I should have said a few of the phrases are missing. That made it sound like they were all missing. My bad.

Not DRM-Free and still requires Steam... change of policy but not exactly a revolution.

The day where GoG will start selling Valve games is the day I will really consider that pig does fly.

Might be. I remember they were pretty realistic and as I remembered them from original release, but I might be wrong.


btw. some newer mods require steam version to work, so it's kinda problem too. Some mods (mostly older ones) don't work on steam, and some don't work without it.

I don't like when games require Steam wherever you buy them. Unfortunately many good games require it so I choose to not reward the company responsible for Steamworks by not buying from them. GameStop isn't responsible for the DRM of Valve games so I don't have a problem with them.

But wouldn't the fault lie with the user of the tool, not the creator of it? The developers choose Steamworks, but you're still rewarding their decision with a purchase.

Well, to non-Americans, the difference between only selling on Steam and selling on both Steam and Impulse is pretty much fuck all anyway. All it really means is that their games might turn up on other, better sites like Gamersgate and GOG.

Publishers only do what they think will increase sales and with so many users in love with Steam I don't see that trend changing anytime soon. Still, I don't deprive myself of a game I want because of DRM but I try to vote with my wallet in a way. My way of punishing Valve is by not buying Steamworks games from them unless there is no other option and I punish the publisher by waiting until the game is on sale for very cheap.

Well, I can accept that, but I certainly don't agree with it. In my eyes, Steam is the only DRM that actually has benefits, however small those may be. If the games were the same price on GG as on Steam, I'd buy them there, but they rarely are.

I have a boxed pre-Steam Half Life. Am I to understand that if I add the key to Steam they'll give me all the expansions? Why, what's the catch?

There is no catch. The games are added to your Steam account. That's it.

Also, the Gunman Chronicles key will also activate the Half-Life games on a Steam account.

Yep, I did that. Actually, half life games were my very first games on steam.

There is one possible problem that you might encounter, and that is that some jerk has used a key gen and generated your key (which was the case with my CD-key. I really should report that to steam). That was how I noticed that my Gunman key worked as well, I just tried to insert it, and got all the half-life expansions added to my steam list.

I don't honestly see what's special about this, they're still just Steam codes. If you could actually download them from Impulse without touching Steam, that'd be important news.

EA don't have exclusivity with the current sole exception of one MMO. All their other games have been offered to all the other major sites, including Steam. And only Steam refuses to sell certain titles (DA 2, Crysis 2, ME 3, etc.).

It's worth bearing in mind that the notion of mass EA/Origin exclusivity is only being bandied around by Valve fan boys who refuse to shop around and who cannot accept that Valve would refuse to sell EA games.

Broken is more like it actually. They introduced several bugs that can potentially break the games -- you'll find mention of them on the Steam forums.