Another straw man argument that you just pulled out of your arse. I've made countless posts detailing the many reasons why I dislike steam, and I've detailed one of them in this very thread, although you seem to be conveniently ignoring it.
If you have decent internet connection there's nothing really wrong with Steam, if your speed isn't very good then you are going to have a bad time of it.
Install a new game from DVD, then Steam will make you dl the patch the first time you try and run it, that could take a while when your connection is < 50kB/s
Same weakness with any modern gaming. Even patches these days are measured in hundreds of MBs. You basically won't be any modern gaming with a shoddy Internet connection.
As usual, we seem to have the two extremes represented with no middle ground. Steam is just like most other businesses, it has pluses and negatives. I have had technical problems with logging in and found customer service to be awful. My internet connection is only fair, so games and patches do take a fair amount of time to download, and I do wish one had the option to decline updates. However, overall Steam has been a great boon to PC gaming, offering a unified platform and unbelievably cheap games. I only play single player games, and actually play most of the time in offline mode, which eliminates the hassle of having to wait for an update to start the game.
Offline mode doesn't prevent updates. You have to actually firewall the damned thing in to prevent those hassles. This was the reason for a thread I made recently about firewalling steam.
I totally understand the need to patch games, but when it's a brand new release, and i have the disc and am still forced to download 100's of mb's on day 0 it's a bit annoying for a single player game.
Read the above post.
If there was a Windows Update equivalent of steam's system, you might turn on your PC to be greeted with a "Windows is Updating" screen, which would proceed to download and install all the available updates while locking you out of the desktop and all your programs until it's done.
I think I should just stop posting now, because you seem to be doing a fine job of making my own arguments for me.
And maybe I'd feel the same way if I wanted to purchase games digitally from steam. But I don't. I have no interest in steam as a store (or anything else). I never had a problem paying retail for games, and these days I'd happily pay above retail for games if it meant that they weren't bound to steam (I would consider that short term pain for long term gain). In my case steam is an inconvenience, and offers me nothing in return. You people seem utterly incapable of wrapping your heads around this concept.
Another salient point that bore mentioning in my last post is that my attitude toward Windows updates is going to be quite different to my atitude towards steam client updates, because, as I'be previously stated, the latter is entirely useless to me and I'd rather I didn't have to install it at all. I see far more justification for any inconvenience caused by Windows updates (not that any inconvenience exists), than for a freeloading piece of bloatware that serves (me personally) no useful function. I don't see why you find this so difficult to understand.
You will continue to try and trivialize and pick apart each point I make, but you fail to see that all the minor annoyances together make steam represent a substantial, unjustified inconvenience for those that do not want any of it's features.
And maybe I'd feel the same way if I wanted to purchase games digitally from steam. But I don't. I have no interest in steam as a store (or anything else). I never had a problem paying retail for games, and these days I'd happily pay above retail for games if it meant that they weren't bound to steam (I would consider that short term pain for long term gain). In my case steam is an inconvenience, and offers me nothing in return. You people seem utterly incapable of wrapping your heads around this concept.
Freeloading piece of bloatware? For what Steam is and does, its probably the least bloated piece of software on your PC. Useless? It consolidates all your games into a single place, keeps them all up to date with the most current patches, gives you a single store to purchase games, often at steep discounts, and integrates a social network and mod infrastructure. Its an incredibly useful platform, and something if PC gaming didn't have, it probably would wither and you'd be stuck playing 30fps console games.
Because your points are so flimsy they're blown apart when my rats sneeze.
So, now you'd want to trade the convenience of Steam for constant pain with a retail boxed copy; that you'd have to manually update every time you want to play, that you'd have to deal with different multiplayer lobbies/servers, that you'd have to drive to the B&M store to purchase days after all your friends already bought them, downloaded them, and have been playing them on Steam?
Dude. Steam is the reason why PC gaming is clobbering console gaming right now, why its growth outstrips the Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo consoles combined.
just to allow me to launch a handful of games that would be perfectly capable of launching by themselves if steam didn't have it's hooks in them.
You people seem utterly incapable of wrapping your heads around this concept.