Steam: @ alistair millington and Pete; crap games.
LAN days can be ruined through Steam. If everyone bringing a PC has a different patch level of a Steam game, then everyone with an `outdated' copy needs to update, which can be *slow* (since the patches can be quite large, you're doing this for 8-30 users with no local caching or torrent-type distribution and you're probably updating more than one game). If your LAN day location has no internet connection, you're stuffed. Tough luck, you can't play these games. Not to mention that "Play offline" can only be run when you're *online*, a problem which you'd usually only find out about the first time you try to play offline! This stops play entirely... I assume the publishers do this deliberately to boost license sales to gaming cafes and to cause trouble for pirates. They seem to not notice that a warez copy and cracked .exe/libraries make for easy LAN day playing, which might prevent legitimate sales for those few who didn't have a copy, and who would have bought one anyway.
I also personally know of two fellow Steam users who got stuffed via Valve and Steam, one of whom will probably never play a Valve game again due to his level of displeasure with the companies' behaviour.
(Apologies for the dodgy English, I am knackered.)
I agree about the Valve going out of business thing, too. What is going to happen to your collection of Steamy software when this occurs? Imagine if large application companies started distributing their expensive desktop apps through Steam (Final Cut, Photoshop, Office-y software, all that crap). You'd be pretty pissed off if all that stopped working magically one day.
Also, what the hell is up with the DRM crap on Bioshock, EA games, etc? These poorly-designed DRM systems infuriate me (since I'm currently offline at home I feel like I've been experiencing all the possible problems!) and they only punish your paying customers anyway. The pirates have a much nicer experience: either zero-install (just unarchive and play, as it should be!) or ISO bundles with cracked activation-removed .exe's.
Perhaps EA (in particular, though there are others) should think about whether it's maybe that their games are crap (hundreds of near-identical sequels, or formulaic gameplay with zero innovation) rather than large-scale piracy which causes their sales `problems'. They seem to have enough cash to me...
Whilst I'm ranting, I'd also like to see these crappy console conversions die a horrible death. I have played two games (original Bioshock before the patch being one!) which think taking the acceleration system for a thumb twiddler and directly translating that to a mouse works, or that low-res textures in a PC game is acceptable. I assume the former is due to lazy or clueless coders/testers. I assume the latter is a result of having low-res textures for the Xbox 360 and PS3 (256MB graphics RAM for one, 512MB shared RAM for the other, IIRC), and not creating high-res textures for PC use due to costs or backroom deals agreeing not to make certain non-PC systems look bad, since they do shaders well but textures and polys worse. I have 768MB of texture RAM, a PCIe bus and 3.25GB of system RAM available. I think it's fair to say most hardcore gamers will have at least 512MB of video RAM and >2GB of system RAM. Let us use it, damnit!
[edit: I Googled it; I have proof: http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
PS - 9.7% use Vista, ha ha!]
Finally, why are games so damn expensive? £30 max. is OK for an absolutely top-notch game (or a pretty good one if it's got a good community of modders and the like providing extra content), provided you get some decent hours out of it. (i.e. more than 30 hours, please!) Why not sell mediocre games at £20 or other impulse-buy level? I refuse to pay release prices and wait until the price comes down to these levels, unless I'm really keen on a new game, which only happens a max. of once or twice per year (come on Fallout 3!). Bethesda really sucked with TES:4, though: all the typical console port problems (interface, textures, simplified gameplay), plus sucky gameplay and paid crappy little additions which were probably in early builds of the game anyway (horse armour!). Compare and contrast with TES:3, Morrowind.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
