Dear Steam,
I'm issuing a stop-payment request on my credit card for the purchase of Half-Life 2 from your servers.
The game has been a blast, after I figured out some hardware issues (thanks for not replying at all (within 5 days) to my requests for help).
Actually, I take it back. The game has been a major pain in the arse.
When it works it's a hoot. But it's spent more time broken in the past 5 days than I care to speak of.
Like tonight, for example. At 9:28PM I jumped on to play an hour or so. Only your servers told me they were too busy to let me on, and I needed to try back in a few minutes. At first I was pissed thinking this was your OVER THE TOP anti-piracy precautions (yeah, I realize you NEED to protect yourselves from piracy, but with all the precautions you've taken, I feel you're screwing me by charging me $50 -- we all know games cost that much to offset the cost of piracy -- since this game can't be pirated easily, stop sticking me with the price, especially when I have to jump through all your mickey-mouse-bull-crap to play the game I've paid for). Then I realized it was just a setting: keep this game updated. 3 minutes later I was downloading a patch. That downloaded/installed fairly well. Anger subsided...
Only now, the game won't launch on my machine. And I've rebooted.
Worked fine today. Downloaded and applied the patch, and now it's broken.
What's it doing Nothing. Not a damn thing. I launch. I Watch my CPU scale up to 100% utilization. I See the hour glass. The CPU dips to 50%... 10%... 3%. No more hour glass. No game either.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm just trying to say thanks for the totally CRAPPY experience. All this 'goodness' and the game was still a year late What gives i.e. you SUCK.
Happily my credit is good, so that screwing you by refusing payment (and forcing you to sick accountants, and customer service people, etc.) won't hurt me.
Oh, eventually I'll pay for the game, but not until you've paid for wasting MY time.
Dang Mike, you're making me think twice about buying this.... hmmm. Perhaps I'll grab the new MOH instead.
Posted by: Carson | December 01, 2004 at 09:23 AM
This is the primary reason that I don't play computer games. I like games every now and then, but use the XBOX instead. (Or, in the past, the N64, or Sega Genesis.) It's nice because games just work. There's no insufficient video card,or out of date drivers, or BSODs... As you can probably guess, I've had some issues with computer games in the past, starting way back in the late 80s, when my Packard Bell's clock was too fast for a poorly game authored for 8088's, and the game ran like at 200 mph on my machine. Screw this, I said, and got a Nintendo. (Of course, a couple games have made it onto my CPU over the years, most notably Civilization I II.)
Posted by: Scott Mitchell | December 01, 2004 at 11:50 AM