Had no idea Impulse vs. Steam was even an issue, or that so many 'It's a slap in the face!' style drama queens were involved in such an issue. 

[rant removed for ramblingness]

Let's just say this:  I don't give a flip if you think you have been wronged, give me a better product than the competition or watch me and my money walk away.

True. But I mean "bar meteors", here.

All of my old games, which I own myself, on disc, is still fully playable. Yes, I may have to run it on an old machine, I may have to hit it with a wrench. Yes, I may have to run it through one emulator, or maybe several.

But I'll always have them. At least until the discs degrade.

Not too long ago, I was banned from the Bioware Social Site for arguing with one of the developers, without explanation. When this happened, everything I had bought on my EA account was also invalidated (they're tied). Every DLC for ME2 and DAO that I had paid for, and that one DLC from ME, all gone. Poof.

Everything that relies in any way on being online, or online validation, is inherently dodgy.

Agreed Luckmann

Actually, this made my day when I read it. Coupled with the lack of any real, further information and system requirements, I went on and happily spent my money on Elemental instead. And to celebrate the purchase, I went on to buy GalCiv II Ultimate, Osmos, Plain Sight and Highway to the Reich (Matrix Games) along with the strategy guide as well. Meanwhile, Civilization IV Complete is in transit, so my Civ itch will certainly get scratched, and I am about to drop even more money on wargames from Matrix.

Something tells me I'm going to have a much better time with these products anyway.

Well first off, t's not a Steam vs. Impulse or a Steam vs. anything. 

Secondly, YOU didn't choose anything.  2K Games made the choice for you.  You act like you somehow made some sort of choice here based on a "better" product.  You didn't. That is the crux of the issue.  

Well for me personally, I decided against buying it.

Yes, I really wanted the game, but I decided to make my own little stand against the game using Steamworks and requiring the client for single-player.

I ended up buying Civ IV off Impulse a week ago and will just evaluate Elemental when it comes out.

Elemental:

" Rich, single-player campaign with over 30 hours of gameplay. "

I hope it will be more than that .

Agreed. They're out to kill the secondary market, milk fans for every penny they can get by selling DLC at outrageous prices, yanking servers to push players onto newer sequels and now they want to be able to literally take your ability to play a game at will. Boy with all this added "value", it's hard to believe I spend less and less on my games as years go by.

 
We're slowly leaving the era of consumer ignorance behind thanks to the availability of information on the internet.  A bad business decision, such as DRM, is as damaging to a game's sales as a bad design decision, such as repetitive gameplay.  The invisible division between making the game and selling the game doesn't exist in today's industry. 
For example, the majority of the educated gaming population doesn't appreciate restrictive DRM software on their titles.  DRM software is expensive and has been proven to be completely ineffective against actual piracy.  It prevents the uneducated user from backing up their game, however.  A Developer who signs a publishing contract that forces DRM onto their game is held accountable by their customer demographic for this decision through a decrease in sales.  It may seem harsh or unfair to punish the Developer for this, however that's simply the way the industry is being forced to evolve.  It's unfair to the people who buy their game to be subject to both the restrictions of product law and license law and receive the protection of neither.  This has forced people to be conscience of the ramifications of their purchase, lest companies like Activision and EA continute to rape the industry.


Then the industry will evolve in time.  Retail publishing companies like EA Games and Activision are trying to keep up with technology and get their claws into things such as DD, because if DD ever goes mainstream they're no longer needed.  DD Allows Independant studios to self-publish and still have access to a wide audience, however it also forces Independant studios to evolve too. 
Marketing campaigns, such as the hundred million dollar one launched for Modern Warfare 2, sell games to the mass audience at retail and provides a one-time cash injection at the products launch.  Suits make that happen, often to a disasterous backlash such as Modern Warfare 2 which will cause the next title in the series to sell less.  Relying on word of mouth and review scores ensures constant sales (see Stardock's early titles) at the expense of the size of the one-time cash injection at launch.  Developers make this happen, often creating loyal fanbases (see Blizzard pre-World of Warcraft).
Companies like EA and Activision can't innovate because it costs too much at the level that they operate at and so they're eventually going to kill their franchises off.  Look at Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, Need for Speed, Spore, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, etc.  Companies like Stardock, however, are able to innovate and create platform specific titles that appeal to niche markets and achieve financial success and happy customers on a smaller scale.  Profits or loyal fanbase.  This is the choice Developers today are foced to make when signing deals.  It's not fair, however as I said, this is the way the industry has been forced to evolve.

I don't know, I don't mind being forced to install something.  When I bout Fallout 3 game of the year edition, I had to install windows live.  Guess how many times that bothered me while spending 180+ hours on this fabulous game and it's expansions...zero.

 

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.

To add to this, my Advanced Degrees from the School of Hard Knocks tells me there's more to it than DRM, and I think that that is information gathering.  I think that's the future -- selling us stuff (like games) in ways that allow information gathering.  The information being used to better target us to sell us more stuff, and to sell the information itself for whatever other uses someone thinks they can put it to.

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.

You mean the same Matrix that shamelessly exploits the fact that you can't buy their games anywhere else to milk their fans dry? Matrix chargins 90$ for boxed Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge made me a lot more angry than 2K choosing Steamworks for Civ5

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.

Maybe they removed tech trading/etc. so they can add it back in in an expansion... or sell it as DLC.

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).