Actually, i'm worried this forum will devolve into picking sides for or against features the community is divided over, more so than in the past.
I'd hate to see it turn into a state similar to the one the RoF forums had during it's release, with people screaming "fanboy" and "deal with it, it's the future" at each other, all just because people can't resist taking a verbal jab at those who harbor a different opinion. We don't all have to agree all the time you know
I'm probably getting the sim anyway, but i really hope Steam is there as nothing more than a server browser. It won't work out if they try to shoe-horn CoD into Steam, it's Steam that has to cater to the needs a flight sim game has and not the other way around.
It's obvious they did this for the extra exposure but what remains to be seen is if Steam gamers fit the demographic and whether they can offset the amount of lost sales from the old fashioned die-hards. I just hope we don't end up exchanging most of the knowledgeable old timer folks who know useful stuff about WWII history and aircraft with a bunch of gamers straight in from call of duty and the prevalence of low difficulty air-quake servers with no real historical context whatsoever.
Just because Steam is a great and innovative platform for certain genres doesn't mean it can do the same for a flight sim. How does one go setting up a historically accurate, mission oriented DF server in Steam anyway? Can you rent one yourself and simply have it listed in Steam, or do you rent it directly from them? In case the second is true, can you add maps and missions to the rotation with ease or is it just basic functionality that suits action games with small maps and few variables just fine, but would be prohibitive to seeing something like Spits vs 109s for CoD? If for some reason you are locked out of Steam (hijacked accounts, happened more than once), will that render your beautiful collector's edition totally useless for multiplayer?
I'd hate to even start to imagine getting ping-ponged between the tech support departments of two different companies in such a scenario and it illustrates very well that since copy protection is already handled by Solidshield and people have been able for ages to set up their own private and public multiplayer sessions through a variety of third party tools, the integration with Steam is an added layer of complexity to deal with for the end user without even being essential to the actual operation and enjoyment of the software. It has some nifty, welcome and even useful stuff that are unfortunately added on top of one more layer of things that can break down.
These are the important questions, namely how good Steam is for the scope of something like CoD and not how good Steam is in general. Our games are not similar to what is generally a game. It's certainly not useful at all poking fun at each other's expense when we don't know anything about the potential implications for our community that close to launch and sadly, once again Ubi is not up to the task of providing detailed information. We don't know how optional or mandatory it will be, we don't know if we will need to install through it, etc.
I try to think it won't be too bad in the end, i hope it will even turn out well, but the lack of choice in the matter sure stinks a lot. I just hope that in the event it's cumbersome and unsuitable for our simming needs we'll be able to eventually bypass it altogether in favor of a community made server browser tool. That or Ubi is in for a torrential and continuous earful until the next release from a multitude of disgruntled customers.