"Wow, most of these negative reviews are quite obviously from people on the payroll of those companies with competing services to Steam. EA and Microsoft are both well known for this antisocial behavior (in addition to all of their other shady business practices).

Don't get me wrong, Steam is not perfect. The UI is questionably designed, sometimes unresponsive, and takes up more memory than it should, but what Steam and Valve have done for PC Gaming makes up for that several times over. If there is a future where the dominant Steam-like service finds itself in the hands of companies like EA or Microsoft, it will be a sad, sad future for PC gaming. The gamer will be nickle and dimed at every opportunity--sort of like what you see in the console sphere with the rip off that is XBox Live. Valve, on the other hand, has amazing deals, updates their games for many years, listens to and interacts with the community, supports independent works, has a great in-house business/development culture, and eventually just gives their games away for free. Not to mention, they keep their master servers active indefinitely. There are classic FPSs approaching the 15 year mark (e.g. counter-strike, half-life death match, TFC) whose communities still thrive, while on the other hand the multiplayer of console games are shutdown a mere 2 years or so after their release. Valve is still loyal to these old games and even fixes bugs when necessary. They clearly do not reap a net benefit from this, yet they do it anyway.

A great company that provides a great service and actually has morals. They could so easily "create artificial value" and start monetizing their customers for way more than they do (given the sad state of the competition), but they don't. They could so easily put an end to their support for avenues of their service which don't net them any benefit, but they don't. With the contemporary "screw the consumer" model of business practice that dominates these days, Valve is a gem and anyone complaining doesn't know just how good they've got it."

"Their customer service is horrendous. Additionally, they force married couples and local networks from owning one copy of the game for their personal use, and must have 2+ copies AND accounts to be able to play together.

Worst service ever. I don't understand why any gaming service would use them, and I'm especially upset that Sid Meier's Civilization service goes through them"

"Steam/Valve boasts the worst customer service in the industry. I will not participate/use their (lack of) service.

I am so dissatisfied with them that I will not purchase games that require that I go through their service. I will not contribute to their success when they do not consider or respond to their user base. Bloody awful organization. As stated, worst customer service in the industry."

"Not much to complain about. Their program is a bit system intensive for what is basically a game booter, but just close it and that's fine.

Probably the best way to DIGITALLY get games, the sales that go on are really good somewhere between 80%-25% off and there's always a game on sale at some point.

I have no idea what the other reviewers are saying here that everyone cheats on their games, I've seen maybe 3 cheaters in 500 hours of TF2 and maybe five in 100 of Counter Strike Source.

Either way, never had much of a problem with their service that's worth mentioning.

Friend recently gifted me Kingdom of Amalur, got it, downloaded it, worked instantly. Can't complain. "

"The worst customer service/support I've ever had to deal with. Their idea of customer support is you send an email - that's it. 6 e-mails in with no response. I bought a wonderful $60 game that is totally useless. I will NEVER deal with this POS again! I wish it was possible to give them negative stars."

"After all these years we still have Steam treating gamers like they had nothing to do with their success. Their terrible business practices would be embarrassing to most but instead they have embraced it for over a decade.

It truly is pathetic to have stuff like all their single player video games unplayable unless you are on the internet and logged onto their advertisement HEAVY environment. If that's how it's gotta be then so be it, just dont charge for the video games. Hand em out free and advertise the crap out of things all over the place just like you do now?

Their customer service department has always been a joke since the day they began delivering Counterstrike all those years ago. Too bad as gamers there is nothing to do but bend over and take what PoS middleman companies like Steam are selling.

People cheat in ALL their games. All of them. So there is no reason to not to just go back to true public servers like the original CS. Put up a website for support and content delivery. This day and age that has to be cheaper than whatever the heck these companies are paying things like Steam and Origin to do so and oh so terribly to boot.

If I want to see anything but the video game whose icon I double click to open I will open a !@#$%^& internet browser and do so. I actually miss DOS launched games because you knew when you typed Launch and hit enter it was about to be on. Not "you are not online", "you are not logged in", "you are not updated", "you have not bought all the rest of our stuff yet, see look at it all". Weeeeee what a fun game, yay, oh wait nevermind it hasn't even launched yet."

"Steam is awesome. The best digital distribution service right now. Back when half life 1 got steam and steam was very young, I always just ignored it and chose not to install it if at all possible since I never like to install additional software along with a game if it's not required to play the game. But For a few years now I've been using it and it's not bad at all. It also is very convenient to be able to just buy a game and play it same day without having to leave the house. Digital distribution is great. Customer service has been ok in the past. There was one time I was dis-satisfied, but other than that it's alright. I never really have to use customer service anyway."

"Make sure that you NEVER save your credit card information
on steam, type in those info every time you buy something,
my son just bought a lot of games the past month, he didnt realise that it cost money - and i didnt realise that steam
as default saves your creditcard information. Atm i am talking to steam about these problems - 2 x reponds from steam in one whole week is slow imo :/ "

"STEAM HACKED AND ALL PERSONAL INFORMATION STOLEN!

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/games-news/breaking-valve-announces-massive-steam-server-intrusion/

Steam is responsible for this and should be accountable for any misuse of your personal information. I'm ready to go legal by punishing these companies for their security flaws and allowing our personal information to be breached. It's ridiculous! We need to stand up and go after all companies not keeping up-2-date on security for our personal data. They're responsible for keeping our data secure.
"

"I was in need of some immediate gratification so I purchased Magic : DotP for a relatively inexpensive $9.99. I'd tried out the free Portal download that they had a couple weeks earlier, and it worked perfectly, on every computer in my house. This purchase would go just as smoothly. It was a large download (600mb+?) but after letting it run for a few hours, the rest was smooth sailing. It's a shame they can't make it an incremental download. Oh well. Main lingering annoyance is that their Steam app has to run in the background, which hogs up some resources on my old Dell desktop."

"I ordered a copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2 as a gift for a friend. The download was fast the and installation was no problem. BFBC2 requires online registration and when he began that process Steam, very conveniently, automatically had a popup give him his product key to enter. However, when he entered the key it came back with an error stating the "serial is already in use". I did a search for the issue and it seems many had this issue. Most seemed to have to contact Steam for resolution. I told him to just try logging in, and he was able to get in no problem. I'm guessing that somehow the serial was already associated with his Steam account.

Despite the minor issue I was very pleased with the smoothness of this transaction, the speed of the download, the ease of install, and the convenience of the online purchase."

"For the longest time I loved Steam; any PC game purchases I could make through them I would. That all changed last week, when I purchased Disciples III. Even though the games information page indicates that it features multiplayer, in reality it only features a half-hearted "hotseat" mode; something that went out of style a decade ago.

I attempted to contact Steam/Valve for a refund, and was informed of their draconian refund policies, which disallow refunds for any reason. At this point, despite my attempts to re-open my ticket and better explain my issue, I'm now being completely ignored, and my tickets not even responded to.

I'm currently going the route of complaining to the BBB & FTC to get myself a refund. To any potential Steam customers, I strongly advise buying your games from retail outlets with more flexible return policies."

"This entry will cover my experiences with Steam, and a direct order from Valve.

First, Steam... As much as I love Valve's games, I still can't really take to Steam as a method of accessing/purchasing games. It's convenient for organizing online matches/details/communities and the relevant amount of games you have installed (to a point), but that's about it. From the time I started gaming, I was usually more comfortable with having purchased something in a box, with manual, goodies, whatever else. (You have the codes/registration keys and physical discs with you, so unless someone steals it all, you're relatively safe.) While it's not very practical to have mountainous stacks to take with you on moves, I do get the appeal of having it all reduced to an installation on your HD.

Steam keeps your info accessible, all in one place. But their setup isn't ideal for games you obtain secondhand, or in relevant situations.

I learned the hard way (a while ago) with a purchase of a collector's edition via eBay, and discovered that I could never get the game to run since it was already registered to the seller--that first purchased and played/tested it. I had the box, the physical discs, and even the registration key, but even after installation, I couldn't get anything to play since it required Steam access for validation. WTF.

After dealing with Steam support and even creating a new account--only to find that registration/game ownership could not be exchanged or swapped, it was very clear that I had spent money on a useless POS with awesome physical box and trappings. The seller could not give me his personal Steam account, so in a sense, he "owns" that game forever--with the mere association of a registration key in a server database, even though he's sold the physical stuff. Such BS...

Fortunately, I got a refund, but the ordeal has since soured me to *any* Steam purchases, even direct download buys. Their advertised plethora of game sales/discounts is nice--if I cared enough to make those purchases, but in this aftermath, I still prefer to get a physical copy of X... just in case there's no broadband internet connection and you *must* play X. (And for people that have limited drive space on portable comps, it's not always ideal or practical to fill up so much of it with humongous games.)

The original method of owning a game (in the non-digital distribution age) was so much better for buyers, but was an obvious, gigantic loophole exploited for unauthorized product circulation. What Steam provides is a way for the company to cover their asses without any regard to legitimate customers; screw the buyers, who cares, they get to control distribution. If only they could devise some method of letting customers prove authentic ownership in product transfers--such as mine, that would make their system much more tolerable. (It's not unheard of in other commercial industries.) The only conclusion one can draw from this is that Valve/Steam's customer-base is soooo absurdly large that they won't deign to deal with the other, more paltry half of customer game "ownership", i.e., the *actual* customers. Why? Oh yeah, it's just more convenient to focus on their delightful ass-coverage.

Now with Valve (primarily store.valvesoftware.com)... they have some of the best-looking swag you could ever want for a game. However, don't expect everything to be made of the finest material, or be offered cheap--even when discounted. There *is* free economy shipping... whatever that's worth.

But economy or not, it seems as though if the shipping method isn't nearly as slow as them getting around to processing/packing the order; just getting it out. I must have checked my acct two dozen times just to see when it would be shipped, and was frequently disappointed. (RE: the apparent OCD, there was a deadline involved.) After too long, my order arrived, and when I looked at the status again, the "actual" shipping date was listed as the same day the order was placed. I didn't see this update ever during the myriad checks, and considering the overall proximity, the timestamp could *not* have been accurate...

Bottom line: Steam support and flexibility aren't exactly great for all instances of paid games, and if you're going to order anything directly from the company, don't expect shipping expediency, or discounts.

If you avoid both situations where money is blown, your nerves may thank you."

"Big warning about Steam/Valve and EA. Extremely poor customer service. I purchased Left 4 Dead 2 from newegg.com a while back. That was a huge mistake.

Be warned that if you don't like this game you are completely out of luck and options. With most other games you can always sell them second hand if you don't like them. Not so with this one. Well, you can sell it but the buyer will not be able to register or play it. Steam is of no help whatsoever and simply repeat pointless customer non-service drivel about how once registered on one computer the game can't be registered on another. There's no way to de-activate the original CD key and get a new one. This is a new low in greed. I'll never get anything from these folks again. Newegg stands out as usual since even though this was no fault of their at all, they offereed a $10 gift card because of the crud experience I had had thanks to the well... for lack of a better word, people I guess... over at Steam/Valve and EA."

"I am a big fan of video games, and I love digital distribution, but only if it is done right. I have tried Direct2Drive, Steam, EA, GOG and a couple of others. Steam takes the cake. My Steam library now has 37 titles and I have never had a single issue. Download times are good, 95% of my bandwidth will be used during a download/install process.

Obviously Steam is #1 when it comes to digital distribution, but they are still attempting to add new features and make sure they stay #1. Their sale prices (there is at least 1 big sale a week) are astounding. The new features such as steamcloud are just awesome. "