Aye, it's very easy to spot a Steam/Valve fanboy, as they're the ones who will swear blind -- even when given proof to the contrary -- that they are right and that Steam is God incarnate.

Just because I like Steam does not make me a fanboy. There are people who use it from time to time. I go to Walmart but that doesn't mean I'm a Walmart fanboy, am I?

Honestly, one of the things that make me dislike Steam, is the fanboys. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault, never Valve/Steam. Like bansama said about JA2. Why was it still being sold?
Valve does it's best not to refund money. And if you do a CC charge back, they'll close down your entire account. Losing games that were already paid for!

You call "stupid" some stranger only because he "dared" to criticize the DRM/crapware that is Steam. If you are not a fanboy, you should really consider becoming one of them. You will have a bright future then, you have skills and attitude, ah!....

And you have no control over the games you have bought - Steam can take them away from you if you do something Valve don't like, or by mistake for that matter. You may have hundreds of dollars worth of Steam-games that are suddenly rendered completely useless. No other copy protection system is that insane.
Hard to argue with that. Creepy.

Steam is great and easy to use BUT with 3rd party games the 3rd party finger pointing potential is always there as well as screw ups like this latest. I only buy non-valve products if they are on sale for under $15 for this reason. Then there are the dumbass publishers who still put DRM on the products - Capcom with Flock! who is using 5 installation limit securom on steam is the current posterboy for thickheadedness.

Got a link for that? That sounds pretty damned dodgy

I'm currently at work, so I can't link. But if you go to the Steam forums, you'll see plenty of people mentioning this in Steam's Terms.

They've been selling broken games for longer than 2 months now. I point your attention to the Commandos Series. and much much more!

Thats the point. It has been underlined before. "Steam is selling a game that does not work". Yes, doesnt matter if one of the normal steam updates broke a game, it usually occurs with software, but Valve should have inmediately pulled off that game (earth 2160) and look into it, not keep in steam's shelf so as to bait poor suckers into buying a non-working game.

Ok, here is the link form the Steam support page that mentions CC chargeback.
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5406-WFZC-5519

Is it necessary to always start these hate on steam threads?

This is not a hate thread. This is a 'I can't believe that they can even get away with illegal stuff' thread.
It's funny, when customers break the EULA, bam, subscription cancelled/closed/disabled on the spot.
When it's Steam(less) who fails to comply with their own terms of service for i don't know how many weeks/months, it's just business as usual, because the mesaures put in place to protect Steam are so obscure that Steam + pubs + devs can just dick the customers around and point fingers at each other while no one is working to fix anything. Steam is busy implementing the 'Do you want to marry me?' tab or the 'Fart Counter' achievement on their client, the pubs just don't care (not their storefront, not their game) and the devs don't care about their game anymore (or ever)
It's just sad to see that gamers are considered both on retail and digital distribution markets as second rate customers. borderline morons that are willing to take pretty much any abuse. And even worst, everybody get's away with it, and most gamers seem to react with a "Oh well...".
I bought this game from Steam on 14/04/2006 for $24,14 ($19,95 + $4.19 VAT) and this is not the first time i find myself unable to play it for an extended period of time for this exact same reason. (the Steam error ID thing). I don't want a refund, i want the problem fixed, or a clear explanation from the people who took my money as to why it can't be fixed. 'Good luck with that', right?
Updates break stuff up and that's ok. No way around that. They just need to be fixed.
But selling a product that they know fully well people won't be able to play for god knows how long, it's got to be illegal.
And while the problem is not fixed, treating paying customers as morons with copy/paste answers, it's definitely rude.
And taking this kind of sweet time to fix the problem, or provide a decent answer as to why they can't fix it, well, we all know what that is. They couldn't care less about their customers.
I wonder who took the iniciative to pull the game from the storefront. I'm willing to bet it wasn't Steam, because by now, any small amount of decency they still had, was clearly washed away by the 'green' flood.

Yeah, like I said, a hate thread. The majority of the people here hate steam and would never even buy a working game from them, let alone a broken one. Is steam perfect? No. But I have gotten a lot of pretty sweet deals from them. Does steam hypnotize people into buying their games? No. Don't like it? Don't use it. I use gog.com and steam and love them both. The majority of people here obviously hate steam, and that's fine.
I can make a thread about a game that I want to see on gog.com, and then 2 seconds later someone will see it and be sure to post that this thread already exists on page 27. But for some reason every other thread on the front page is about how much steam sucks. Gez, get over it. If you guys played games as much as you bitched about steam, then all those unbeaten gog games on your computer would be 100% complete.
Read through the threads for about 5 minutes, and it's clear that the majority of you are completely uninterested in buying a steam game. Stop masking your hate threads with topics that you obviously don't give a crap about. And please stop throwing the word, "fanboy", around. It's a tad hypercritical.

Also, for the record. I bought this game too, and it worked fine. No patching at all. Not sure what you're talking about.