All I want is a great sandbox mode with a ton of options.  The campaign means nothing to me.

What of studios owned by publishers?  Are you saying it's their fault too?  I've worked in media and games companies.  Trust me what I say the development teams have little power in final approval.  The investor (publisher / suit) has right of final approval.  If they do not like what they see, they change it.  If the studio does not approve the investor goes to someone else who will let them change it.  The only change in this pattern is in studios who can self fund (the suits sit with the development team).

BTW, Firaxis is owned by 2K Games.

Game designers don't become designers to make money.  They become designers to make fun games.  I know how much they get paid, they are MOST DEFINITELY NOT in it for the money.

And it appears after all that block of text the last couple of sentences you agree with me.  But there's a lot of confusion as to what you are actually trying to say.

Steam is not the problem.  We can choose not to buy and play games with Steam.  We also cannot blame Valve for having score many more games than Stardock and others.  Valve is the big kid on the block.

The question really is what Stardock is going to do.  Will it let Impulse be just a place for its own games like Matrixgames?  Will Frogboy turn "evil" to compete?  Playing Mr. Niceguy seldom get anything done.  Will the fan of Impulse/Stardock willing to accept a more "draconian" DRM from Stardock?  Anyway, I am just thinking out loud here.

Yes it is. I am tired of developers and studios hiding behind publishers as the source of all the problems, as if they didn't get into bed with the publisher to begin with. Too many developers sell their souls to the highest bidder and then say hey, gamers, don't blame us, blame them. They weren't forced to go with that publisher. And if developers don't like this kind of arrangement, they either need to go the indie path, small, efficient, clean releases with relatively low budgets, but high value to gamers and not try and sell millions like the giant companies do, and/or start making efforts to change how business is conducted in this industry.

Steamworks being built into games... is the problem. Steam itself is not a problem. Had Civ V released like their previous game, with Steam versions available but not the only option available, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Oh how little you know about how the games industry works.  

That is not the issue, since Civ 4 is on also on steam.

Because the gaming industry is somehow special and lives by different rules than the rest of the business world. Someone can hold a gun to a developers head and force them to sell controlling stakes, forces them to go public, forces them to make lucartive contracts? Takeovers aren't magical you know. And they are not unique to the gaming industry.

Apples to Oranges.

Yea, I had to install (actually I had a bug and had to download the latest Windows Live from MS) for Fallout 3.

BUT there is a main differences here then a Steamworks game:

Windows Live never runs when playing Fallout 3. I don't even have a Live account.  I've never logged into it and never plan to.  Yet I could still play Fallout 3 for dozens and dozens of hours.  Heck, I've never ran Live on my computer.  It's just there which slightly annoyed me at first but if it never runs and bugs me I'm fine with that.

Not so with Steamworks game like Civ 5.  Not only will Steam and Steamworks have to be installed, it will have to be running in the background just to play, even in offline mode.  If Steamworks worked like Windows Live did for Fallout 3 or the way Impulse works I wouldn't have a problem with it.  But instead it's invasive and pushes itself on me just to play a single player game.  Thus I won't stand for it and I won't ever buy a game that forces Steamworks on me.

I think the best way to explain it would be that steamwork does not provide a functioned that is required to run the game, it is just forced to as a DRM scheme. While things like directX upgrades, .net, windows live, etc provide software dll libraries that the game requires and uses to perform an actual function, and are not a form of DRM.

I don't think most of us are mad that Steamworks is DRM, we are mad that Steamworks is requiring the installation and running of the Steam store for no other good reason, even if you bought the physical copy in a store, you are required to have the steam store running to play this game.

Folks like Valve are well-positioned to do this -- tens of millions of 'active' users (and growing!) who can be 'persuaded' to run Valve's software in the background, unnoticed and forgotten, monitoring and collecting information while the users play games, search the net, and do various other tasks.  Heck, Valve even has users putting out a lot of effort to cheer Valve on.

From a business perspective Valve'd be remiss/stupid to not pursue this, and nothing they've done suggests they're anything but smart.

Stepping back from the Steamworks shitstorm for a second; now that there's more info on the game I can't say I like the direction it's going in anyway.  Some confirmed changes:

-Resources aren't infinite anymore.  Have horses?  Great, you can make X calvary units, that's it.  Need more than that? Guess you'll have to beg.

-Devs have outright said it will be easier to play diplomatically than through conquest.

-No tech trading!  Want to play warmonger and get your tech via threats and espionage?  Too bad!  Trying for conquest wins was bad enough in Civ4, now you get to autolose to the peaceful techers!

-No unit stacking, at all.  While super stacks needed to go, how are you supposed to take over cities at all anymore?  Now you have to pretty much surround a city with units before trying to attack it.

-Unique leader traits for every civ.  This sounds like a good change until you release this will lead to 3-4 leaders being considered flat out better than everyone else.

-Removed religion from the game completely.  While I'm not a religious person at all, even I acknowledge the massive impact religion has had - and still had - on Human relations throughout history.  I thought it was handled pretty well in Civ4, with it having a major relations and cultural impact early on but fading over time once most civs moved on to free religion.

Civ4 was great overall, just a little too hard to conquest.  Now it seems to be even worse, with the player being flat out encouraged to just sit there and tech to win.

This one change is making me reconsider not buying the game due to steamworks. I've loved all the Civ games, but it always bothered me that having a resource gave me infinite of it, but apparently not enough to trade until I got another infinitely loaded resource.

I'm not sure about the rest. No unit stacking will be very interesting, but removing tech trading completely is plain stupid. Why not make it a choice like in other games? Religion didn't have much of an effect, so meh, but didn't Beyond the Sword have unique leader traits already?

EDIT; On further review, resources apparently equal 1. Not 1 per turn, or whatever, but 1 iron resource is enough to build 1 swordsmen. Now, unless resources are just everywhere, how the hell is someone supposed to have any kind of army. Guess lbgsloan was right and it becoming completely non-militaristic.

And removing religion may be to 'not offend' the masses (PC for the PC?).

It seems they're dumbing down... errrr... 'simplifying' the game.  I know they're trying to get a civ-type game on all platforms, even a mobile for phones, and perhaps this 'simplifying' is to facilitate that (ie -- lowest common denominator type of thing).