I meant that people implied they would crack games if they had a problem, not that they were cracking their games unnecessarily. I've often wondered what would happen in the scenario where a user was banned, but had happened to backup all his games first. Would he delete them, or crack them? ;-)

But maybe I'm being harsh on Steam. Maybe they only ban users as a last resort after multiple infringements.

I linked to a Steam forum the other day and I was suprised at how many banned users there were just on that topic. Surely all the Steam users would have learnt by now to keep quiet and just keep playing their games ;-)
Hey, I'm supposed to the delusional one ;-)

You know, after eight years and how many million users, I have yet to see a user being banned from steam without reason. I would like to see that thread, if you still have it, please.

The Steam forums are seperate from the accounts. Steam forum users get banned all the time. It does not affect your account in any way. The stuff I posted on GOG would have gotten me banned a hundred times over on Steam forums (which is why I don't use them).

I have this one saying in regard to Steam and GOG. I like GOG, I use Steam.

I don't think Steam give reasons. There's just the word "Banned" under the various poster's names. I tried viewing all the recent postings of one of them at random, but I couldn't find a post that seemed to be a compelling reason to ban them. Unless some threads are deleted, or the user was banned long after they said something that got undue attention?!?
May GOG.com keep doing what it does best. And I don't mind the occassional new game thrown in ;-)

Like SimonG says, forum accounts and game accounts are kept separate and there are no links between them. You can create as many forum accounts as you like, or create a forum account without having a steam account. Creating a steam account does not automatically create a forum account.

Being banned in the forums means just that, you are banned in the forums. Your game account is not affected by this at all.

I still have not seen a single piece of evidence (not hearsay) about any users being banned from their games in Steam without any reason.

Steam forums are (partially) community moderated. That leads to banning for the silliest reasons. Eg. In an other thread I complained that LucasArts isn't selling DOTT anymore and you would have to check Abandonware sites. That would probably get me banned on the Steam forums. I think even linking to sales on Amazon might get you a ban. Really stupid stuff.

If a forums ban would lead to an account ban (like with other clients *cough*origin*cough*) they would probably only have half the active users anymore ;-)

A-men!

Those ones are nearly always to do with something like a problem with payment - so I'm glad to hear that Steam does give their users the benefit of the doubt before blocking them from their games. I got the impression they blocked the users first, and only then tried to sort out the payment problems with them.

Sorry, but here we have to stop because you seem to know much better what I want than me myself. I request that you be much more careful with how and of what you accuse others. So here for the records: I always want numbers.

So now that we have clarified this: I can sum the anwsers up in that there are no reliable numbers available. It might be wrong to say that Steam revitalised anything. And if it did the amount of revitalisation could be very small.

For me it is really difficult to judge Steam. I never used it. I never missed it. I have enough games without Steam. I am not planning to use it. Achievements and friends lists do not seem essential to me. Multiplayer I play for a long time without Steam. I mostly recruit multiplayer partners through forums. I guess I have an old style approach to gaming: Install the game, start the game, play the game.

But I would never deny anyone Steam. Nobody says this here. I am relying on the greed of the publishers as everybody should do in a good economy. That they want to make money also on the people who like their games DRM free. They simply need to develop a similar matchmaking and if must be also achievements and friends system but without DRM, purely optional, in the best case compatible with Steam. Or just rip all this things off and sell it as it is. It's not that difficult: just look at the pirates or the Double Fine production who found that after one day of collecting money it would not be too difficult to offer non Steam versions. I hope this example will be the standard in the future. However I fear many publishers won't get it and because of this misjudgement the market will remain inefficient. That or the costs of maintaining two versions are largely underestimated by me.

That explains a lot, doesn't it? I think that if you eventually do try it out, you'll be surprised how simple and (mostly) harmless it actually is to use Steam. If you're getting your idea of how it works from this forum, it will inevitably be all wrong.
Sorry, but I have to agree with SimonG here. If you claim there are enough people who like their games DRM free to make it worthwhile for the publishers, the onus is on you.

It's difficult to comment here more, but the value of pi for example is relatively undispusted. Many other things too. I would always bet on science. But it doesn't matter here. No information available, no science possible.
Obviously I only can in the most sincere way affirm to everybody who wants to hear it that I would like to buy games DRM free and do not like to buy games with DRM. That's all I can do.

Do you think this discussion here will change the world?

No, I don't expect to change the world in any single thing I do. I'm not a teenager any more.

But you see, the wording of your post I was responding to wasn't this latest "oh, don't mind me, I just hope they'll change their ways". You said "they want to", "they need to". I'm just asking, well, do they? They seem to be content enough as it is.

That is excactly what I mean. Your most sincere affirmation is enough for you to claim that DRM free games are a massive market that just needs to be tapped. But you will never accept any argument made in the favor for Steam unless you see some "numbers".

There nothing wrong with having a bias against Steam, but be honest about it.

Exactly. Somehow I have to explain the world to me. My explanation is that economy doesn't work perfectly. That smaller trends are not regarded because people falsely only concentrate on big trends, resulting in less maximized profit but still enough to be content enough.

Maybe I and people like me are just even more insignificant than I think we are. But it is also possible that the industry is just too lazy to cater to me, maybe both. Or do you think that the economy works always perfect?

You want to approach this scientifically, yet throw out something as blatantly biased as this? Note my emphasis on "falsely" there. You do not know if it's "falsely" or not, and neither do I.
The industry, by and large, is not "lazy" to cater to you. It apparently doesn't consider the effort worth the trouble, which is something different. Whether they are right in doing that or not, well, that's the crux of the question once again, and I can only repeat that neither you nor I know the answer.
Deflection. This is quite irrelevant.