STEAM: what's the deal with it?

[JG27CaptStubing]

Originally Posted by RCAF_FB_Orville

Feurefalke, I bought Empire the day it came out and cannot get it to work on Vista 64......Many others have this problem and I am beginning to hate steam with a passion......If it doesnt get sorted out soon I will never buy another thing from them. I seem to recall you run Vista too and have/had an Ati card as well as Nvidia? Can you tell me what drivers you are using to run it? I can't run it on 8.12, Im going to try the latest 9.2 tonight. This is the third time I have downloaded it, having bought the retail copy and unable to install from the DVD-ROM. I know this isnt really the place, but I badly need help and Steam have not even bothered to reply yet to my request for help.....Customer service is atrocious and I am not a happy bunny. Grrrrr. Heres a copy of the letter I sent them......

"Hi there. Ok, I bought the retail version of Empire:Total War and tried to install it but could not, getting an error message saying "Failed to run install script". After many attempts, I decided to activate the game on steam which then resulted in me downloading it, which took about a day! I now have it installed, have verifed integrity of game cache (Size 15091mb) and defragmented....but on trying to launch I get a message saying "Empire: Total War has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and it notify you if a solution is available". Windows Vista64 is fully updated. I have tried to disable Windows UAC and still does not work. I have run as administrator and it still does not work. Tried running in XP SP2 mode, and completely disabled firewall and anti-virus, still does not work. Why could I not install from the DVD ROM in the first place, thats why I bought it??? I am new to steam and there may be something I am missing....but I must say I am very disappointed with it, as its a lot of money to pay for something that I cannot get to work!

Thank kindly for your help.
Yours Sincerely, Mark."

Your problem has nothing to do with Steam per say... It has to do with the game developer and drivers. I've had Steam for years now and I can assure you it's a good service. It is the way PC games will be sold from now on.

http://help.sega.com/index.php?_m=kn...17&nav=0,6,165