Romantic Robot » stupidity

Valve, Steam and 1 expletive.

Mark — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:26:40 +0000

I have a Steam account. I have a Mac Mini 2.0Ghz. Zen Bound 2 was released this morning and as I like the game on the iPod Touch I wanted it on the mac.
Login to Steam, find the game and click to buy it. I choose Paypal. Steam then wants my name, address, county, country, postcode, phone number. Why? You do not need these to purchase using Paypal. We don’t on WordPress.com, you don’t when you complete software purchases elsewhere and you don’t at eBay. So why do Steam ask? They do it because they can, not because it is required.
Buy the game, download. It does not work properly. Windowed the screen is black, full screen the model is black. Unplayable. Why does not Steam download a helper program or have it in the client that identifies if the computer it is on can run the game? Why do Steam do not do this?
Go to their Support and try to contact them. You need to create a Support account, this is different from your main account. There is only one possible reason for this – to stop Support requests. There is no other purpose to creating that new account. It heads people off, it is a barrier. Which lazy bastard thought that one up?

I am perfectly aware that Steam are leaders in what they do, piracy is dropping, aren’t they great blah blah blah but the above is ridiculous and fantastically easy to solve.

Commenting at P-F1

Mark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:07:30 +0000

http://planet-f1.com
If you wish to comment you must register. If you want to register the following information is mandatory:

Username
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and when you have done all that they don’t even show you their T&C’s even though it appears you are agreeing to them.
And if you want to discuss this their contact email does not exist.

The upside is that running Noscript and disallowing all their code lets the site load quickly.

iTunes. Again

Mark — Sat, 24 May 2008 10:32:20 +0000

Insert Scooter album into drive.
It copies the music to the HD and plays it.
Later I try to find said music and cannot so I re-insert CD
It offers to re-import and replace – I say No.
I play the CD.
And now I have 2 copies of all the tracks on that album.

Why on earth do people rate so highly this monopolistic piece of bloatware?

Please please please can Apple be investigated by the EU just as Microsoft were and can someone else start writing something that does just one thing – play music.

I think I’ll buy a mini hifi.