And still nothing happened to them for it....

The anticonsumer policies involve chargebacks, as well as no refunds for technical issues (which Stardock offers and should be standard- I believe gamersgate offers this also)

Poor support- your 1 day is my 1-2 weeks on average

unstable servers- Steam crashed when I wanted to play TF2 whenever there was a major update or big game came out. 

Accordingly to what I've read, steam was started by former microsoft guys. Steam is pursuing a similar strategy as microsoft to garner a monopoly in their area of business. Start out cheap and "friendly" to reel in the suckers, then once you got them by the balls, start squeezing. I have no doubts that steam is a microsoft "front" company. The downsides of steam have already been explained in grisly detail, the future with this outfit is obvious. Ever hear of "once bitten, twice shy"? Why continue wearing that "kick me" sign on your back?

Chargebacks are designed for when you buy something and you dont recieve it at all - not for when you by game I you dont like some 2 features in it. Chargebacks can cost shop up to 200$ + original price, which is IMO good reason to lock account when user does this. Chargebacks are also ften abused by greedy customers - on my server I had several people who boasted with how they bought DRM free games from Steam and other companies (including Impulse) and after they downloaded them, they used chargeback to get their money back (those asshats recieved permaban on my server).

My experience ,YMMV:

I asked Steam only once for refund and Support agreed to substract price of that game from my next purchase. From what I heard from other people, Steam give refund only when authorized by publisher of that game.

All support tickets I created this year had response from Support within 1 business day.

After big release, things are slow, but servers dont crash.

1. Yes

2. You are paranoid. Newell and Herrington retired as multimilionares and they loved PC games, so they decided to use some of their money to make a good game - they even said that they didnt even expect game will make any profit. Also, they asked other companies to pay them if they provide them with current Steams features, but nobody was willing to do it so they created Steam - Stardock even IIRC already had at that time digital distribution, so SD missed huge opportunity.

3. Every service have upsides and downsided - myself and many others consider upsides of Steam to be more important than downsides.

Insults. The common response of a slimy salesboi to those who don't buy their sales pitches. Cant have people not buying the slop, can we? Everybody line up to get fleeced.

Here's our local steam salesman again, with an almost unreadable OP. What's with the damn background image screwing up the readability? Why not just go to you beloved steam forums anyways. You do nothing but promote them on their competitors forums while trying to sway people against Impulse. Your lucky the moderation of these forums are so accommodating, most places would of given you the heave-ho long ago for trolling.

It wasnt me who derailed this thread by spreading incorrect information - you can thank Alstein for that....

If you dont like threads created by me, you dont have to open them.

2scratchthepitch: yes, your rant was just paranoid FUD.

I'm not sure that lashing out at him and accusing him of being part of a secret Steam conspiracy is necesarily the best way to show that your not actually paranoid.

Not to mention it doubled as an insult, making him the same the same kind of "slimy salesboi" and throwing him into an infinite loop of paranoia and self-insult!

This comment is meta.

Back to topic (Steam and its competitors)....

Looks like MS is going to relaunch its store soon - IMO too little and too late (and MS has nasty habbit that unless something start making money soon they either cancel it or stop development, so I dont expect their current push into PC gaming to last very long). What is your opinion?

They just relaunched windows marketplace this last week, didnt they? They're having some good sales right now.

Games for Windows Marketplace will be relaunched on November 15th. (at least based on 3 articles I read about it).

Calling someone a salesboi is paranoid? That's funny. 

I second those sentiments most emphatically.

Well assuming that you were accusing him of not being a genuine elemental forum goer, but instead secretly working for another organization, then yes that is pretty much the textbook definition. So is angrily lashing out at people for percieved insults.

On the now locked thread about steam here, you were one of the strongest promoters of this monopoly scam. And here you are using bs to defend steam's main salesboi here and attacking those he attacked. Gee, that's some real curious coincidence, aint it. 

I see by your member # that you've been around here a long time, yet only +2 karma. Apparently you have a history....

I have in fact been a stardock customer for a very long time, having started with GalCiv 1. I've only been posting on boards since I became interested in elemental a few months ago.

I note that your response to my suggestion that you are showing classic signs of paranoia is to suggest that I'm part of a conspiracy that is out to get you. I suspect that you do not appreciate the irony of this.

God,  you're creepy. You're actually paranoid in an almost-scary way.

These sorts of posts are what got that thread locked.  You guys should know better.

As for the chargeback abuse, you're right that it's wrong.  The question is- who should absorb the costs: Steam, or the purchasers on Steam?

I have no issues with banning accounts from buying games, or banning cards.  I do have issues with banning games legitimately paid for over a dispute on something else.  People who are going to delibrately try to scam Steam, are smart enough to use a different account for each game, so Steam isn't really protecting themselves, just inconveniencing legitimate users.

I agree that things like that arent ideal and that it could be improved, IMO it would be better to give customer his money back in form of in store crefit (via Steam Wallet) when he has good reason to ask for refund, but customer would have to provide his communication with developers support to prove that he tried to resolve it.

Chargebacks are just too costly to be easily tolerated - to do what you suggested, CC comapnies would have to demand from their customer number of their Steam Support ticket to verify that customer tried to resolve issue with Steam and that his reason for it are legitimate (when asking for chargeback you are telling bank that you tried to resolve problem with seller - which lots of people dont do at all).

Actually, coming into a conversation like that, that has absolutely nothing to do with you, just to attack another poster is creepy in a very psychotic sort of way.

Well, I gave my opinion of steam, and was then maligned by steam's pushy sales people. Expecting people to put up with insulting behavior over the internet that they would never put up with in person only encourages those obnoxious people to do it more. And they do.

Suppose you bought a computer and it turned out to be a lemon. The dealership refused to fix the problems or would not replace it with one that worked or take return of it and return your money. The problems were legit and something that the dealership was legally obligated to make good on. But they still refused. The customer charged the item, so was able to convince the credit company to return their money. What did the dealer do? They went to the person's home and took back the defective computer, but then also stole all of the other items that person had bought from them over the years. This is what steam has been doing.

Now in most consumer cases such as the above in the usa, the dealer committed a crime and the customer would be able to seek some sort of legal redress. Though that's changing as corporations gain more control over people's lives through their control of the law makers in the political system. But what sort of legal redress does a steam victim have? This company is more like a mafia protection racket than a legit operation. Did they find a loophole in the consumer laws so they could steal from their customers like this? Probably. Perhaps the way their victims can fight back is with a class action lawsuit, but really, steam should be in criminal court facing theft charges.

In a situation such as this, where a crooked corporation is exploiting their customers in such an obviously criminal manner, it is very foolish to be one of their customers.

Edit:

I own a small business and recently a customer returned a couple of things they bought for repair and modification. The repair was due to something that was my fault, the modification was something the customer changed their mind on. What I did was repair the problem and do the modification all free of charge. I was morally and legally obligated to make the repair at no charge, but not to absorb the cost of the modification. I ate the costs, regardless, because I felt I had inconvenienced the customer enough already because the items went out the door with a fault of my making (the fault was not something that could be determined at the time, but appeared later, but it was something I should have foreseen). It takes time and costs money to return items for repair, as a customer I always hated that I had to eat these costs usually when returning a faulty item. Doing the modification at no charge kind of evened things out and I think was a fair way to deal the situation. And the customer agreed.

Now if I was steam, what I would have done was pretend the faulty items were defective due to something out of my control and either refused to fix them or charge the customer to fix them. I would have also charged the customer for the modification asked for. If the customer objected, I would have then replied "so sue me" and told them to leave while I kept their items. That's no way to run a legit business, but it's becoming more common, unfortunately.

I don't use Steam, but I am aware of it and the positives and negatives associated with it, so take these comments as they are, from someone who's a disinterested third party neither for, nor against it.

Steam is the digital age version of Standard Oil.  If you don't know what that is, it's one of the companies that is responsible for there being anti trust and monopoly laws, and one that was successfully sued using those laws simply because they owned too much.  I recall someone early on asking if a company has ever been in that position, so there's your answer.  The State of Ohio versus Standard Oil to be exact.  They owned Ohio and most of the north east US, and if you wanted to have any part of the oil market in any form there, you had to compete with the world's first and largest multinational corporation.  It got to the point where no one even wanted to try, Ohio sued and won.  Now the terms used in the various lawsuits were terms like unfair business practices, undercutting prices, rebates (coincidentally companies still have rebates and sales [read sales as undercutting prices] all of the time and this isn't considered to be illegal even though it actually is according to antitrust and monopoly laws), and collusion, but those were words used in the 1910's when the feds were breaking the company apart piece by piece, not in the 1870's when they were doing then what steam is doing now, being a pioneer, an innovator, and a leader in it's particular field of business.

Eventually Steam will get hammered like Standard Oil did, but Standard Oil lasted 20 years before there were even laws to say what they were doing was illegal, and then another 20 some more before it was finally dismantled and split up into over 30 separate companies.