[ColdFront]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

I used to be pretty "anti-steam", but now I prefer it. So you "heard" stuff a couple of times. I heard Mike Brown in Ferguson was attacked and then shot in the back by a racist cop. Guess what - that wasn't exactly true.... Nor has my experience with steam been anything like what you have "heard", and personal experience trumps rumor and hearsay any day. Origin does have good support - kind of. Its live and always available.... but often times can't fix the issue. The fact Dragon Age Inquisitor runs like crap on a 12 core monster with 48G of ram and a very good (not screaming) vid card shows that the publisher (Origin/Steam/Others) has limited ability to fix problems.

I heard from first hand sources, unlike with Ferguson, which is coming second hand from news sources.

Order of War can be purchased and played on Steam right now. The "Challenge" part (multiplayer "expansion" that required always on connection to Square Enix servers) of the game was removed because Square Enix (Not Steam/Valve) shut down the servers that allowed it to function. Steam did not control the servers, nor did they have any decision in the process of shutting them down. To blame Valve for the decisions of another company entirely - is just plain silly.

What should Valve have done - leave a known non-functional game in people's libraries? Oh - and the users that had the game - still had the game installed on their computers. Steam didn't "rip" the game files and data away. The game simply wouldn't work - due to Square Enix. All Steam did was make sure no one tried to run a game that everyone knew wouldn't work, then clog up Steam's support channels over something they had no ability to fix.

Now this is just plain lying. Valve only restored the singleplayer after the brief outrage, which everyone forgot about soon due to the brainwashing of Steam sales. What Valve should have done is lived up to their can-do-no-wrong reputation and left the multiplayer community alone. They had managed to maintain multiplayer through tunneling. Or they could have tried to maintain official multiplayer. You know, like Origin is trying to do with all their games that got affected by Gamespy shutting down.

Read the ToS with Steam - you know they have the right to dump every game you have if they want. They won't because it will kill the business - but if the users are upset, they need to take it up with Square Enix, not Valve.

And they shouldn't have the right. Order of War: Challenge proved that they will dump games, and that was only the beginning. Valve is the one that destroyed a multiplayer community, not Square Enix. Square Enix failed to prevent multiplayer from surviving, and they weren't the ones who ripped out the game. Because Valve did it, the tech press covered it up for months, and the story only broke because of Forbes.

Brainwashed Steam fanboys like you will blame anyone and everyone but Valve. Just like when Valve ripped many of EA's games from Steam. People blamed EA, because they can do no right, and Valve can do no wrong.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...aming?page=0,1

Which brings us back to Steam's ongoing feud with EA. All sources indicate that the yanking of many high profile EA games from Steam was Valve's decision, not EA's, as EA's DLC practices violate Steam's terms of service. Regardless of who's at fault, the reaction from the Steam community has largely been "f- EA, I'm boycotting that game." The fact is, whether by means of high-minded gamers boycotting on principle, or simply through lack of convenience, advertising and exposure, publishers that decide to forgo Steam WILL sell less copies, and this effect only increases the more dominant Steam is.
What will the publisher response be? Will it be for each major publisher to create their own storefront like EA has done with Origin, creating an even more fragmented PC market? And if high profile titles don't sell on the PC, will publishers capitulate to Steam, or just cut their losses and give up on PC gaming entirely? It's tough to say, but given the climate of AAA publishing on the PC, it's not inconceivable that publishers would cut their losses entirely and double-down on console markets with their own more publisher-friendly distribution models.