Xbox Live Gold Price Increasing to $60/year

[Dark Jaguar]

I really can't think of a modern reason to have multiple partitions on one drive. Drive failure doesn't tend to take out whole partitions if a small section gets corrupted these days (the drives can automatically account for that). The sort of failure that does that is the sort that will take out the magnetic head alignment entirely and thus takes out all partitions with it anyway.

That said, I do agree that allowing customized install directories wouldn't be a bad thing. There's also one other issue with Steam, which is that some games will end up with both Steam DRM and whatever DRM the game already had. Bioshock is one rather annoying example. In those cases, I just buy the disk version. (Yeah, I end up doing a lot of research before buying modern games these days. In other words, preorder "bonus content" is almost NEVER something I ever actually get, another reason I can't stand it.)

Otherwise though, it's about the most user friendly online store out there. Comparing it to Apple is pretty silly, considering that even with those issues, if you just go to the game's own directory, most of those games (aside from Valve's own) will still let you run them without the Steam client at all.