1C: UK retailers refuse to sell Steam-enabled games

Steam can be a pain even on a good Internet connection.

I'm not a console fanboy but popping in the disc and being able to play straight away is a bonus.

Steam / DRM / whatever is a monster created by pirating PC masses.

@Darkshadoe

That would be fine if the game shops gave decent deals new title comes out £49.99 for new £47.99 pre owned, they keep it artificially high. Also if a game is not in the charts it is rarley avalible in the shop for new, you are forced to buy second hand. How are you supposed to support your developer without paying full price? OH YEAH STEAM IS AVALIBLE.

Plus a "Yard Sale" is not exactly a multi million copration that forces all other yard sales to close down and then offers the goods for sale at a couple of "dollars" below retail.

Steam though is a good system. I have used other systems and they lack too many features that steam offer. EA are trying to take on steam with the origin system but it still in its infancy to see if it will succeed as it stands at the moment it is still pretty poor.

Yeah I am sure... So they will so they will not sell all the Valve games!? Meaning that when HL3 arrives (not saying that is going to be soon), or Portal 3, or any other of their games - the retailers will say "No thanks, we don't want to make profit of these games that sell well. Steam can have our piece of the pie".
There are a lot of people that buy a Steam enabled game and use Steam only as a gaming network.
I don't know but from where I am sitting this can only hurt the retailers and help steam.

On the steam subject - for me this is by far the best online service I have ever used.

Steam has never been a pain for me other than on days when a popular game is released and their servers get overloaded.

Also, stating not to be a console fanboy, then admitting lacking the attention span necessary to install a game doesn't help you in the least.

I've been using Steam since 2008 and I don't even mind it anymore. I just run the game from the icon on my desktop and it's like it was never there.

I have games from Steam and GOG (Good old Games) too! It makes it easy to order games and they manage them. No CDs!

One of the things I like about Steam there are games from small gaming companies that I play that I know would never make to the game store's because they only have the most popular games from the biggest gaming companies.

My biggest fear in the future Steam will do away with the one time purchase of a games and make me rent the games, each month I have to a pay a fee.

I don't think we'll have to worry about that, however my biggest fear is the day steam goes belly-up how will we re-acquire our games? People always ***** about physical copies etc "you can scratch them" well you can also back them up! create .iso's and or burn them to other media.

I love steam, i love how it's all integrated, I love that i can see a friend playing l4d right click his name and be in the game in minutes, but all big companies come to an end at some point.

it will be interesting to see where the future will take us.

Well since I already have the games on my hard drive, it's just about backing them up.

I love the comment about steam being created by the pirating masses - if anything it has lowered the amount of pirating done. A company looked at the trend and though, "well hells bells, folks sure do like their digital downloads of content, let's make it legal and see how much of that thar moolah we can make!"

Now people can get their digital downloads fast, easy, safe, and cheap. You can't beat that. I have bought a number of games on Steam and while I am not much of a PC gamer either, I appreciate having a decent selection on my lappy when I travel and can't really drag an x-box and TV around with me.

I don't like having to go through steam to play multiplayer on some of my games. It runs in the background and takes up a lot of resources for being a game downloader launcher.

incorrect.

i was just on a road trip with my laptop with all my steam games running off-line on trains, airplanes and never needed to be online to play the games. like others said, once you downloaded and installed the game. you don't need to be online to play the games you have.

retial shops only have themselves to blame , bit silly to try and blame there downfall on steam . And as others have said it makes no sense to then not sell a game so you will definetly buy it online. I assume they started this as some kind of empty threat hoping publishers would drop steam in favour of retail . Of course they are dreaming and i guess they will find that out very quickly.

The retail sectors lack of effort and promotion and knowledge of PC games is what killed it for retail . Theres the odd shop were there's a guy working in there who knows his stuff but on most occasions i would go in and ask would they be selling WOW data disk and they would say " whats warcraft?" .

My brother works for a very large internatioal retailer thats sells games , they didnt stock WOW , when he phoned up head office they said " never heard of it" . Thats retails problem . They have someone in charge of ordering games who has never heard of warcraft or valve.

I have been with Steam for seven years now and have a massive number of games (over 1000) with their service. I still buy physical copies of games for my PS3 and Wii but not for PC games. Retailers with this point of view are just damaging the industry. It should not be about competition, it should be about expansion. Get games into the hands of as many players as possible and get the developers their hard earned money so they can develop new games.

Steam is one of the giants of the DD industry and now that Direct2Drive is gone there is nothing that directly competes with it not even Origin or Impulse (aka Game Stop's app). Valve could easily monopolize the industry but they have not done so yet so fears like the ones posted in the article are unfounded BS imo by a business who wants an excuse to complain about their crappy retail sales.