services without monetary payment, and the company gets to abuse them in return. The more invested you are in the network, the more abuse you will bear before quitting. Of course, this component of Steam is secondary to games distribution and therefore quantifiably less evil than its oligopolic hold on games distribution.

Steam/Valve basically forces an ultimatum upon you - either you issue a binding statement that you agree to the new terms and conditions there and then by clicking on "I Agree", or you can't access your previous purchases.

I contacted Steam Support and they turned very obnoxious about it. That was pretty much the last time I bought something directly from them.

Bear in mind that the new TOS is also applied to the previous purchases.

I still don't get it. Skype lets me do a whole bunch of social communications stuff, and to my knowledge has never abused me. It uses it as a platform to offer me services that cost money, but I don't consider being offered paid services to equate to abuse. Steam does roughly the same thing, it uses my friends list to show me what products I might be interested in (and it often gets it right), but again, I don't see how that equates to abuse, especially given that it's entirely optional from the outset.

Okay. I didn't even read it, it's way too long. Is this about the whole no more possible civil suits against them? :P

Among other things, although the class action issue only really applies in the US. Enforced arbitration is not permitted in most European jurisdictions anyway, as the right to legal recourse is enshrined in law in many EU nations. That's primarily what the whole situation with the vzbv is about here in Germany at the moment.

The changes also include a rather broadly worded ban on importing games or using games from other regions,

I don't have a Steam account I never will unless Steam starts officially to sell DRM free installers that let me to install and play games off-line forever without any activation requirements.

I haven’t touched Steam over all the years until last year when Deus Ex came out and I really wanted to have that game for the PC.

I still don’t like it (Steam) though and don’t plan to buy any other Steam titles. For me, software that is bound to Steam is defective by design. And it’s not worth the full price or a price above $10 to me for that matter. However, I still only consider buying games that cheap and on sales on Steam that I really have an interest in. In general, I simply ignore games that make use of DRM such as Steam, Origin or similar systems.

I refuse to buy steam games - I've only ever bought one, and that was because I bought a boxed copy online and the website didn't say it needed steam.

To be honest, I just don't get steam - I don't see the point of achievements and I don't play muliplayer so it really has no benefit for me.

I also don't do achievements or multiplayer, but it still has some benefits for me:

- Games that use other DRM often don't work for me. I have been able to play every single game I've bought from Steam (well, at least the ones I've tried), even when the DRM has prevented me from being able to play it when purchased from other sites like GG.

- It does a good job of predicting what I might want to buy and telling me about it. I've found a bunch of games that way that I otherwise wouldn't have known about or looked into.

- Their prices are the best in the industry for the games they sell.

- I really like the backup feature where you just click a button and it backs up all my games and stuff to an external drive or different computer. It would take me frigging ages to do that one by one.

- I like being able to join groups that are specific to the games I'm playing, so I can communicate in real time to other people who are playing the same game. That's not always useful, but it can be, and it's nice doing it from one centralized place rather than having to join a million different sites for a million different games.

- It always accepts my money (well, at least since it let me make an account). Every other site occasionally flags my card and stops me from using it until I prove to customer support that I'm a real human being with real money. Steam doesn't question me, it just takes my money and offers to take more.

I used to rage about Steam because at one point, it thought Cambodia didn't exist and wouldn't let people here buy stuff. But since they started letting me give them my money, they've been really great.

Well this is just sad. You have all these games and you don't play them because you didn't accept. Wouldn't of it been easier (and a lot smarter) just to accept and never buy another game off of steam?

If you want to lose all those games than don't let your stupidity stop you. I payed for my games and I sure as hell will make sure I can keep playing them.