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And what happens if the power is out in your apartment? Don't reply "my laptop has a battery", because you have to charge the battery when the power is online.

And what happens if the power is out in your apartment? Don't reply "my laptop has a battery", because you have to charge the battery when the power is online. Seriously: what kind of uptime reliability do you demand from a game? The fact that it has an offline mode already puts it far ahead of most cloud-based services. If you don't like Steam for political reasons, that's fine, but this is a very weak line of argumentation.

jasonkester 15y ago
It's a valid point that's bitten me in the past. I'll often head off to a remote 3rd world beach for months at a time. I bring a laptop along, and usually stock up on a few games to pass the odd rainy afternoon in the hammock. For this use case, something like Steam is just crippling. Even if you remember to put your games into "offline" mode before leaving home, it still insists on connecting to the server every month or so just to be sure. I'm in a place with generator power a couple hours a day and no internet. That's an edge case they didn't plan for, and it only hurts people who paid for the game.
vollmond 15y ago
Power being out, luckily, is something that can be dealt with by the individual consumer (call power company, go to a neighbor's house, etc). The point here is that if Steam goes offline (through glitch or bankruptcy or whatever reason), there is nothing at all the paying consumer can do, outside of hacking/pirating the game. This is a massive loss of functionality from games past. And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new. edit: removed possibly inflammatory comment
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  This is a massive loss of functionality from games past. Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture. Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...
  - vollmond 15y ago
    But in that case, again, it's entirely up to the paying customer. You could have kept your Commodore 6502 to play those games (just like I still have my NES and Sega Genesis) - it's up to you. The actions of the company (and the existence of the company) have nothing to do with whether you can play those games in 2011.

jasonkester 15y ago

It's a valid point that's bitten me in the past. I'll often head off to a remote 3rd world beach for months at a time. I bring a laptop along, and usually stock up on a few games to pass the odd rainy afternoon in the hammock. For this use case, something like Steam is just crippling. Even if you remember to put your games into "offline" mode before leaving home, it still insists on connecting to the server every month or so just to be sure. I'm in a place with generator power a couple hours a day and no internet. That's an edge case they didn't plan for, and it only hurts people who paid for the game.

vollmond 15y ago

Power being out, luckily, is something that can be dealt with by the individual consumer (call power company, go to a neighbor's house, etc). The point here is that if Steam goes offline (through glitch or bankruptcy or whatever reason), there is nothing at all the paying consumer can do, outside of hacking/pirating the game. This is a massive loss of functionality from games past. And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new. edit: removed possibly inflammatory comment

michael_dorfman 15y ago
This is a massive loss of functionality from games past. Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture. Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...
- vollmond 15y ago
  But in that case, again, it's entirely up to the paying customer. You could have kept your Commodore 6502 to play those games (just like I still have my NES and Sega Genesis) - it's up to you. The actions of the company (and the existence of the company) have nothing to do with whether you can play those games in 2011.