The ability to handle digital downloads is already inherently present in the very structure of the 'Net. But what's NOT handled through the 'net, is the issues of DRM's and making as sure as possible that the product cannot be copied and spread through pirates. Not that you will ever be able to stop pirates (You can't stop the signal, Mal!), but still. And also take into effect the costs involved with securing enough bandwith, having servers that can handle the loads etc, and you have a very good reason as to why solutions such as Steam are something that you will see more and more.

Steam doesn't have a monopoly on content distribution, but it is, by far, the best current solution (Try EA's Origin if you don't believe me. It sucks) available. But why should a game-dev like 1C NOT use Steam, when it currently offers the best solution in terms of both how much money they charge per transaction and how often they pay out to the companies that distribute games through them?

Let's face it: the time when you bought games in the stores are dying, and that holds especially true for flightsims and other niche genres. Or would you rather have to deal with systems as invasive as for example StarForce?

Personally, I would just like to own my copy of the game. Regardless of where I bought it.

I definitely prefer ED's Starforce solution for DCS:A-10C over Steam.

Yeah Starfarce had major issues and lost a lot of clients because of their approach. But now it's really fine, i'm a DRM hater and still can't fault ED for their copyright protection. No hidden processes, no extra apps running all the time, no limited activation (even if you use them you get one every month), no internet access required (except for activation).

I like ED solution and Bohemia Interactive's (FADE + Securom activation i think). I have no problems with entering a serial for online check and then being left to play in peace without twenty thousand apps running in background, patching my games without asking, monitoring my PC activity and god knows what else.

A little bit off topic, but can anyone confirm, definitely and without a doubt, that the original DVD version of the sim did not in fact have a copy of the sim on it, just a Steam download link.

I'm asking because I'd like to try installing that original version and then only patching it up to a certain point, and perhaps even trying to mix different parts of different patches together (using the graphics from one and the sound from another for example). This would be for off-line use only.

I never backed up past patched full versions of the game and found I could only roll the patches back so far from the current version before I needed to start adding them to an older full version of the sim.

Agree..... I despise Starforce but its better then it use to be

I don't know for sure, but I bought the Collectors Edition when it was first released, and it downloaded most of the content from STEAM. I don't think you will be able to find individual patches as they are probably deleted or overwritten with the latest patch.

I installed it from DVD and there was no dling of files.

You can't roll back patches with Steam. If you install the very first version it will patch it to the latest version in one go (patches are cumulative, not incremental), so you're either stuck with the initial version or the last one, nothing in-between.

That's why i used to keep backups during the early patches when performance tweaks were a bit hit and miss: if the patch resulted in worse performance on your system, there was nothing you could do to roll back.

That's actually my principle annoyance with Steam. For a service with so high bandwidth costs, one thinks they could have seen the benefit of enabling incremental patching to give their customers some finer control if they want it, while also saving themselves some bandwidth.

Right now it's inefficient for both steam and customer if a game goes through a prolonged optimization patching process (like CoD): they stream all those GBs to you even if you don't want them all, while you take up space on your HDD or copying them to DVD for keeping backups of older versions.


Actually, Steam is one of the easiest protection methods to bypass. The fact that it also has a pre-load feature when you preorder high profile AAA titles (download the game ahead of time but it doesn't activate before release day) makes it a pirate favorite: they can preorder one copy, preload it a couple of weeks before release, crack the protection and release date check and have it on the torrents weeks before it's out in the stores.

In all fairness i haven't had much trouble with Steam, but it would be better if it stuck to doing what it does best: content delivery.

It's useless as an anti-piracy measure (crack one game and you've cracked them all) and depending on who you ask, it's a mixed bag in terms of support and user experience: some people swear by it, others have permanently lost access to hundreds of $ worth of games.

If it was just an interface to buy and download games, without having to run the client in the background to play, it would rock plain and simple.

As a small example, a month ago my secondary HDD died so i had to reinstall Steam and download CoD again. Well, the registry information about the previous installation was still there, so i thought "ok, let's uninstall normally through the control panel, it will clear the registry and just tell me it didn't find files to delete".

Well, no dice. Steam wouldn't install because it thought it was already installed and it wouldn't uninstall either because it didn't find the path to the files to delete.

I ended up finding a solution after scouring the net for a couple of hours and it wasn't even documented in steam's official FAQ. The official troubleshooting guide had me download a "steam remover" tool that also failed to work, the solution was found in a user forum.

It's stuff like that which annoys me when adding layers of complexity not directly relevant to the software i'm going to use: making it harder for the legitimate user to use the software without it even being his fault that things got messed up, while a pirate copy will play flawlessly regardless of anything.

I know what i'm talking about, i keep my original game discs in good condition by doing just that: applying cracks on games that i actually bought :-P

I guess Steam is one of those things that works well when it works, but you keep your fingers crossed it doesn't stop working.

Thanks Chivas and Urizen. I'd have to see if using the beta patches on the original version of the sim would work, as the official final patches weren't available outside of Steam as far as I know. Probably wouldn't work, but I might give it a try at some point.

Edit - Just saw Blackdog's post about the cumulative, not incremental nature of the patches/updates. So it looks like I could only roll back from a current beta to it's preceding official version, or roll forward from an older official version to the beta that immediately followed it. Still, I do wonder if that applies to individual elements within the beta patches. Not going to hack into anything, but maybe some user accessible stuff can actually be copied back and forth without messing up the core game itself. I don't know.

Ideally, the final non-beta patches would have been provided for download by the developers as well as the beta versions. That way you'd still have to use a legitimate Steam copy as your base, and could just roll backwards and forwards to your hearts content, not having to rely on downloading the whole content from Steam (and only the latest version of it) and saving it every time.