Ryat, I have never had Steam cause an issue modding a game and I Mod a lot of games.
Well, with "Dragon Age Origins", there was some problem with the expension "Awakening"... modded files was needed to be placed differently if the game was buy on EA or Steam... well, a simple mod installer who check if yourr game is Steam or not solved the problem...
That's the evil of steamworks, it makes where you buy it irrelevant
Well, in some case, it make "where you buy" relevant... specialy if you buy a boxed game who need Steam... let say that you are on holiday in Thailand and buy in store some boxed game who need Steam there... install it, and play it during your Holiday without problem... back to US, you try again and ... bang ... the game don't work anymore...
Some game are protected in a way that you can only play with them in the zone where you have buy it !!!
The deals it provides for PC software cant be beat. If I am not sure about a game and eventually (within 3 months) steam will knock 66% off the price for a day and I usually buy it.
Well, one of the thing that i hate the most with Steam is their price, specially for European like me... their 1$ = 1 euro make my game cost at least 30% more on Steam... by example, if Rebellion is released on Steam, for US people, it will cost 39.95$... for me, it will cost 39.95 euro ( 50.89$ )... lucky, i was able to order directly with stardock and enjoy a discount... have pay 23.51 euro ( 29.95$ ) with the Stardock pre-order...
In fact, i advice any european who read this post to pre-order the game now, same if they don't have the discount, they will spare at least 10$ by buying directly on the Stardock store...
If your internet connection goes on the fritz it can lock you out of all your games if you did not set yourself to off-line mode BEFORE the internet connection was lost. Might be a work around for that.
There is a work around in some case... by example with the Total War game, in place to start the game in the usual way who start a launcher.exe, you directly start the game exe... will not work with game who have steamwork embedded in them...
Well, steam is not perfect... by example, it is the only software that i use who lead to the BSOD at boot time ( not always )... something about a protected area of my main memory used by my bios for initilize my hardware raid that Steam overwrite... Reply from Steam was simple : "dissable your raid system" !!!
On the other hand, Steam work perfectly with Linux ( no problem with my raid drive, so maybe the BSOD on windows is due to a communication problem between the OS and Steam )... Impulse have never work on Linux !!!
I like very much the "add a non-steam game to my library" option... all my game in one single place is very easy... and the Steam "GUI" is very easy to use...
Steam is not better or more bad that a other client... and having Steam being the main digital distributor have one advantage... Steam will not die ( soon ) like it have happen with direct2drive where some people have loose between a few games and 2/3 of them when direct2drive was buy by Gamefly... Maybe the same thing will happen someday with Impulse, seeing how Gamestop handle it...