N.B. I didn't intend to one star this so savagely when I began typing, but by the time I'd read back what I wrote I'd already hit 'submit'

It's SO TEMPTING to buy a game that you haven't heard of or have no interest in cause it has a -66%, .39 tag on it with the mentality "If it's shit, I haven't lost much."

Doesn't help if you read the steam write-ups as they have the obvious intention of making you spend your cash. Usually I check the game's forums or another review site but after looking at 20 games for .39 or whatever it becomes tedious.

For bigger things I pirate it before buying it (which everyone claims they do but I actually do, so fuck off). Saved me a lot of cheeses over the years, X: Rebirth you little shit-bitch.

I'm not the most frugal spender in the world. I tend to impulse buy even though I'm living paycheck to paycheck and trying to stick to a budget. But I have enough sense to understand that spending $ 3.00 here and $ 5.00 there during giant Steam sales can and will add up to a lot. There's little difference between spending the full $ 60 for one game on release day and $ 80 on a burlap bag full of shit I'll never even install.

I go for the one AAA title I've been waiting to come down and leave it at that. I've already got enough accumulated books, movies and games around my apartment to work through without turning my place into the Library of Congress.

Yeah, I can't stand nerd consumer culture. It always drives me through the roof insane. It's a point of pride for them that they give all their money away to game companies.

I think you guys forget yourselves. Ten years ago, heck, less than that, you had to wait for a game to show up in the bargain bin in your local game store (if they had one) before you found it for cheap, and then you had to be lucky enough to find the title you wanted -- before someone else came upon it. And even then, it was usually one or two years after release that it got reduced. Back in the 90s it was even worse, games stayed at full price on the shelf for years or only lowered , meaning C&C Red Alert was still in 1999.
Saint's Row 4, ; Just Cause 2, ; Borderlands 2, ; The Lego movie game is only right now, down from ; there's too many titles to list. And you can buy these from the comfort of your couch!
So why the hate?

I don't hate Steam (aside from the fact that I'd rather avoid having games tangled up in Steam if possible, but these days things like Civ 5 are completely fucking tied to it). I hate the culture of people that prop it up.

It's (exactly) like comic books. Some comic books are great, and the medium itself is fine. Comic book fans? THE WORST.

Also, how's their offline play these days? I broke with Steam because, back when I was in the Army, their internet DRM locked me out of my entire library of games for almost a year, games which shouldn't have even needed Steam's proprietary software to run in the first place. Oh sure, they said you could play in offline mode, but the problem was, the offline mode option kept defaulting back to online mode every time you rebooted your laptop, and the only way to toggle it back to offline mode was to connect to Steam's servers and sign in with your account. Since this was usually impossible, due to network security and spotty backwoods wifi, what it meant was I paid eighty bucks for a Special Edition copy of Empire Total War that sat bricked on my harddrive.

I've never had issues, and have played while on the road lots.. but, maybe I haven't had an issue because I invisible log in again within 48 hours.

herp derp.. invisibly log in.

not that I have time to play much, once the spawnling hits puberty I hope to regain some of my life back.

I never had any issues, either.

As for the whole "community" complaint, I really don't get that. You don't have to join in or even care if you get achievements (I don't).

My biggest gripe about Steam is that you can't stop it from telling you how many hours you've wasted playing a given game. Its information I really, REALLY don't want to know.

Someone I used to know always claimed the ginormous hours he wracked up was due to "leaving the computer on" while he slept or some such, so maybe you could try that to distort your hours and preserve yourself from crushing depressing over the direction your life is going.

Never ran into any issues with offline. As far as I know the only time you're locked out of your games in offline mode is when they require an update.

And while I agree that fanboyism and fan cults generally ruin everything good, I'll take Steam over Windows LIVE or any other publisher's surprise required log in bullshit (looking at you, Square Enix/Final Fantasy VII...)

SPK - it's like Facebook. It's easy to say, just don't use Facebook. But I *don't* use Facebook, and let me tell you, not using Facebook is a pain the ass, because everyone treats you different, they look at you funny. What kind of asshole doesn't use Facebook?

When every game expects you to socialize with your gamer friends, then all of your gamer friends expect you to socialize with them. Participation becomes a social obligation, and there's a cost to opting-out, or, in Steam's case, since I'm opted-in whether I want to be or not, for ignoring it.

Your mistake was thinking the Total War games are worth playing.

They used to be! Empire was a total turd, though, and I realized that once I finally got the damn thing working. It made the entire ordeal so much worse.

Side question: ,is Rome 2 any good?

"What kind of asshole doesn't use Facebook?"

And yet you don't, yet you MUST participate in the Steam communities? To enjoy a video game?

I'm starting to think the problem doesn't lie with the Steam client, here...

No, you misunderstand. I don't participate in Steam community stuff, either. Just as with Facebook, I don't want to deal with it, so I don't... which causes it's own set of problems, because then my friends feel slighted. Do you use social media? If you do, then it's probably impossible to explain what a hassle it can be to live without it, while still trying to associate with friends who love it.

At any rate, the nagging community bollocks is the least of Steam's problem.

homer:

Rome 2 is still kinda broken even after ages of patching (unless it has changed in the last two months). basically the AI is passive as hell so the game is cake even on legendary (as opposed to brutality that was Shogun 2). Basically all you have to do is have 2-3 full stacks of mediocre troops and move them en masse around the world taking over shit by auto-resolving.

Yeah, early access sucks for the most part. In all honesty, I'll just wait and pay the extra 6 bucks, thanks. Starbound is an exception to that rule, I had a lot of fun on it and the early access wasn't such a hurdle with the vibrant mod community. Not checked it recently but with the new Dwarf Fortress version coming out in July (supposedly) I doubt I will have the time.

Early access sucks, but what I hate is all the broken shovelware like Air Control or Earth Year 2066. Is anyone at Steam looking at what they release anymore?

Earth 2066 is one of the mega-rare instances where they took it off Steam and gave everyone a refund, but there's other instances where they didn't and really should have. Off the top of my head the Steam version of Freespace 2 (it doesn't work at all on most OSes without third party mods), and that shitty Ashes Cricket game which was actually withdrawn by the studio but Valve would not give refunds.

I've bought two early access games, Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers.

the first updates on a regular basis and actually done a collaboration with NASA.

the second updates literally every seven days with significant additions and gameplay changes.

There's TF2 servers out there that specifically sever the connection to the Valve verification servers so that no one can use add ons and have to play normal, old, vanilla TF2 and it's the best thing ever.

Starbound was an EXTREME letdown. It had all the potential of Terraria with exactly ZERO of the charm. Horrible crafting system.

Did they ever fix Starbound, or is it still being sold as an indefinite Alpha?

Checked it today - the game suffers from the same problems.

BUT THERE ARE MUSHROOM PEOPLE ON PLANETS RANDOMLY NOW HERP DERP

They said they fixed the guns, but guns are still useless unless youre on a really under-powered planet. You have to be on a planet that's one or two threat levels below your current gun's rating for it to be effective.

The best weapons is still that stupid bone club.

best weapon*

all of those games are on permanent uninstall for me

Gmork was burned too many times in that mothership fight.

I thought I was done, and then some asshole buys a TF2 hat I put up for sale for , now I gotta buy even MORE games.