I have never objected to being forced to pay for a game I want. What disturbs me greatly about recent developments in the industry is the way these commercial schemes are impacting my play experience. Value that we used to have as gamers is being taken away from us.

What do I get from Steam? I'm sure that Civ 5 will have 'Achievements'. This so that after a game of Civ, I can quickly verify that I am not history's greatest emporer, but in fact well below average. That is so fuuuunnn!!! If Sid Meier's most recent public address were law, this would be a fairly egregious crime coming out of his own company.

In a game of Settlers 7, I was recently told I had to stop playing my single player game, because Ubisofts connection went down! So I serfed the news for a while instead of playing my new game.

There are people who think they understand the game industry, but neither love or understand games, shoving their garbage notions into our faces while we play. They are not even trying to give us what we want! They are trying to control what we want so that their industry can be more predictable. It's so much easier to sell something if you don't have to rely on 'talent' or 'vision'. Ultimately they will fail as it does in every creative industry.

I'm somthing of a gaming archivist. I still have 'Populous: The Beginning' on my hard drive and I play it every 6 months or so. I have three file cabinets of game disks, some of them on 5.5 inch floppies (ok those probably don't work anymore to be fair) My favorite game companies are Microprose and Bullfrog. When I buy a game today, what will happen 10 years from now when Valve and Steam no longer exist? Certainly they will go under eventually if the value they provide is whittled away. Will the games I buy just go away? Unless there is some way to make the games outlast the company, the company is basically destroying it's legacy. Talk about short term gain! When companies no longer care about their legacy, it's as inevitable as night that the industry will start eating itself and in the end it will be up to us to make our own games.

Ahh not to condone it or anything but just use the cracks widely available on the net for games that have to have steam running in the background. Problem solved.

For those of us that think that is wrong or "breaking the law" enjoy the crappy DRM that ruins your gaming experience. Even if there wasn't any pirates you would still have the DRM. I for one will be buying Civ 5 and will be using a crack to play it.

Most EULA stomp all over your individual rights as a consumer anyways and therefore aren't lawful themselves. Can't remember where I was reading up on that but  do remember that EULA's was studied by Harvard Law and found to be unfair or even unlawful.

The best part is when companies release older games with their protection removed and use cracking groups DRM removal and they don't even try to hide it.

I do not understand. Will Civ V be also available in retail or only on Steam? Will retail copies (if any) demand you to be plugged on Steam to work? Will Steam charge you for this?

-we can still buy civ5 in stores, on dvd (same price as DD from steam)

-we need to have steam installed, running, and online to activate/authorize civ5 when installing.

-we'll need steam installed and running to play civ5, even a single-player game.  Steam can be in 'offline' mode for single-player.

-I'm not sure if we'll need to have steam in online mode to play all forms of MP -- ie if we have a local LAN, or use IP addresses to connect, or the other 'old-fashioned' ways we've used to MP over the net/LANs/etc.  If we can do some MP without going thru steam we'll still need steam running (as we will in offline SP)

Offline mode only works for fully-updated games, and updates are done in-place in my experience.  Eg. instead of downloading an update and then installing it, steam just pulls the update down incrementally and locks the game until it's done.  I don't know if they force the update before you can play again, haven't experimented with it since I tell steam to keep my games automatically up to date.

.... oh fuck it... Fine I will buy the limited edition tomorrow since I don't want Civ 5 requiring Steam...

Have you seen the Steam achievements games are using lately? I managed to complete around 50% of Napoleon by playing the game normally. Admittedly, given CA's quality control of late perhaps having an achievement for managing to start a single player game isn't all that invalid ....

"Does Steam make you download updates if it catches any available before letting you play it offline?"

 As far as I know once it starts downloading the update you have to let it complete. Steam, for whatever reason, don't seem to bother with compressed files or the like; it downloads the individual files into the game directory itself. One of the other complaints about it; why make me sit for hours downloading an 8 Gb game when you could zip it up and give me the 4Gb archive in half the time ...

Forced updates will destroy the Civ 5 modding community. There's gotta be some workaround there.

Yea, hopefully there won't be forced updates ... additionally there should "hopefully" be some way to maintain several separate versions of Civ 5 (with XML, PYTHON, and even C++ changes)

As a quickie totally non-scientific test, I just yanked the network cable out of my computer and ran Borderlands (only game I own through Steam that is installed right now). Steam didn't restart, or bug out, or do anything other then try to show me the news updates (which it couldn't since I was offline). Borderlands ran quite happily. I didn't set it to offline mode before hand, and as far as I know have never used offline mode before in Steam.

Obviously that doesn't prove much, since it's not a Steamworks enabled title. But it does give me some confidence that they've been putting work into making offline mode functional.

I prefer Impulse over Steam, but not enough to make me not buy a game. It's a preference. Being forced to install Steam would bug me more if I didn't already have it. But I do. I have a friend I play games with in the US, and he likes getting me games as birthday presents. Steam is GREAT for that (Impulse is catching up there, but Steam has had the functionality a lot longer).

So while I'm not joining in on this refusal to buy the game, I totally support the people who feel that strongly about it. This is the free market in action. If they're selling a product with strings you don't find acceptable, the single loudest thing you can do to protest is refuse to buy it. Money talks. Really, it's no different then the people who refuse to buy a game if it's not on Steam.

(edit - Also the people who were annoyed when Stardock started requiring Impulse for Sins of a Solar Empire patches, which wasn't true for the first few.)

Maybe they'll find a way to make mods less brittle with version changes. If they put in a versioning system for the game libraries, a mod could choose to load the 1.24 data files instead of the 1.3 data files, which would provide at least some protection against every patch breaking everything. (Obviously major structural patch changes would still break things, but that's unavoidable.)

That would be a level of tech not typically seen in games, but it's entirely doable.

However, if you happen to put steam in online mode for any reason, then it'll check and may flag the game as not-updated and from then on refuse to run it (and try to automatically update it).  Or maybe not.  Heck, I dunno as I haven't tested this and the explanations from valve and 2K are not always clear/specific.

There are two types of Apps on Steam. Ones with the protection, and ones without it. The type that Firaxis is going for is the one that comes with the protection. Try that same test playing a protected title and you'll see what happens. I think games with this protection has a note in their description.

You can toggle off auto-update in Steam.

Check out The Settlers 7 for a good example of what we are talking about - in the Game Description:

A PERMANENT INTERNET CONNECTION AND CREATION OF A UBISOFT ACCOUNT ARE REQUIRED TO PLAY THIS VIDEO GAME AT ALL TIMES

That's Ubisoft's DRM, not Steam's.  You need a permanent connection and Ubisoft account even if you get the retail non-Steam enabled version.

Hmmm....  see, this may change things.  I was thinking it would be more like my copy of Dawn of War II, in that I play through steam, but normally in an offline mode with no difficulty.

If a constant internet connection is required - I'm sticking with Civ IV Beyond the Sword, and they won't get my money.

(This isn't because I don't love the game, and it's not a huge political stance move on my part. It's practicality, in that I use my laptop for recreation in many areas where I don't have access to internet. If I can't play Civ V in these areas, there won't be any practical reason for me to buy it - I'd only be able to play about 20% of the time I'd like to. Not worth the money for me, I'm afraid...)

Hmm let's see.  Lots of games use Steam instead of other invasive types of DRM (Saints Row 2 for instance), you don't have to dig out your CD, constant absurdly great deals on typically expensive video games, auto updates, by your request, for games you frequently play, eliminating the need to question whether or not your game is up to date and if you can join a friend's game, and the ability to purchase a game on disc, install it, add it to your Steam account, and have it there forever - even if you lose the disc, you can redownload it at your liesure with no questions asked...

All for what?  Yes, you have to make an account, but it asks for nothing except a username and password - not even your birthdate, name, and anything else that was required for you to sign up for this forum.  Does it run in the background?  Not if you don't want it to - close it down when you're done using it, just like you close down a game.  And if you don't want it to be online, press the offline mode and rejoice because it works flawlessly.  If Steam were really treating you like a pirate, there would be no such thing as offline mode because of the options it affords potential thieves.

The only things I've heard that are valid against Steam is A.) the fact you have to turn it on to play games, to which I say you turn on your computer and wait for it to boot up, and you turn on your browser and type in your login information (you can set Steam to auto login) before you can even post here and any of the other nine million places you've signed up.  So how is Steam such a burden?  You signed up here, you're posting here, you're rightly stubborn about Ubisoft's DRM crap but Steam is no such beast (Steam is a gateway, it's tied to the executable of Steam-implemented games and does nothing more than allows you access to the game, exactly the same as a CD-in-drive requirement).  And lastly B.) you have to be online to authenticate games, making people who don't have an online connection face troubles when they buy a game and didn't realize it required Steam.  This is the one I identify with most, and it is indeed a problem, especially when games using Steam have no alternative.

Obviously I'm for Steam.  I know there are some people who have troubles with it, but they are by no means the majority by a tremendously long shot, and I have never had any troubles with it.  You have to keep in mind sometimes it's the game developer who fails its end of the bargain in its agreement with Steam that causes things to go haywire.  Anyway, if you try it out, you might find you like it.  It saves you an ungodly amount of money even on brand spanking new titles, and all titles sold over steam come with no tax and with the aforementioned unlimited download - you don't even have to put in a registration number before you can play it (Impulse).  It's quick, it's easy to use, and it isn't the devil.  Plus, retail stores are most definitely dying, as the PC game sections in Fry's Electronics and Walmart and everywhere else continues to shrink - this is one bus you'll have to get on eventually, even though I myself do enjoy having a physical copy in my hands, and you could do far worse than Steam.

Steam has some amazing deals, it's true.  I just picked up Empire:TW, Medieval II: TW + expansion, and Rome:TW + expansion all for $20.   I've been using it since day one.  Valve is a company that responses to consumer feedback.  Offline mode has improved since launch.  Steam, Impulse and services like them are the future of the industry.  The amount of impulse buys (lol pun intended) is amazing.

As I said, the only real downside to the services is the requirement that they be active for you to play your games.  Impulse doesn't have to be actually - you download and the game is yours.  You can even burn it onto a CD and play it you'd like, you bought it.

Steam is DRM, plain and simple, but it's a no mess approach to the whole situation, you know?  Some companies choose to use it instead of other, cumbersome CD-based approaches, or Ubisoft's wonderful methods.  I have a feeling Civ 5 will be utterly without DRM other than what security Steam provides which, in my book, is a great thing.  But I don't know not everyone appreciates the online connectivity, even if it's only required to validate your game.

Oh god, I wish I had the possibility to upgrade. Unfortunately, I don't have a credit/debit card anymore (I don't even have a bank!). Ah, well.