ishiki said:
It's gotten a bit better. But in general it's not more cumbersome than Xbox Live or PSN network. It's just on a PC this isn't the norm. I have to say, though steam is my prefered service. And it initially sucked because it was a requirement for half-life 2 (which had really limited use for online... sound familiar? :P). This does in turn, does create a lot of other issues. But I'm not a fan of it must be on steam. I'm a general fan of no steam, GFWL, Origin in general. GOG and Direct2Drive (though its gamefly) doesn't require anything.
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It's definately improved over the past few years (GFWL) and Steam did get a lot of flak early on (deservedly). Steam however improved and is now a very good service which I feel is continually improving. It's at a point now where I actually feel certain games can benefit from some of Steam's features and integration. The Steam workshop is just one example of this. It's bringing a console-like experience to PC whilst playing to the PCs advantages.
The problem is the rate of improvement on GFWL right now is slow. There are very few advantages to using GFWL over Steam. The same is currently true of most other services too. I don't dislike them as they currently are but there's nothing that makes them stand out in terms of features or benefits. They leave me completely neutral at the moment.
It's nice they're competing in the digital retail space, but I see sales as a seperate issue versus software integration (effectively user experience based DRM) into a game. I still tend to buy a lot of my PC games as a physical discs because on release amazon tend to have games for much cheaper than the digital services. With extra competition, hopefully that'll change.
Not every game has to be on Steam, but at present, it's the best at what it does.