Saturday, March 16, 2013

Why Steam's poor service encourages a return to piracy

No longer being a student, I finally had some money to spend on entertainment. The advent of digital downloads and the reasonable pricing, made the choice rather obvious. Why wait a couple weeks to receive a DVD when you can download the software?

It may be a straight forward question if you have a high speed connection with unlimited bandwidth, but less so if you are using the only telecommunication service available which has a cap and is very slow.

I don't mind not having a fast connection for most things. I prefer to read something rather than watch a video, I don't like to send or receive high definition image files. However, a connection is necessary for Steam. With regard to my title, I think I may continue to buy games on Steam, but will have to find a new way to get the games as the client is useless : backup and restore fails.

A few months ago, I purchased some titles which exceed 15GB. Given my connection wouldn't allow me to download the files at home, I went to the public library to update my library on my laptop. The latter is low powered and not my gaming machine. Nevertheless, I made a backup of the games that I downloaded through the Steam client and then tried to restore the games on my gaming desktop.

The restore function restored 6.5 GB out of 16 GB for one game, and 6.9GB out of 16.2GB out of the other. I wasted time trying to contact Steam Support, looking around on forums etc, but to no avail.

Thinking about the ease one can have in downloading pirated copies, I wonder if Steam is shooting itself in the foot not properly supporting their products.

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