I haven't used steam for a while. I was in at the start with the steam beta but the way it was being run put me off and a few years ago I gave up on it entirely. However, EU3 was one of my favourite games and it was rather a surprise to discover EUIV was steam only. I'm wondering if it's changed, in particular the following things I found unprofessional/unacceptable/just plain annoying:
1. The commercialism. Buy a steamworks game from gamersgate and the steam client it installed would have steam's own store built in, and adverts for it. I'm surprised they didn't get brought up before the monopolies commission for that sort of anti-competitive behaviour, but it wasn't that long after GamersGate, Impulse etc. had agreed to sell steam games so I'm guessing that's gone now. What's the situation with the advertising though? Maybe it was something to do with my beta account but steam started showing adverts, and you couldn't disable them without also turning off game update news and other features. Is it now possible to just shut off the adverts, assuming they're there if you don't buy a game from the steam store of course.
2. The updating. They used to be mandatory which would play havoc with mod compatibility, and several times meant that when I was expecting to settle down to a relaxing night with a game I'd suddenly be told I couldn't play it for the next three hours because it was updating. This was separate from the automatic updates function which just determined whether it updated in the background (which it would do whether or not the internet was already in use) or when you came to launch the game. This is more of an annoyance and a valid decision for the developer to take, but does anyone know if EUIV updates are going to be optional (at least for a couple of weeks after release)?
3. Startup and shutdown. As steam obviously wasn't trustworthy enough to run it in the background (see updates) I had it set to run with the game. Or at least, start up with the game. It never seemed to close itself with the game even after trying it on several computers, which rather defaults the point of not having it run in the background in the first place. Also, the startup and login process was extraordinarily long. Whereas most DRM takes 5 seconds to authenticate steam was taking 20-30 seconds - often doubling the startup time of a game. Does it now work as smoothly and discretely as normal DRM during standard sessions of a game?
4. Interaction with other games. In particular games with steam multiplayer used to share a common username and friends list. As you can imagine this lead to several impossible situations, a name appropriate for a dark brooding game like Killing Floor is hardly appropriate for a more abstract game like EUIV. I'd normally use friends lists to keep track of associates (people to arrange games with etc.) with only actual friends being on all of them, with steam you had no choice but to have everyone in every game and I had to resort to bits of paper to keep track of all the names. Are there now per-game name settings and friend list categories?
I was going to check this myself of course, but I don't remember my account details and steam support apparently requires you to register for a support account so I thought I'd ask here instead. Can anyone update me on the current state of steam, I'm hoping they've changed quite a bit as paradox always used to be keen on minimal DRM systems (of which the steam I knew was quite the opposite).
1. The commercialism. Buy a steamworks game from gamersgate and the steam client it installed would have steam's own store built in, and adverts for it. I'm surprised they didn't get brought up before the monopolies commission for that sort of anti-competitive behaviour, but it wasn't that long after GamersGate, Impulse etc. had agreed to sell steam games so I'm guessing that's gone now. What's the situation with the advertising though? Maybe it was something to do with my beta account but steam started showing adverts, and you couldn't disable them without also turning off game update news and other features. Is it now possible to just shut off the adverts, assuming they're there if you don't buy a game from the steam store of course.
2. The updating. They used to be mandatory which would play havoc with mod compatibility, and several times meant that when I was expecting to settle down to a relaxing night with a game I'd suddenly be told I couldn't play it for the next three hours because it was updating. This was separate from the automatic updates function which just determined whether it updated in the background (which it would do whether or not the internet was already in use) or when you came to launch the game. This is more of an annoyance and a valid decision for the developer to take, but does anyone know if EUIV updates are going to be optional (at least for a couple of weeks after release)?
3. Startup and shutdown. As steam obviously wasn't trustworthy enough to run it in the background (see updates) I had it set to run with the game. Or at least, start up with the game. It never seemed to close itself with the game even after trying it on several computers, which rather defaults the point of not having it run in the background in the first place. Also, the startup and login process was extraordinarily long. Whereas most DRM takes 5 seconds to authenticate steam was taking 20-30 seconds - often doubling the startup time of a game. Does it now work as smoothly and discretely as normal DRM during standard sessions of a game?
4. Interaction with other games. In particular games with steam multiplayer used to share a common username and friends list. As you can imagine this lead to several impossible situations, a name appropriate for a dark brooding game like Killing Floor is hardly appropriate for a more abstract game like EUIV. I'd normally use friends lists to keep track of associates (people to arrange games with etc.) with only actual friends being on all of them, with steam you had no choice but to have everyone in every game and I had to resort to bits of paper to keep track of all the names. Are there now per-game name settings and friend list categories?
I was going to check this myself of course, but I don't remember my account details and steam support apparently requires you to register for a support account so I thought I'd ask here instead. Can anyone update me on the current state of steam, I'm hoping they've changed quite a bit as paradox always used to be keen on minimal DRM systems (of which the steam I knew was quite the opposite).
