This, so fucking this.
I agree that Steam support is absolutely horrible - I've had nothing but problems with them. That being said, I'm yet to see a truly 'good' support service for a publisher or platform. Everyone was raving about Origin's support, and after spending ages trying to actually get the email form on the German website (gave up after half an hour), I opened the UK one and got a chat window there.

Apparently EA have outsourced their EU English-language support to India, and it is absolutely useless. The people barely speak English and have since gone the Steam route of blurting out prescribed half-truths that barely befit the situation.

Not had the pleasure with GOG's support, but it's a telling thing that I've never had to use it.

Too bad that's not valid for other Eastern European countries in which the life standard is many times lower. :(

he he some people are down voting users bursting their "Steam is the Evil" bubble, how cute :)

I've been on Steam since Jan 2004 and GoG since the early Beta, and I love both.

GoG is the like the ideal platform for me, and Steam the "good" one among *normal* platform.

Steam brought a LOT to gaming and publishing, once you start doing your homework and looking at contracts and the video-game industry history.

...

Regarding OP, this is the typical "Wha wha it doesn't work ! let's blame the nearest logo I can find !" you see everywhere on the Internet, for any services/products: the same people are blaming Facebook over a faulty app, blaming Microsoft over a buggy x86/x64 software or a faulty hardware component.

- Dark Messiah doesn't work ? Steam can't modify the package without publisher agreement, Valve do not have an access to the source code, it is not the duty of Valve to fix other publishers and developers games. You want Valve to take over Dark Souls and fix it too ? Then what about Red Orchestra 2 ? They'll need 10 000 developers soon...

- Steam forums aren't as good as gog.com forums in terms of ergonomy, indeed. But it's still pretty good: by searching for your post (search by user name), you can quickly see if anyone published a new post on a topic you previously participated in.

The ToS is abusive ? Like any ToS on the Internet, they can ban you if they want to, because they can't legally cover every single possibility (you want a 200 pages long ToS ? they can do it if you really want that). Calling that out is just bad faith when it's done like that.

- Banned on the forum ? Oh sorry mate, I've been fighting regional price since day 1, actively contacted Valve over it (and the price tiers, and so on), participated on that thread ("Looks like...") and Steamunpowered, and never had any problem because I took the time to THINK before posting.

Aggressively accusing Valve/Steam wildly without any evidence or arguments, in random threads everywhere on the forum, acting like an obnoxious child toward moderators (who are NOT employees, just volunteers) who are just trying to keep the place tidy, will get you banned.

Just because you think you are "right", that you have the "right" to be angry, doesn't mean you can break in any room and start shouting at everyone there. People who stayed calm and focused on the topic never got perma-banned.

Stranded got banned because he's sometime losing his self-control and swinging his angry-rant bat at moderators and Steam, turning himself into a noise rather than a solid argument.

- Still think Steam is responsible for regional pricing ? Seriously ?! How can you call that greed when it's the publisher deciding for the pricing ? They should be held responsible for what publishing mastodons such as EA and Activision are deciding ?

Seriously, blaming Steam for that is blaming the grocery store for not fighting off the world largest food distribution by forcing them to change their prices.

You should blame Steam for failing in negotiating prices harmonization over different country, but shouldn't just cross the line and call them greedy over that specific point, this is just silly : they tried the pricing tier (nb: I'm in Tier 1, highest prices), they repeatedly told devs, publishers and journalists that markets like Russia should have specific (lower) pricing (because of lower incomes there), and they pushed hard for the "Steam Sales" so gamers -wherever they are- can buy games for the cheap.

How is that pure greed when they convinced (through meetings, conferences, public display of sales figures to journalists) publishers to drop the price by 50% to 75% (or even 90%) during christmas and summer sales ?

...

Oh and let's not talk about the "gifts from a cheaper region": kids who got 100€ (or more) worth of games cried when they got their account temporarily suspended by Steam, calling Steam of the most nasty curse words.

I gifted many games to people living in censored countries (such as germany), received a few games from cheaper regions, and never had a problem, because I kept it low and never went overboard.

Don't be foolish : Steam billing services admins are watching over the transactions and gifts, and will only strike down upon obviously abusing users. As long as you only get a game or two like that every 6 months, you won't get any problem.

I'm just grateful that they even sell me games, they wouldn't before, it was only last Christmas when GameRager found a "Khmer Steam Members" group (that consisted of one guy) that I tried it again and discovered it would let me buy stuff. It's been mostly awesome since then.

/agree

Purposely ignorant for the cause bro!

Oh look ! Another EA bashing thread on the Steam forums . :p

So I'm not the only one. "Poisonous" was the word that was coming to me every time I scanned through the posts here lately.

Yeah, it's like Americans debating socialism... it's not based on facts, the other side is just EVIL!

I have no problem with saying "Steam gives a company control over my access to games and I can't live with that." That's fine, I GET that. I might disagree because the openness of the PC makes their power irrelevant, but I totally get the principle and concern involved. The problem is a lot of people seem to make up grand inconveniences or problems that don't really matter or exist in some attempt to make it sound better I guess? I dunno.

Steam is successful because it's convenient, not the other way around.

We joined around the same time. It really wasn't that much better. It was somewhat better than that when I was lurking the forums in the earlier part of 2010, but people started getting several degrees stupider after the shutting down "fiasco". Folks were so irrational at the time that I went from 0 to -200 rep with my first post on the forums. Things were better, yes, but the decline between September 2010 and August 2012 is not so great as you may wish to believe it is.

All the same, this forum is still far greater than any other gaming forum I've been to. There are only four gaming forums I have ever been a part of that I have never been banned from. All the ones I have been banned from, I have been banned from no less than two dozen times each. SPUF is a pretty fucking abysmal place, but GameFAQs definitely sets the record. I stopped counting sometime after 1,000 bans since 2001. I don't have as much to say as the average forum-goer, and I rarely make topics. I've probably made less than ten topics here on GOG. The thing is, I have a problem with authority. Corrupt, stupid, underage authority. That and censorship. I expect to vanish very quickly from these forums should the same problems come to ravage this community. That's when you know it's all over.

That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in this industry. Especially coupled with the 'new' features and crap that was 'introduced' following that event.

That is all true. What I'm getting at though, is that services like GOG could become the future. More and more games are starting to appear on GOG so it looks like some publishers are taking the hint. The DRM is something to do away with.

I'm afraid I don't agree to this. Since it's usually the big boys that do charge higher for games rather then the little indie ones. If Valve told Bethesda that Skyrim had to be a flat fee (Since it was $80 USD over here when it game out) I don't think Bethesda would dare take it off the service. It would be a PR nightmare. Imagine reading "Bethesda removed Skyrim because Steam said no more regional pricing"

God people would hate the company after that.
There are torrent sites (I can't tell you which ones sorry) that have better support that Steam. In fact I know one site that has on the fly IRC support and they won't even charge you for it.

a serious wtf at the downvoting of posts here in this thread, while a post filled with insults is still visible here. What a complete joke .