You don't get banned for a minor TOS offence. And they don't go after pirates, they go after kids. I've worked in the field. But this is neither here nor there.

Maybe we should just convert the statement of Brad and put it out as a question for everybody to answer:

Brad says, DRM is acceptable as long as you don't really feel it under typical usage conditions (more or less regular internet connection existing). Is this also true for you?

Additional question: If you might have a problem with it, would community features like friends lists or automatic updates change your mind?

Have you actually polled everybody who has used steam or something? Where are you getting this ratio from?

Is that recent? I think I had already read that from when Impulse was owned by Stardock. I wonder what good Brad would say now.

This is simply subjective. A large number of us like to use the overlay, going to great-ish lengths to get it to work in non-supported games, and the reasons you so snidely (and arrogantly) dismiss as "silly" on their own are together a very strong argument for Steam, as far as I'm concerned.

When it boils down to it there's simply no explanation for Steam's userbase except for that people like Steam. I can understand a lot of the arguments in this topic but the general opinion on GOG is certainly not the general opinion at large, and I think that's something that everyone can agree with.

Does no one remember "Xfire"? It had a lot of what people tout as the "good" features of Steam, without the DRM. Even towards the end of when I was using it (and I left when a lot of people started; MTV's purchase kind of hurt it) they were getting OPTIONAL, OPT-IN-ABLE Steamworks-like things, where games would include the XFire module preemptively for (again, optinal) in-game messaging. It's trivial from that to achievements and that other (to me, useless) crap.

I recall it even had serverfinding/matchmaking, albeit primitive.

That depends... do they have to be a different five people every time? :P


Although - come to think of it, I've never once met a person IRL who likes Steam. The scale is "don't care" -> "annoying but tolerable" -> "dislike it but use it anyway for some games" -> "avoid where possible except for Skyrim".

pretty sure most people will happily take $100 and say they don't like steam that leaves %500 pure proift

I like Steam and I know some people IRL who are crazy about Steam. I haven't met anyone in real life who hasn't liked Steam. I think you'll find that the number of PC gamers who like Steam outnumber the number of PC gamers that dislike it.
Ah, but if I posted a thread on SPUF or reddit I could probably get hundreds of Steam fans expressing their love of Steam with very few dissenting.

While I do like Stream for it's ease of use, all you're basically paying for is a license to download and install a game. If Valve ever decides to shut it down or goes out of business, you're pretty much screwed (I take their promise of making your games DRM-free if that ever happens with a grain of salt). With GOG, you can backup the installers, as I had done just before that whole going out of beta PR stunt occurred.

I'm not really worried if legal channels for games expire, piracy has always been there and will always continue to be there to provide games. In the end, I believe it's the responsibility of the gamers to make sure games are still to be acquired. Not that I'm defending piracy, but sometimes it's the only method of acquiring an obscure game.

I never see people say it "enhances" anything (it's not a SPAM ad for Viagra, after all). I do see people frequently say, "I don't mind it," and, "I've never had a problem with it."

I always assumed the "No Steam No Sale." crazies were limited to so fan boys on the forums, and even half of those probably bought BF3 anyway.