Matrix and Steam

[bobarossa]

I don't see Steam going away. My fear is that some corporate bean counter will realize that they can make oodles of money by charging a monthly fee for access to their service. I mean who's going to refuse to pay with all those games held hostage. If you think you can just run offline mode you'll find they patched in a time limit before they announced the change. Don't doubt the potential evilness of corporations.

[wodin]

I imagine the game developers would have something to say..and another steam like company will start up with no charge..so doing that I think would be commercial suicide

ORIGINAL: bobarossa

I don't see Steam going away. My fear is that some corporate bean counter will realize that they can make oodles of money by charging a monthly fee for access to their service. I mean who's going to refuse to pay with all those games held hostage. If you think you can just run offline mode you'll find they patched in a time limit before they announced the change. Don't doubt the potential evilness of corporations.

[demyansk]

ORIGINAL: bobarossa

I don't see Steam going away. My fear is that some corporate bean counter will realize that they can make oodles of money by charging a monthly fee for access to their service. I mean who's going to refuse to pay with all those games held hostage. If you think you can just run offline mode you'll find they patched in a time limit before they announced the change. Don't doubt the potential evilness of corporations.

Nice point on this, I love Steam, so easy, cheap and easy to delete and update. Still buy games direct but seriously, you only have 24 hours a day to play games. I still play Panzer Corp all the time, just bought twilight struggle and haven't really put anytime into it. Bought the Vietnam a m 65 game, never play it. I wait until sales now except for dc3 Barbarossa and some others.

Yes, loyal customers are forgotten in many instances. Just look at the sales in the pay tv business. Regular customers need to beg for a reduced rate.

Main thing, no monthly subscription for playing games, that is a deal breaker for me.

[demyansk]

I don't see Steam going away. My fear is that some corporate bean counter will realize that they can make oodles of money by charging a monthly fee for access to their service. I mean who's going to refuse to pay with all those games held hostage. If you think you can just run offline mode you'll find they patched in a time limit before they anno

Nice point on this, I love Steam, so easy, cheap and easy to delete and update. Still buy games direct but seriously, you only have 24 hours a day to play games. I still play Panzer Corp all the time, just bought twilight struggle and haven't really put anytime into it. Bought the Vietnam a m 65 game, never play it. I wait until sales now except for dc3 Barbarossa and some others.

Yes, loyal customers are forgotten in many instances. Just look at the sales in the pay tv business. Regular customers need to beg for a reduced rate.

Main thing, no monthly subscription for playing games, that is a deal breaker for me.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: Jestre

Another thing that keeps me from getting Steam is worrying whether the games will work, my boxed copy of Civ IV wont let me install and use Beyond the Sword, Medieval 2 wont install and play correctly either so I dont want to invest in Steam if I still have these issues.

Boxed or no both those games "require" the steam client to be installed to do that check I was telling you about. It's only one time an as I said then you can play offline as long as you like but should go online to steam occassionally to get patches and updates. Those titles with DRM that are on Steam DO require you to install it and log on at least once with them and start them up. Once that is done it's over with.

Creative Assembly did that to you though not Steam. They signed a DRM contract with them to do the checking for their games. I think it started with Empire but after that all the Total Wars require steam to activate. Firaxis did the same thing with Civilization V. Might even go as far back as IV but I don't think so cause I have it and it's not in my steam library. Mostly it's the AAA title companies doing it to you though not Steam. Steam is just the presenter or distributer of the game and they make contracts with the game companies whether to use the DRM scheme or not.

If it hadn't been for the new steam "refund" policy I would have been stuck with Heroes of Normandie that I didn't like at all because it's too much RNG in it.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: Jestre

Another thing that keeps me from getting Steam is worrying whether the games will work, my boxed copy of Civ IV wont let me install and use Beyond the Sword, Medieval 2 wont install and play correctly either so I dont want to invest in Steam if I still have these issues.

I just reread this and it's Civ IV and Medieval II? What OS are you using? If it's Win10 then there are some issues still with that new OS. Those two games were actually made to run on WinXP in the beginning. I have them both and am running them find on Vista64. I don't think Steam would be an issue in fact it might fix your problem with them running them through the steam client instead of just your system. Might be a patch you haven't got or updated. Could be a sound card driver or graphics driver. Any number of things could be causing your problem but let's not blame everything on Steam just because it don't work on your computer. [:D]

I remember many saying Medieval Total War I wouldn't run on Vista64, but, I found a way to make it work through trial an error and downloading some patches an updates I had missed.

Some say Steel Panthers won't run on newer OS's but that too I have fixed and found ways to make it work. If you take enough time with most games I feel one can figure out how to make it work. [:)]

[Jestre]

ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore

ORIGINAL: Jestre

Another thing that keeps me from getting Steam is worrying whether the games will work, my boxed copy of Civ IV wont let me install and use Beyond the Sword, Medieval 2 wont install and play correctly either so I dont want to invest in Steam if I still have these issues.

I just reread this and it's Civ IV and Medieval II? What OS are you using? If it's Win10 then there are some issues still with that new OS. Those two games were actually made to run on WinXP in the beginning. I have them both and am running them find on Vista64. I don't think Steam would be an issue in fact it might fix your problem with them running them through the steam client instead of just your system. Might be a patch you haven't got or updated. Could be a sound card driver or graphics driver. Any number of things could be causing your problem but let's not blame everything on Steam just because it don't work on your computer. [:D]

I remember many saying Medieval Total War I wouldn't run on Vista64, but, I found a way to make it work through trial an error and downloading some patches an updates I had missed.

Some say Steel Panthers won't run on newer OS's but that too I have fixed and found ways to make it work. If you take enough time with something I feel one can figure out how to make it work. [:)]

Using 8.1, tried all the suggested work arounds for Civ IV BTS, was able to install up to BTS but BTS wouldnt work, Medieval 2 seems to install but nothing happens when I click on play. Just tired of always having to find workarounds to play games. Thought about just having a computer with xp just to play 'old' games.

[Rosseau]

Back on topic for just a moment. I see PC Soviet Corps half price two months after release. The loyal customer loses out again, this time for $7.50. It will be the last time for me.

Just don't cut the price of Brother vs. Brother for a while. A full $50 and that game is as dead as a door nail. Lacking in content and as difficult to mod as the day it was released. Not even a free scenario thrown to us as a bone to liven things up. I guess that will come with the paid DLC.

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: bobarossa

I don't see Steam going away. My fear is that some corporate bean counter will realize that they can make oodles of money by charging a monthly fee for access to their service. I mean who's going to refuse to pay with all those games held hostage. If you think you can just run offline mode you'll find they patched in a time limit before they announced the change. Don't doubt the potential evilness of corporations.

This is basically the model some older failed services and right now would be Playstation Now.
A paid subscription service that streams games to you to play on your console.

This is dependent on how good your internet is.

Steam and Origin and GOG and U-Play (shudder) and others work not as a subscription service but because they take cuts of everything sold.

I am not sure if the streaming gaming model will ever take full hold. I hate to say never ever. But I have probably what would be considered the worlds top 1% of internet speeds. 100 GB/sec with no Cap.
But Playstation Now which is cutting edge game streaming still lags a bit and 60 FPS is hard to sustain.

I still think the best solution at least for a while yet will be gamers downloading games to their local machines and letting their own hardware process the games and playing them locally.

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore

You ever notice there's no loyalty code for buying early? Not once in my 30 years of gaming has a company ever sent me a free game for buying their games early or retail. Now, of course we do get these "coupons" and such but you notice you have to "buy" something to use them?

Companies really have no loyalty to their customers so why should we/I have loyalty to them?
Creative Assembly sort of put the icing on the cake when they made RTW and it was totally for the casual crowd not for the gamers that actually gave them the business in the beginning when Shogun and Medieval Total War came out. They got me on RTW because I thought it would be like Medieval Total War and it was the worst poc from them I ever played next to Empire Total War. AI armies broke sieges they could have won, they had armies that did nothing but march up and down the same road turn after turn and 3 units or less and a lot of other things that were not good or fun that I never saw in Medieval Total War I.

I learned "patience" a long time ago about the time WinXP came out. I didn't jump on that band wagon until Windows Vista came out. Then I never upgraded from it to Win7 or 8 or 8.1 because I didn't see a need or felt like I had to be first or one of the crowd.

The difference between 100 games for $499 vs 100 games for $4,999 is called "patience". So, when a new game comes out and 6 months later it's onsale I don't get mad....I'm actually glad. [:'(]

I just don't rush to anything in the computer industry anymore because I saw early what they were doing. A little upgrade here $100, another version of the same game $59 and so on and so forth. It's all out there for them to make money off the lemmings or monkey's. (you know monkey see monkey do?)

So, I wait patiently for every new game I want to try or play now and play a lot of free to play games online that's on steam that are pretty good and pretty fun if you don't get into the Pay gimmick of them.

Back in my boyhood days I'd drop $500 on a new computer just to play "one" frickin new game. Later I discovered how silly that was.

Now, don't get your panties in an uproar about "if everybody did that there wouldn't be any games". There will always be lemmings and monkeys and they will always out number me. I'm just one of the smart ones that found out early what was going on. I do notice though more and more complaining about the prices, even on steam. Especially the Slitherine games on Steam. You think we are bad here you should see the post from them about $19.99 for an old Close Combat game. They are hilarious. I just think Steam has sort of made a lot more accustom to a lower price point even on new games and most especially older games.

The other saying is "You got what YOU paid for" and others got what THEY paid for. There shouldn't be anger because YOU had no patience. [:'(]

Old man yells at cloud

[:D]