SEV: What am I REALY getting for my money?

[NullAshton]

Steam does not block access to all your games. If you are caught cheating, your license for THAT GAME ONLY is banned from all VAC secured games. And it's very hard to set off the VAC anti-cheat system. At least from what I read, anyway.

Steam is nifty(for broadband users at least), in that you get automatic patches, and that the anti-cheat system that they use scares cheaters into not cheating. It's not as effective as they say, but the permanent ban serves to scare users into playing the game how it's meant to be played. Not to mention the authentication system hampers pirates that steal games, without invasive software such as Starforce. Just log into your account once, identify yourself as who you are, and then you can go play offline mode without the internet as long as you want.

Some of this stuff may be inaccurate, so feel free to point out inaccuracys. But in my experience, Steam runs flawlessly and gives you a lot of convienent features.

[Renegade 13]

NullAshton said:
anti-cheat system that they use scares cheaters into not cheating. It's not as effective as they say, but the permanent ban serves to scare users into playing the game how it's meant to be played. Not to mention the authentication system hampers pirates that steal games, without invasive software such as Starforce.

I don't see how Steam is any different than invasive software such as Starforce. It's just the implementation that is slightly different.

[Raapys]

I think Steam works alright as an *addition* to the hard-copy packages, but it should never become a replacement.