A Vote of No-Confidence in Steam

2011.1114

If you have been alive and breathing you know that on November 6th, Valve Corporation's Steam digital delivery service was hacked. At first, company drones made it sound as if it were only the forums that had been hacked. It wasn't until November 10th, when PC World broke news that the hacks were worse than was being reported, that Valve came out and admitted that user information, including passwords and credit card information, had been compromised (not "used", just "compromised").

A lot of people have voiced reservations over time about using Steam. Although i've had the same problems everyone else has had - the inconvenience of having to log in to use the service, the inconvenience of having to remember to check offline mode before taking my game on the road, the occasional lockout of the service or having to put in a special code to run games on a different computer - the "carrot" of being able to instantly download DLC and have game backups kept me quiet and in agreement with the rest of the mob, just like a good little compliant gamer should be. But being that this issue has the potential to turn into identity theft for anyone who has used Steam, i'm thinking again about using cloud-storage services, whether it be to serve up my programs or as convenient file repositories.

I've already given my two-cents (and more) about this issue of using Steam, and on the issue of Paul Jackson and RSC for their dogged insistence on using Steam to serve up Railworks. In my opinion, the dangers (and aggravation) of this breach far outweigh any benefit we might be getting from having instant updates and backups. I'm calling for RSC to immediately begin making plans to distribute their goods on DVD without the requirement to slave the program to Steam or any other online cloud service. There are other ways to try to secure copies of the game so that they are less of a target for piracy, as Microsoft and others have proven with product activation. This continued reliance on Steam for distribution isn't in the best interest of RSC, and was NEVER in the best interest of the end user, as the myriad of complaints about problems with Steam have proven.

RSC has put it's worries about losing a few Euros to pirates ahead of customer convenience and ease-of use for long enough. It's time to either put an end to Steam as a digital distributor, give the alternative of having an unslaved hard copy of the game that doesn't have to log onto Steam to be activated, or risk losing current customers and future sales.

Voice your displeasure over this issue and let RSC.com know that Euro's are at stake if they don't begin to offer an alternate method of distribution for Railworks.