I'm wondering what people who like GoG think about Steam. I sort of want to play Civ V and Shogun II, and maybe I'll want to play Skyrim once the price enters reality. I am put off by a lot of what I read about Steam though. There's definitely two camps -- folks love it and folks hate it. I don't want to start a flame war; but since liking GoG is a reasonable attitude, I thought I might get some reasonable opinions here re Steam. So what do you think?

Ugh. The forums are REALLY slow today. The Intertubes must be flooded.

Oh no, not another Steam discussion. We've had about a thousand of those already and they always degenerate into irrational angry poo flinging.

Oh man...here it comes...

Basically many of us hate it with a passion and a few don't seem to think there's anything wrong with it. A few others are largely indifferent.

The important thing to remember is that those of us that hate it with a passion are right.

It delivers me inexpensive games at a reliable speed. I like it.

Just go after it if you think it's worth it to you. Simple enough. :)

They have good sales.

Back in the 18th Century people understood that poo flinging should be taken in a serious-minded manner and without undue emotional strain. You'd each get a poo second to see that the poo rules were observed by all parties and attend to you. Then you'd meet under a tree at dawn's early light, bow coldly to each other, and fling poo in turns from a reasonable distance. There was none of this unmeasured, degenerate, mob-like attitude about resolving your differences in a gentlemanly and poo-covered fashion.

...Sorry, mind wandered.

I'm not a major GOG regular, if that's what you're looking for, but my 2-cents': I've only had a couple real complaints about Steam. (For instance, one time my wife bought me a game my brother was gifting to me at the same time, before I'd redeemed it, and they wouldn't give her a refund -- this was back before the present gifts system was in place, so it couldn't be given to anyone else. Not sure how that would work today.) I've never had problems with the service failing or being unable to play my games, so on the whole it works, for me, for the time being. I don't do multiplayer so VAC hasn't been an issue for me. Mostly, they tend to have really good sales if you're patient, which is how most of my acquisitions have come about.

I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, but it's cheap and reasonably-ish reliable. Not at all customer-oriented, though.

I have never had a problem with Steam.

There are two things you need to know:
1. It's DRM. You need to be online to register it, but you can enter offline mode to play it.
2. Offline mode doesn't work for some people.

Win.

Steam? Fuck 'em!

I love Steam , I have 291 games at the moment and never had a DRM issue or a problem with one of em , installed multiple games ,multiple times on different PC's and never had an issue with a single one of em , DRM paranoia ? ... bah hocus pocus , haters gonna hate ;)

Steam haters are irrational and devoid of logic , thats my 2 cents ;)

Oh and just to add before some anti Steam nutjob gets on my case .... I love GOG and loads of other platforms too.

I might be in the minority (at least being represented in this thread), but I enjoy Steam.

1. It has sales constantly
2. Good download speeds for the most part
3. Some games use the 'SteamCloud' for saves from computer to computer
4. They have a fairly new security measure called 'SteamGuard' that requires confirmation from an email in order to sign-in on different computers (can be enabled or disabled, I believe)
5. They have a very good selection of games to choose from.

But that's just my two cents. I've purchased games from there that ended up coming here and repurchasing them for the drm-free and extra goodie aspects, so I'm bit positively biased towards both of these digital services.

Steam is okay if you can tolerate the DRM. My biggest reservation about them is their extreme popularity. The beauty of the PC is that it's an open platform. Only having one viable mainstream DD distributor hurts that.

Now that GOG has such an impressive library and the recent news that they've expanded into new games, I'm going to make an effort to avoid Steam as much as possible.

I like it for what it is. You can get ridiculously cheap games and sales, and they're all automatically downloaded and updated for you. The only downside is that you have to be logged in to play the games, and offline mode is not very good at its job. But it's hard to be mad that I have to log into Steam to play a game I paid $2.50 for.

Out of all the DRM infused online store clients out there, Steam is (in my opinion) one of the lesser evils. I've never had an issue with game access. Of course, someone's going to storm in here and prove me wrong I imagine.

Addendum: Never ever ever ever buy an old game from them. They do absolutely nothing to guarantee it will work on XP, let alone Windows 7, and won't issue refunds when it inevitably doesn't function. Stick to GoG for old incompatible games.