I bought Alien: Isolation in a shop. Found out when I got it back that it requires an endless diarrhoea of sign-ups, client installs and registrations on Steam before I'm permitted to play it. Did all that. After playing it twice, I find that this game is not playable unless you're online. To be precise, it has an offline mode but you can't save your position unless you're saving it to an online account. After a lot of trawling forums I found someone who had the same problem and found that the only way they could resolve this was allowing the game to connect online to sync its saves to the Steam "cloud". Making the game worthless to me. Is it possible to transfer ownership of games on Steam or unregister a product so I can return the game? I don't play many games and this is the first Steam game I have bought (accidentally). It's utterly without value to me as is.
Thanks. I bought it for cash in a shop and don't want any other Steam games - I bought it because I am a very particular fan of the Aliens movies and thought it would be interesting. So there's no way for them to directly refund me and credit has no interest to me. I now suddenly see why all those people were so vocal about not being able to "own" things you bought anymore.
Huh. Turns out the game was lying to me. I have no idea why but the game has the Save Syncing greyed out - you can't turn it off. And if this is turned on in the game but turned off in your Steam settings, it will repeatedly lose your saves each time you restart the program (not merely go back to main menu but actually exit). However, if you have both enabled but no Internet connection, it will still work. Apparently it only wants permission to upload your Saves, even if you deny it the ability to do so. Stupid software.
Yet another reason to never support the likes of steam. Personally I would never purchase or allow others to hold my data I take self responsibility for storage.
Yes. I play games so rarely that this is the first time I've ever played a Steam game. I am fine with DRM in principle, but Steam is way beyond a DRM method. It's really unfortunate that the game I really wanted was only available through Steam. I will be uninstalling the Steam client once done and I'll probably just change the email address on the account and give the whole thing to a gamer friend when done. Email addresses are easy to create.
Steam support for returns is very very bad. Even when games dont work or are broken and you explain in a support ticket about the problems. You also explain that you have played for like 20 mins they still wont refund you. I hardly buy anything off steam nowadays tbh. Mk9 I purchased and I could not play one mp game because of the broken lobbys that a simple patch could have fixed. Never again will they take my money.
I've had little issues with this so far. Two times so far I wanted to get a refund on something and I got it in the end. Of course this won't work if you've played something for a long time already. Steam itself is very comfortable, to me, and usually the first thing I open when I turn on my PC. I didn't like it when Half Life 2 came out but now, it has really grown to be one of my absolute basics.
I actually went from hating Steam back when Orange Box first came out to now loving it and not purchasing games unless they are on Steam. I can't really think of a time when I won't be connected anyway so that problem doesn't affect me but I can see how Steam would be much less appealing if you actually do have a problem with being connected. In fact, I'm trying to trade a Non-Steam version of Farcry 4 for a Steam version right now but it seems like everyone else who has Non-Steam versions is trying to do the same.
You don't buy games. You buy a license that allows you to play the game. You don't own the game, no matter where you bought it from.
If the fact that people talk about buying a game causes you that much cognitive dissonance you're really going to struggle. Perhaps you would prefer it if everyone said "I just bought an open-ended licence to install and play a game under certain restrictions about sharing copies of it" rather than just, you know, "I bought a game". But that ain't going to happen. It's not even accurate to correct people. Owning a game is perfectly acceptable terminology. It's only weird people who insist that not being legally able to give copies away means you don't own something. I mean, I own a car but it's illegal to drive it down the street at 115mph does that mean that I really don't own it because of restrictions? I can't legally copy every last part of it and reproduce it either because of patent laws but I still think I own it and so does everyone else including the law. But there's always that person who wants to chime in for no reason other than to sagely correct everyone. Usually by imposing their own version of words in defiance of the fact that everyone is familiar with the terminology and short-hand that was used and despite that human language is based around common definitions. All that really matters to most of us is reality. If I buy something and can use it forever, sell it on, lend it out, I call that owning it and so do most people. I mean what else do you think I'm going to do with a game? Feed the binary as static through my speaker system and call it Abstract Art? But if I find most of that restricted - especially if I can't play something because I have to sign into someone's online service and that's unnecessary to the game itself, I call that something different. So yes, Captain Lobotomy, we do in fact distinguish between "owning" a game and something like the Steam system not being the same. Is there anything of value above your neck? Seriously!
Cry me a river, why don't you? All I did was explain to you how it works. If you fail to comprehend that, your bad. Sounds like you're fairly new to gaming and don't fully understand how things work. Next time just ask. Or do some basic research before you spend money. Why complain about steam games requiring steam, really.
I can point out that it's a simplistic statement that has little relevance to the actual problem though. If a game is only available on Steam and Steam causes you problems, then that's the complaint, not anything else; even if that anything else happens to be something easier for eclap to argue against. Let's try eclap's "logic" in a few equivalent situations: Person: "The only restaurant in town is a Chinese one and I don't like Chinese food". eclap: "You can't complain that a Chinese restaurant only serves Chinese food" Person: "I wanted a copy of the song Just a Girl but I can only find the Miley Cyrus cover" eclap: "You can't complain that Miley Cyrus only releases Miley Cyrus songs" Person: "I wanted a pizza without anchovies" eclap: "It's an anchovies pizza. You can't complain." Person: "Yes, but I want one that isn't..." eclap: "Well it is so you can't complain." Person: "I don't think you're getting this - the complaint is that I want it to be something else." eclap: "Cry me a river. It's an anchovies pizza. You can't complain that an anchovies pizza has anchovies on it." Person: "I just did. They could do the same pizza without anchovies on it seeing as lots of their customers have problems with anchovies." eclap: "It's an anchovies pizza. You can't complain that an anchovies pizza has anchovies on it." Everyone else: "Walks away from an obviously pointless conversation." Basically, you can't address a complaint about a design decision being made by responding that the product achieves that design decision anymore than you can address a complaint that somebody shot you by saying: "it's a gun, it would be a bad gun if it couldn't shoot". They're two different levels of problem. A statement can be logical and still entirely miss the point. Especially when it deliberately does so in order to "correct" people.
Steam games do require steam, no matter how much you cry about it. It is not going to change. Why are we talking about anchovies and pizza joints? thought this thread was about something else.
