Not really, from what I've seen - torrent updates to games come with their own personal cracks. New update comes with a new crack.

Unless the game is really really unknown.

EDIT: If you're using a decent tracker.

You're thinking of today, I am not. I'm saying in 20 years if Steam shuts down and I want to play a classic like Skyrim it will be easy to do so. People will patch Skyrim to make sure it works the same as they do today with Thief 2 or whatever else. The PC community proved to me long ago that we take care of our games even if publishers don't. It'll be a "Skyrim Win18 138bit installer" I download of an abandonware site, nothing more and nothing less, assuming of course Valve and Bethesda don't take care of it by themselves.

If Gaben bans you tomorrow and you lose all your games that when then yes, full pirated releases I guess, but those aren't very hard to come by so I still don't see why it's like "winning the lottery."

You should be able to leave Steam alone for months or years if you so please and still be able to fire up your games in an instant. This is one of the things which utterly pisses me off about Steam. When there's a new client update you don't get an option to update now or later - it has to be now, even if you haven't got time. This is no good at all if you haven't got time to wait for the update or if you've prearranged a multiplayer session. But they just don't care about you, the gamer. Steam may be a very polished service in other respects but the cons massively outweigh the pros. They also don't seem to give a damn about the non-savvy users who don't know how to use their stupid, invasive client. DRM isn't working because pirates will continue to pirate and only honest gamers who would never even consider pirating end up being punished.

Spot on. My first contact with Steam was when I've bought a boxed copy of Dawn of War 2. What a mess that game was lol. No, I'm not talking about the game itself but the ridiculous DRM or some other bullshit it had. Afair you had to register it on Steam which really annoyed me, than I had to download a ridiculously huge update which again took some time and after all of these, when I thought I could finally play, I started the game and it turned out I needed to make a MSN/Windows Live account (just to play the campaign). I didn't have an Xbox back than (cause you could use Xbox Live account as well) and that was yet another problem. As you probably already know from Xbox One announcements MS treats polish costumers pretty poorly and it wasn't any better back than. It turned out I couldn't even make this Windows Live account due to some regional bullshit (lol I know right?). I had to google some solutions how to bypass it and only than after what I think was like 4 or 5 hours I was ready to play! Oh wait, I didn't really have time to do that anymore...

and the funny thing? I have decided to buy this game after dling a cracked copy from the web. Installation was a breeze, no problems whatsoever. I have since sworn to never buy anything from Steam (not much a gamer anyway, the only regret I have is that VVVVVV game) and to be honest kinda regret buying an Xbox instead of PS (won't happen again).

Sorry for the derail, it's just some amazing costumer experience I really had to share...

My install of Starcraft 2 took - I kid you not - 17 hours ! I realise this is not Steam but the principle is the same. Clearly I didn't know what I was doing but I just innocently put the disc into my laptop (just like you used to be able to do in the good old days) and that's how it panned out. If I could have been arsed to do a bit of googling in advance maybe I would have have been able to cut down the time, but when I'm in the mood to game I'm in relaxed mode : I don't expect to have to do shitloads of research just to find out how to avoid having a large portion of my weekend erased owing to someone else's security concerns.

As far as the subject of piracy is concerned I don't practise it myself but I'd say I have a neutral attitude towards it nowadays because things like Steam seem to justify it. It's only ordinary gamers who just want to buy a game and play it who actually get punished, not pirates.

Gamers from all over the world ought to be treated the same, I agree with you. I'm from the UK and we tend to still get fair-ish treatment but I personally find it embarrassing when I read stories about region locking etc. and don't want my country to be associated with it. There was a post earlier today by lettmon (spelling) about his experience with Deus Ex : Human Revolution and Steam. He had already had a hell of a time finding a way how to play Fallout New Vegas as his copy had been "regionally locked", whatever that means. The games industry is just lurching from one kind of suckage to another at the moment. It will eat itself if it's not careful.

I don't know anything about consoles post the PS1 but I'm vaguely aware of the XBox/Microsoft issue. I hope it works out well for you.

Had the same issue. I've been keeping it in offline mode to avoid temptation to buy more games (my backlog has gotten pretty long this year).

Maybe not hard to come by, if you are happy with the mostly buggy initial versions, I guess.

There's a reason so many (potential) casual pirates opt for buying games from e.g. Steam instead of hunting down the pirate versions: messing around with the pirate versions is a total pain in the ass most of the time. It is a far cry from just downloading a small crack from some centralized database for your already purchased games.

I'm not really sure why you think this is some disagreement with what I said, honestly. I said one-time DRM doesn't bother me because I can crack the games if I ever need to. I never said that wasn't a hassle sometimes.

I disagreed with the "download a crack, solved"-part, which made it sound so easy.

Oh.

Well the few times I have done it the process was pretty simple. I can't speak for all games of course, though. What I meant by "done" was simply that Gabe can't take my games away. I can download a way to make them work, be it tomorrow or 20 years from now, and Steam is quickly made irrelevant.

Assuming this is happening after Steam is gone some distant day it wouldn't even require the naughty side of the internet, one assumes the fixes would be hosted on a site as easy to use and access as abandonia.

This is all assuming Valve and the publishers don't fix it themselves, of course. The only example I know of where a company went out of business with DRM'd games out there was Jowood, and sure enough they removed the DRM from Arcania as they went out of business. I think that could end up being very common, but we shall see.

I said earlier I will report back. So there is no two weeks interval in my offline mode of my Steam I can start games without any visible hindrance for longer than three weeks now. However I suspect the offline mode might not be as offline as I thought it is.

I had put Steam in offline mode and I had told my Windows firewall to block everything called Steam. However yesterday Steam updated itself automatically by downloading a 100MB. How could it detect that it needs an update and how could it download it, I ask myself? The only answer I have is that it was online the whole time despite my actions.

Can anybody help me and give me directions how to configure the Windows firewall so that Steam is effectively offline?

'Updating' means phoning home, most likely.

Depends... how paranoid are you? I tried a few blocks of the steam.exe and the steam service but it still could connect to the internet. You could try blocking every program and dll in the steam folder (and in the "program files (x86)\common files\steam" folder) but I couldn't be arsed to try it myself.

But anyway, if you really don't trust steam you can simply block all access to steampowered.com. Here's how....

On the start menu find notepad and right click it and select "Run as administrator". Then in notepad go File -> Open... and copy this into the file name box "%windir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts". Click open.

Finally at the end of that file copy and paste the following starting on a new line: Now save. That should block the steam client (and everything else) from contacting the steam.servers. Obviously if any game requires contacting steam then that game wont work.

I don't mind them updating if internet is present, as long as the client would still work if that internet were not there.