Xbox Live Gold Price Increasing to $60/year

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, sorry for not having infinite space on my C partition, or being so stupid that I'd actually use Raid 0 and risk everything if one disk drive went bad... there are reasons for wanting the option of choosing where you install things to other than just "I want it there", you know! It's called "which partitions have the free space?". Guess you don't actually use your computer for much, so you don't actually use much of your hard drive?

I've got about 1TB of HDD space, but it's almost full so I'll need to look into getting more... and it's across three drives, each partitioned. (I just added it up, only 54GBs free across all partitions)

There is a workaround, fortunately, or it would be very difficult to figure out how to keep many of my Steam games installed, a little app that can add functionality in Windows that fools things into thinking a folder is in one place while it's actually in another, fortunately, but having to use such workarounds is insane. Why in the world has Valve used, and stuck with, such a terrible design?

Every other service just gives you a file to download and install normally. Valve goes the Apple route of forcing you to install it where they want, in their folder, with no options, and it's awful.


And I know I've said it before, but that's just one thing I dislike about Steam. Game organization is another one. They've improved things a lot, with the semi-customizable list options you now have, but still, it's far from ideal. Etc, there's more.

Steam also has achievements, big-time sales, centralized online community and friend list, loads of indie support, and non-invasive DRM.

Achievements: I don't care
Sales: Yes, those are nice.
Online community: Yay, so it's Valve Messenger too.
Indie support: Only because of how big it is...
DRM: Why should we be celebrating that everything on Steam has DRM on it? At least on other services some/most/all (depending on service -- GOG is DRM-free) games don't have DRM, while others do. At least it isn't the really bad kind of DRM, sure, but still, it's DRM. (Yes though, it is better than stuff like Ubisoft's always-on-connection idiocy...)

Oh yeah, and as for games, I've never finished a Valve game, so it's not like their games draw me to it either. I mean sure, the Half-Life games are very good, but I like other things more. They're very good FPSes, but FPSes aren't near the top of my list of favorite genres...

One other thing I dislike are the Steam fans, the people who say things like "if it's not on Steam I won't even buy it", etc... another reason to compare it to Apple and their fans to come up for excuses for all of Apple's bad behavior? :)

That stuff is annoying, the game is just as good on other DD services, and better retail because at least you get an actual box to look at.


Still though, Valve's not all bad... I mean, they haven't abandoned PCs for consoles, done anything as bad as Starcraft 2's crippled mapmaking and online modes yet, or done Ubisoft's always on thing either. That is definitely good, in today's "We are going to use piracy as our excuse for why we're going to ignore the PC now (or cripple the games we do release with DRM)" world... but I really wish the program was more functional and less restrictive, and Valve's fans were less annoying.