So... being Civ V so close to release, are we bound to get a thread of "I didn't buy Civ V"? This one reaches some people's definition of epic.

Just one of a number of reasons I dislike the steam approach enough to pass on this latest installment from my all time favorite game title...

steam has the ability to deny users access to their games.  Denial of game can occur through various software faults on the user and client side.  Denial of game can also occur from a policy directive.  In the EULA and terms of service agreements, there is nothing preventing steam from denying you access to your games.  In order to use steam (required to install and play GameX), users must agree to terms which allow steam to lock users out of their games for whatever undeclared reason they desire.  That's not cool, nor should it be legal.  But users must agree to those terms or they cannot use the product they purchased. 

There are a host of scenarios where steam could begin charging for its services.  And there are a number of reasons to be concerned about steam stopping support of GameX before you are done playing it.  Civ5's steam arrangement gives ownership of the software license to steam.  They can revoke this license at any time, for any reason.  I don't accept that.  When I buy a product, I want control over it's usage.  And after I've bought a product, I want assurance that it stays bought. 

I will not be buying Civ5.  Nor will I steal (pirate) it.  I take a firm stance on the protection of IP rights.  But I'd be more likely to steal Civ5 than to purchase it.   Upon install of a purchased copy, steam takes away the users ownership rights.  I'd have more confidence of ownership, by stealing the damn game than I would by buying it!  So Civ5 is dead to me.  It's all about Elemental now baby!!!

Well I have to say that it took me awhile to figure out why people were concerned about Steam and most of the concerns do seem a little paranoid. I can understand objecting to technical errors in connecting keeping you from playing (though my understanding is that for Civ 5 you only need to connect once). But feeling that they are going to suddenly hold all of your games hostage unless they start paying you money seems unrealistic in the extreme. Can you imagine the lawsuits and PR? There seems to be a lot of speculation about imaginary nightmare scenarios that have ever actually happened.

For me I would have saved hundreds of dollars on game repurchase costs if every game I ever bought was on a service like Steam or Impulse where I could just redownload it again later if I want to. I'd say that's a big enough reward that it outweighs the remote chance that I'll lose some money on games if Steam gets taken over by skynet and starts trying to take over the world by charging me for my games or something equally unlikely.

I bet anything the OP has pre-purchased Civ 5.

I'd take that bet.  Some people do have willpower and ethical standards, you know.

GoG.com just did this very same thing.  Anyone who doesn't happen to have their purchased game downloaded right now, at this moment cannot access their game at all.  This happened without warning.

Now, I don't care if this is just a stunt/joke, or if it's a legitimate going out of business notice.  The fact remains that your purchased games are being held hostage at this point in time.

If it can happen to GoG, it can happen to anybody.  So don't give me, this is just an "imaginary nightmare scenario" or, its never "actually happened" crap.

The issue with GoG is compltely different and has nothing to do with DRM. They are simply a digital distributor that went out of business (maybe), you do not need to log into them to play your games. Are you saying that you should never buy from an online service such as implulse because they might go out of business? Granted that is a risk, but that makes a giant like Steam a much safer bet if anything.

"Imaginary nightmare scenarios" ?!?  I've lost music due to Yahoo and MSN decisions.  They both dropped their music service, so I lost all the music when the PC they were registered on suffered a fatal crash.  I am once bitten twice shy on this issue.  Both Yahoo and Microsoft are big players with their own reputations to protect.  That changed nothing.  And no law suits has gotten my music back.  I spent a fair amount of money on something which turned out to have never been mine.  I paid the money, but they had ownership.  It was up to them if I could use the product or not.  Now the music is gone and there is nothing I can do about it.

Another reasonable scenario is that steam may find itself in need of recouping rising server and administrative costs.  They spend big money to provide the MP servers, chat service, mod hubs, patch distribution etc.  What is to say that rising energy costs don't tip the balance and cause them to enact membership fees.  And what is to say that net neutrality and increased network congestion issues won't bring about access fees.  And how about 6 years from now after Civ6 has been released... will steam decide that not enough people still play Civ5 to justify free access to their servers.  Will they charge a nominal membership fee to use the MP features of old games.  ++

Through no fault of my onw, I lost a couple hundred dollars worth of music because it was on a service similar to steam.  I have never lost a PC game CD (not even a single lost manual or box.. this was not a difficult task).  And of the many music CD's I have owned, none have been lost by by me.  And none have been damaged despite exposure to construction sites, hot truck cabs, and other unfavorable conditions.  I am willing and able to take care of my own stuff.  I have no need, nor motivation, to give ownership of my things to someone else.  I don't trust, nor want, other people to take care of my stuff for me.

So, you're saying Steam isn't a digital distribution service?  Nice try (actually, it was terrible, but whatever).

You need to log into their site to download your games.  For people who have purchased dozens of games, it is silly to expect them to have them all sitting on their hard drives, when GoG has always had them stored on their site for free.  In fact, it would be far, far worse if Steam went down.  Not only could you not download your games, but you could not play many of them either, period.

It most certainly is a reason to never buy from online services such as Impulse or Steam, because they might go out of business at any time.  You call Steam a "giant"?  Didn't they say that about Netscape, AOL, and Compuserve only about 15 years ago?  Giants can and do fall all the time.

I'm going to be laughing so hard at all of you when Steam glitches out, starts charging, or goes out of business.  Because, MARK MY WORDS, as history has proven time and again, 99% of online services have short life-spans and it will happen sooner or later.  I have my game copies sitting on my shelf, do you?

1. You can run Steam in offline mode. I run Civ III Complete in offline mode with Steam. Just turn it on or off. No problem. My Civ 4 is a DVD boxed version.

2. Just looked at Steam client with Task Manager, and it is taking up 12K and the CPU reading at idle is 00.

3. I think there will be probably two DLCs at most before the first Expansion. Mods from Civfanatics or whatever can be loaded as usual.

4. After reading the Manual, the devil forced me to pre-order. Can't argue with him!

5. My main concern is that Civ V will turn out to be CivWars, with too much combat.

6. If Civ 5 blows completely, I have Civ III Complete and Civ 4 BTS with lots of goodies.

When you get right down to it, Civ III Complete is still one heck of a good game -- if you set the resolution to match your monitor. I'm running it at 1680 x 1050 and it looks great!

It is a tough situation for conscientious consumers in the game industry lately.  Quite a few newer titles are getting away from the "consumer ownership" style, traditional purchase model, and going toward the "consumer license" marketing scheme (scam). No longer to you pay money and purchase a box of software for your own use, as you see fit.  Now you "license" the use of game software for use only in specific fashions laid out in the EULA (and on the box) and have limited technical rights to your purchase.

Added to that, companies throw in online DRM to use games even in single player mode ... which, if you dig through your EULA, there will be a clause about your "purchase" discussing what happens if the servers go down (temporarily or permanently - Hint: You are screwed out of your "purchase") which does nothing to stop actual gaming Pirate groups.  All these DRM measures do is make more hurdles and hoops for paying customers to go through, some of which people can (and do) easily argue, take away your previously accepted rights as a game consumer.

Trouble is, most people dismiss arguments against DRM as either "well you are a pirate then"; or "well you are paranoid."

Personally, I'm just pretty hard-line on people removing rights from me, to do what I feel I want to, with something I just purchased.  I haven't had to call and "check in" since I lived at home with my parents ... why should I have to "check in" with a game company to be allowed the privilege of playing a game that I just gave them money for?  Would you be ok having to connect to the internet and verify your purchase every time you want to watch a movie you just bought on BluRay?  What if you want to put a few DVDs in your laptop case when you go on vacation, to watch on the beach somewhere one night ... should you have to ask permission to watch each DVD before you go somewhere that might not have WiFi access?

I hate any DRM that forces me to do, well, anything beyond registering my product to get updates (and I'm not too much of a fan of that, simply because hiccups can happen and things can suddenly stop working correctly - as seen with the issue of fan-made Elemental bugfix patches causing the game to stop working and give the spinny frowny face), or for older games that stop getting constant support.  I usually find most up-to-date patches on sites other than the game company's site, either because they went out of business or no longer devote space on their website to ancient games I just felt like dragging off my shelf.

"Well I keep steam up 24/7, so I don't know why you complain" arguments? Well, I have Steam too ... got in a few months ago and purchased a couple games through it.  Know how often I have Steam up?  Only to play those games, then I shut it right back off.  I don't want anything running on my PC unless I give it permission, I'm OCD like that.

I'm the person that downloads no-CD cracks for the games I purchase, just so I can load them on a laptop and not have to drag around 20 CDs in case I want to play any of the games I own, or if I want to put them in a box in the closet and not have to wade in there every time I boot up an old game that I forgot had CD requirements.

I'm looking forward to Civ V ... I'll probably get it off the shelf when I buy it (especially since there is usually no discount for D2D-style purchases compared to B&M shelf purchases - so I might as well get something physical for my money), and I'll probably break it so it doesn't require a check-in to play single-player (which of course is against the EULA, but I'm evil I guess).

Starcraft II has the same-style DRM as Civ V seems to ... you have to "check in" once in a while to verify your account to play single player.  Know how many days it took the pirates to release a working copy that subverts that mechanism? -1   ... negative one days ... there were working copies of the single player game the day before release.  Paying customers have to deal with stupid hoops, yet the people stealing the game not only get it for free, but they don't have to be annoyed by stupid restrictions like we do.  The industry has lost its mind.

Edit:  Oh, and for the sake of full disclosure ... I am paranoid.  I don't even post using the same account, or even email address, that I make my game purchases through.  A long while back I made some criticism posts in a beta forum for a game I was helping test, and they revoked/banned me from playing further.  So ... paranoid. ... but that still doesn't make my comments any less true

To me, it's not hard to make a stand on this.  How many games do you need to play at once?  I did buy TF2, but that was a Valve MP-only game, for which I don't mind Steamworks on something like that- I can even see why a Steamworks-like DRM is necessary for a game like that.

SP games don't need DRM.  

There's enough good stuff out there, though I don't need to "settle"

Btw the demo is tomorrow right ?

I guess where I personally have a "disconnect" with the general sentiment of this and other anti-software-license-to-use-instead-of-own threads is the fact that I see video games as "consumables".  Before you flame me, hear me out.

I have two simple points to make.

1.  As much as I loved (and I truly loved) the story of games like Homeworld etc. and enjoyed absolutely every second of even the grind of resource-gathering in order to make sure you have enough shit in the next mission, I have to say......all I ever do these days is look upon the boxes on my shelf with fondness associated with the memories of those classic games.  Point # 2 is why.

2.  I think the reason why I haven't ever re-played any of the old "classics" is because the video-game scenery changes so quickly these days.  My gaming-rig gets upgraded every year these days, newer graphics chips and processors often introduce weird effects/crashes in older games even if you can put up with the "dated" look/feel some of the classics show when reinstalled.  In other words, sometimes I just don't want to ruin the great memories I have associated with these classics by attempting to recreate the initial experience.

I've found, that often the amazement and awe we felt back when we were playing the original/classics was partly there because of the relatively few number of video-game releases each year and the relative newness of video-gaming in general.  I remember with much fondness the "quest" series of adventure games, the original Leisure Suit Larry games (those with Al Lowe and not all about low-bro bs humour) and strategy games that were actually about strategy, long before games were about holding-your-hand and making you feel like you were in a movie.  Would I necessarily want to play those games again today?  Absolutely, but I don't because those fantastic memories could be tainted by (as I said above) issues introduced by todays hardware/software (I've had some older games run super-fast like they're on drugs because of the CPU's being used today etc.) and personally I'd rather have my good memories.

No I'm not saying that everyone must have my point of view.  I'm simply asking for some understanding for those of us who do, because those of us with this viewpoint don't mind STEAM and other such forms of distribution because we buy, download, play and then move on.  Sad, but it's the truth of the videogame-landscape these days.  You can thank the ADD-generation for that......

the Monk

Since Impulse and D2D are starting to sell Steamworks games with the Steamwork component removed, this could be the best way to get Civ V.