So every game on steam provides achievements and there is an overall achievement score you can find on Steam ?

I think not..........

PS : It's as easy to make a Steam account as it is a PSN account. I should know I have a Steam account I created and never used...

Because a silver subscription is almost as pathetic as paying $50 for a gold subscription. With silver, you can't even play online :/ And you can only download anything up to 5 times (more than that and you're forced to call Microsoft).

With gold, you're also forced to download up to 5 times too, and you have to play on P2P crap, which is terrible for anyone that wants the best online experience.I mean, really, for a service that you have to pay, there's nothing in there does better than what is on Steam.

Right now, there are 1.4 million people logged online on Steam.

The vast majority of people don't care about achievements because they have already existed since the dawn of time, and it barely gives you more enjoyment than without it. The average guy that does care about it are people who just want models to show off to everyone.

I finished Deus Ex twice (2 complete playthroughs I mean). The first one I just played normally. The second one was to see everything, discover every nook and cranny possible in the game. I loved every second but I never thought about getting a medal for it, and do you know? It's because the game is so brilliant that I felt compelled. Same thing for Audiosurf (which does have Steam achievements)

The thing is, I'm not against achievements, it's just that in essence, you can have the same exact experience without having a medal attached to your rectum. The bad part is that achievements are implemented badly and are now used to keep people from selling the game, and almost all of the achievements... for the most part they don't promote skill, they don't promote ingenuity, they don't promote sense of exploration. What they do promote is grinding, or the achievements are so easy that you have achieved nothing at all.

Make up your mind.

3 posts above you argued Steam supported achievements, and now that you'v e been proven wrong you argue achievements are a bad feature...

What is this download 5 times thing?  I have never heard of it or ran into it and I have been on Live for 6 years, and I have made many purchases either through the Video Marketplace, Indie Games, or Arcade.  So, this is a non-entity.

As far as P2P goes, that is up to the developer.  Forza 3 will have an amalgam of both P2P and dedicated servers.  There are several games out there that do this.  Developers can opt to use MS's infrastructure for matchmaking and the TruSkill system.  Which, I find to be a much better experience than dedicated server churn.

1.4 million people who at least have Steam going in the background in their task bar.  There are far, far less people playing anything on Steam at this very moment.

So by the way, number of PSN users is unreliable because anyone can create a PSN account but anyone can create a Steam account too and the number of Steam users is reliable ???

You're running out of arguments...

I don't care if they force you to be on battlenet, everyone owning SC2 will go there anyways ^^

i wish battle.net and steam and games for windows live would all combine into 1 place. it would be so much easier to just have one username.

They said the same thing when Square and Enix merged.  And while the two companies tried to keep their IPs and the groups who worked on them seperate, the heads of the company have been making a number of risky ventures that are loosing the company money.

Even when the games development are kept seperate from the management, the mismanagement of the company can affect the sales of the games.  And, over time, can inversely affect the way the games are made.  As once again, we have seen with SquareEnix and their extreme focus on only 3 IPs (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest) and hardly touching or plain overlooking all their past series (Mana, Chrono, etc).

So basically, companies who enter mergers or get bought out walk a fine line between creative freedom and changes from new management.

Blizzard hasn't actually been an independant company for a long time..( since 1996).

Except Vivendi had nothing much to do with games any of the games that any of the studios made.

As for Steam,Bnet, vs LIVE,, PSN. I really don't think you can comapre the services at all. LIVE and PSN are THE internet on consoles, that's it. Meanwhile Steam, Bnet are just services to make online multiplayer more manageable.

That said, LIVE and PS fail miserably as being internet gateways when compared to the PC. As for achievements, I really never gave a damn about them. They just show who wasted more time playing the game than anything else ( I won't deny, I have 7k points on WoW).