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Steam: Invasive crap software

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hooflung said:
I bought a boxed copy of Fall Out New Vegas. My friend was staying over so when I was at work he installed it on my living room PC. He was signed in to his steam. Steam bound that game to his Steam account. My game is now his.

Since when was a game I payed for at the brick and mortar supposed to phone home and bind to a Steam account and that considered 'ok' by consumers. I'd rather have a Disk Check. The Disk is effectively, for broadband owners, worth a lot less after an initial install. In fact, I can now DL the game off of Steam as an added bonus. So long as my friend is logged in.
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From what I understand, even boxed copies of skyrim require steam activation, so maybe bethseda had this in place for FO:NV? If this is the case, it sucks that your friend logged into his account but surely that had to be some sort of dialogue box that made this happen? If not, that really sucks.
 
TallBill said:
From what I understand, even boxed copies of skyrim require steam activation, so maybe bethseda had this in place for FO:NV? If this is the case, it sucks that your friend logged into his account but surely that had to be some sort of dialogue box that made this happen? If not, that really sucks.
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Any game with Steamworks as its DRM will require Steam activation. Fallout: New Vegas is one of those games.
 
hooflung said:
I bought a boxed copy of Fall Out New Vegas. My friend was staying over so when I was at work he installed it on my living room PC. He was signed in to his steam. Steam bound that game to his Steam account. My game is now his.

Since when was a game I payed for at the brick and mortar supposed to phone home and bind to a Steam account and that considered 'ok' by consumers. I'd rather have a Disk Check. The Disk is effectively, for broadband owners, worth a lot less after an initial install. In fact, I can now DL the game off of Steam as an added bonus. So long as my friend is logged in.
Click to expand...


The activation code is bound to the Steam Account. Surely your friend knew this if he already had Steam account....he effectively stole your game! And its because they dont want a used market, otherwise you could resell that code.
 
Childs said:
The activation code is bound to the Steam Account. Surely your friend knew this if he already had Steam account....he effectively stole your game! And its because they dont want a used market, otherwise you could resell that code.
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Yeah, this is where I was going with my comment. Either the friend is an idiot, negligent, or a thief. Surely even if he didn't know it would happen there had to be some sort of dialogue box that even got him to log into steam in the first place.
 
All the DRM and being un-able to get refunds on games does make it a pretty crappy situation. The best part is due to your internet you can't even steal the game either.
 
Can you disconnect from the internet, install from the DVD, and then just log in to steam and go back to offline mode? Or will it not even let you install the game until it is activated?

Or do you have to perversely download the game from Steam anyway, even if you have already installed from the DVD?
 
hooflung said:
I bought a boxed copy of Fall Out New Vegas. My friend was staying over so when I was at work he installed it on my living room PC. He was signed in to his steam. Steam bound that game to his Steam account. My game is now his.

Since when was a game I payed for at the brick and mortar supposed to phone home and bind to a Steam account and that considered 'ok' by consumers. I'd rather have a Disk Check. The Disk is effectively, for broadband owners, worth a lot less after an initial install. In fact, I can now DL the game off of Steam as an added bonus. So long as my friend is logged in.
Click to expand...

That's what friends are for! Very nice friend right there.:hmm:
 
frozentundra123456 said:
Can you disconnect from the internet, install from the DVD, and then just log in to steam and go back to offline mode? Or will it not even let you install the game until it is activated?

Or do you have to perversely download the game from Steam anyway, even if you have already installed from the DVD?
Click to expand...

You need to activate it online after it's installed. Then you can go into offline mode.

You can install from the DVD. It does not require you to download the game.
 
hooflung said:
I bought a boxed copy of Fall Out New Vegas. My friend was staying over so when I was at work he installed it on my living room PC. He was signed in to his steam. Steam bound that game to his Steam account. My game is now his.

Since when was a game I payed for at the brick and mortar supposed to phone home and bind to a Steam account and that considered 'ok' by consumers. I'd rather have a Disk Check. The Disk is effectively, for broadband owners, worth a lot less after an initial install. In fact, I can now DL the game off of Steam as an added bonus. So long as my friend is logged in.
Click to expand...

You need to set steam to look for the game.

Your friend obviously clicked YES when it said scan computer for new games while he was on his own account.

Your friend is most likely at fault and im fairly sure he knew what he was doing.
He probably thought, oh u have the original DVD's and wouldnt require steam, so he was trying to get a free game at your cost.

At this point id make my friend fork over the game for his mistake on clicking YES.

And ive had this happen to me a couple of times by my wonderful little brother.
He took all the original CD keys i had for my games, and started registering it... or would go on my PC and log onto steam and register it that way...

Yeah he had to pay me back for all the games he took, but this is totally the USER's fault.
 
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I'm going to cite this thread as an example of the "driving in a snow flurry" phenomenon. Make peoples' lives minimally more complicated, and a small minority freeze up with anxiety and go apeshit when they have to solve 2 * 8 + 4 - 1 as opposed to 2 + 3. The rest of us just do it in our heads and go on with our lives.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
You can turn off steam news in the settings.
You can run in offline mode after your first activation.

I like steam, but I have to agree with OP that it's not acceptable for store bought games to require steam, gamers should always have a choice.
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simple solution is to NOT buy those games...It is marked on the box, show the companies your vote with your wallet. Since the average human will not pay for a game he can get for free, the software companies want to get paid and are using the best methods they can.. YES the legit people suffer, but blame the a$$hat stealing the game , not the company doing what it can to stop it from happening. If nobody stole the games you can bet they wouldnt waste time and manpower (and server bandwidth) to protect it.
 
Welp, here is my Steam Hate story - and this one is all Steam's fault as the software snagged a bug or something.

I'm enjoying a nice weekend when Comcast decided to be dicks and take down the internets for my area. No worries, I say, I get kicked out of Steam and wait for the Offline Mode window to pop up (as I've done so many times before when Comcast wanted to be dicks.)

Nope, this time I get an error - "Couldn't Connect to Steam. Would you like to switch to Offline Mode." Options [Retry Connection][Ok - go to Offline mode]

So, without Internet I clicked go into Offline mode - same error pops up. Well, no shit I got no Internet so of course I want to get into Offline mode. Again, and again and again.

Close Steam, boot it up, again. Reboot PC, Steam auto-starts - again. After about 10 minutes I couldn't get into Offline mode because Steam couldn't connect TO get me into offline mode.

How odd. At this point I figured I'll play an old game I hadn't yet beaten - install, good all done, One-Time Activation process - Please make sure you are connected to the Internet. Fuck me!
 
hooflung said:
I bought a boxed copy of Fall Out New Vegas. My friend was staying over so when I was at work he installed it on my living room PC. He was signed in to his steam. Steam bound that game to his Steam account. My game is now his.

Since when was a game I payed for at the brick and mortar supposed to phone home and bind to a Steam account and that considered 'ok' by consumers. I'd rather have a Disk Check. The Disk is effectively, for broadband owners, worth a lot less after an initial install. In fact, I can now DL the game off of Steam as an added bonus. So long as my friend is logged in.
Click to expand...

Several ways to fix the problem. 1) Have him gift it back to you. 2)Complain to Steam and they will fix it. 3) have friend come over, log in, click offline mode, and play. When he not looking gift all his games to you.

It costs money to make good games and pirates suck. Your friend is a ninja. I'm a monkey. Have a good day
 
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you can contact steam support. you might have to send in a scan of the box with the registration #. It happened to me a long time ago when steam was still kind of new. A friend was using my account to play CS and he bought CS:CZ but accidently activated it while logged in with my account. ~a week later the game was gone from my account and activated on his.
 
DeadFred said:
ROFL Steam is DRM.

They just added the extras to placate the simple minded...and to make more money of course.
Click to expand...

Its common knowledge that Steam is DRM. But its also a model for how to do DRM mostly right. Its far better than invasive crap like SecuRom or TAGES.
 
Bateluer said:
Its common knowledge that Steam is DRM.
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Thats what I thought........but apparently not.


Some folks seem to think its a magical app that grants you the ability to play games on the PC........... like we didnt have that ability before Steam. 🙄
 
DeadFred said:
Thats what I thought........but apparently not.


Some folks seem to think its a magical app that grants you the ability to play games on the PC........... like we didnt have that ability before Steam. 🙄
Click to expand...

I used to have to drive my car to a store, and pay full price for a box. Then bring that box home, extract the disc and wait for it to install. And then keep up with the box and disc forever, and change out the disc when I wanted to play something else.

Then Steam came along and I could buy a game online, download it in a few minutes, and have it forever and ever, no matter how many times I move or how many different computers I have. I didn't have to mess with discs or keep track of them or worry about scratching them.

Seems pretty magical to me.
 
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