Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Having no internet connection at all is like having a computer that cannot run the game. Got to upgrade and go with the times or suffer the consequences, as bad as it may sound.
As sad as it is for some people this has become the truth.

The industry expects you to have some kind of internet connection, just like many publishers ship games solely on DvDs now. It is an expectation that has been brought on by advances in hardware, the times, and the PC gaming community. Where ten years ago online support was an added bonus, now days you get a funny look from people if you tell them the game you just bought is single-player only.

For whatever reason there are people who are unable to obtain some kind of reliable net connection on the comp they play games on, whether because they cannot afford it or just simply their location. It's a crap situation to be sure.

I understand fully the complaints that people are raising with the Steam activation but I suppose I am just being an optimist when I say that SEGA/CA could have made things a heck of a lot worse than Steam. When things like SecuROM and the infamous SPORE DRM are out there, Steam can't help but look attractive to me.

As for the issues brought up with Steam in this thread, I can only say I haven't even had the majority of them in the last two years. When Steam came out with Half-life 2 it was a mess, but since then the team behind the service has really upped their game. The only time steam seems to suck up CPU power is when it's first initializing, after that it's fine from my experiences. The Steam servers aren't nearly as unstable as they used to be. I don't think i've been kept from playing a game I wanted to play with Steam since the weekend hl2 was released. That's just me though, and my experiences do not equate to the experiences of others. Take the words as they are.