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After spending two hours post midnight fighting Steam's own little brand of draconian DRM, I went to bed. Later the same day (today) when I woke up, I figured, hey, it's sunny outside... perhaps Steam just had some temporary problems with their network. I'll give it another go.
Long story short, it was another bust. Kept getting the same messages, etc. So, in utter frustration and resignation, I uninstalled Steam, thinking that perhaps a clean installation would end these problems. Wrong-o, my friends. I had four legally purchased games installed on my computer: Duke Nukem Forever (DNF), Left 4 Dead 2, Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Source Beta. DNF alone takes over six gigabytes of space. Not to mention all the Orange Box games, which I previously installed (again, retail disks) but hadn't played in a long time. Guess what? When you uninstall Steam (an online verification system), you also uninstall EVERYTHING else that goes with it. This means if you have an intractable problem, such as the problem I was having, and you decide to uninstall Steam, you are penalized for this decision by losing all the data on your own computer that pertains to the games that you are forced to use Steam in order to play. Furthermore, to make matters more insidious, when I performed the re-installation of Steam (which of course magically experienced none of the previous "network" problems), I am greeted by the ugly reality that I must re-download ALL of the games I had already installed, configured and was successfully playing before all this crap began. Doesn't anyone else out there see the problem here? Two of these games were bought as retail disks, installed as such, connected to Steam to verify their authenticity, and were played for X hours apiece. Then, because of some unexpected error by Steam's own software, I am forced to re-install them. How can any customer have confidence that this will not happen again and again? One of the most disturbing aspects of this debacle is that when I reinstalled Steam, I had to enter a special code, which was sent to my email address. This code was necessary, I am told, because I'm trying to use my account an a different computer. This happened not once, but twice! This is the same computer I've been using the entire time! No new parts, no new network configurations, nada. Clearly, I am suffering the consequences of Steam's mistake: they have overshot their own ability to provide proper service, because they have simply grown too large for their resources to successfully address all the myriad problems their service has eventually produced. I ask you: is it "good and right" that an online company, which can fail not only by network problems at their end, but also by their own poorly planned software, be allowed to decide that I can't play a game on my own computer, that I installed on my own computer, and that I legally purchased from a retail outlet? Every one of you game publishers who have granted Steam so much power, have no right to complain when it continues to generate unhappy customers. And if your bottom line is good enough for you to not be concerned, then shame on you. |