Amazon screwed up my release-day shipping for Civilization 5 so I ran to Wal-Mart at midnight on release day and grabbed a copy... I was so excited! Civ5 was in my hands! I rushed home to install it, so giddy with anticipation...

Only to find out retail copies were locked until 10AM the same as Steam purchases.

THANKS STEAM.

I know it's whiney to complain about 10 hours, but the point is that I don't think the experience of buying a boxed game in a store and then getting home to find it unplayable should ever happen.

Well Wal-Mart's mistake. Shouldn't have sold it earlier. However now you are playing already :)

Okay, you won. :)

But then at midnight for each timezone. So regional restriction at least has a purpose. :V:

I think that part of the reason people are willing to give up control to Steam even if they are aware of what they are giving up is an overall lack of confidence in the future of the PC gaming. There are a lot of PC gamers who feel that the platform would be far worse off now if it weren't for Steam, and by now this is probably true to some extent.
There are an increasing number of games that wouldn't have even been noticed, would have been almost inaccessible to a lot of gamers, or perhaps might not have been made at all if it weren't for Steam.
Of course, this can be self fulfilling in some ways. PC gamers accepting Steam means more developers and publishers will release their games on it and so on and so forth.

I think, and I may come out strong here, that you are full of shit.

They are willing to give up control to Steam because either:
1. they don't know/care about what they're giving up and the convenience Steam offers is enough;
2. they do know what they're giving up but when weighed against the value added by Steam as a platform those things don't provide enough incentive not to use Steam.

The problem with this arguement is that (assuming they don't use a service like Steamworks or GfWL) the disc check has been pretty much been elimated by the online activation. Ultimately, for people entering the PC gaming market today, your arguements will probably be invalid. Basically, this post hits the nail. Steam provides the best service for new games for the majority of people, hence it's popularity. Also, for most people (including probably myself), the platform provides value-added benefits (although for most of them the client provides it to pretty much all games).

Of course both of those are true as well, but I also think that there is also bit of a doom and gloom attitude that some PC gamers have that ends up attracting them to Steam, whether or not that view of things is misplaced and irrational or not.

With today's focus on consoles and talk of the "decline of PC gaming" (which I think is greatly exaggerated) anything that seems to be good news in PC gaming is going to look a lot better than it might be.

In a perfect market and all information available, one could argue customers demands are answered fully and everybody gets what he wants for a fair price. However I don't think that we have it here.

I think that people choose Steam because there is no real competition and no other good alternative. Many games (already there or still to come) are exclusive to Steam, so you get what the games industry wants you to have and not the other way around. Also for the people that want a different DRM (I actually can accept the need for some form of DRM) the demand is maybe not big enough to create a functional market. So their might too be forced to go to Steam or abstain since publishers will hardly make the effort to compile their games for all possible DRM schemes.

My questions, which I am pondering lately, are: there must be a better DRM for downloadable property than online activation! It takes away all the rights from the customer. Thats not acceptable. Now I think what this could be? Hardware dongles would be a solution but maybe no practical enough. Fingerprint identification? Just a third party right manager, which is neutral and transparent and sponsored by the whole industry, so unlikely to go down. A guaranteed playability for x(>5) years or money back (maybe via an insurance)... Or no DRM at all.

That all could be ways to return rights to the customer. However the answer will not be easy. Steam is an easy answer, but I want more rights and more privacy. There should be an alternative somehow, only it still needs to be discovered.

Well I bought a game on steam recently. When I look at the CC statement I get a foreign transaction fee and steam billed in London. Are they not in Seattle?

They are indeed based in Seattle. However, they use the company Global Collect to handle all billing and transactions. The company is based in the Netherlands, with transaction servers all over the world.

From what I can tell, during sales that generate a lot of traffic, many transactions get shuffled around to these other servers and cause users to incur international transaction fees. The worst part is, from the few stories I followed closely, there is nothing that can be done about it. Steam will refer to the user to their bank, and the bank will refer the user back to Steam. It is an endless cycle.

It has gone on for years, and Valve has yet to find a solution. Here is one user's experience from 2009.

Wow that sucks. Will buy even less from them now. First I cant use paypal because it says PR, USA and my IP is PR and now this.

They do at least have a work around now. If you think that chances are high you'll incur those charges during a major sale (such as the year end one), then you might want to add funds to that Steam Wallet thing, that went live yesterday, prior to the sale.

nice move Brad -.-

edit: how do they manage to support modding, after releasing a patch in every week ?

If they released official mod tools, so that created mods don't essentially work like hacks and 'break' every time the game patches, that would work just fine even with an update every week.