I played through Chapter 1 for the third time on Sunday… must resist… playing… again…

It’s actually in all programs, and the only way to “work around” it is by making a game run windowed.

*hopes for an email soon*

Cannot bloody wait.

At least the pre-order version has a curious habit of messing up the resolution / refresh rate when going from desktop back to game on my LCD panel. Wouldn’t be too surprised to see that fixed in the release version, though.

Of course one could say that no DRM is better than ANY DRM, but in this case i wouldn’t mind a bit of DRM for all of the other advantages.

I just hope that they atleast consider the possibility, and at the very least don’t treat their customers like idiots when faced with the facts.

Because whether or not they knew it was coming to steam, which realistically they didn’t, just like they didn’t have a Wii or Retail release planned in the beginning, they can still try to do this, and if it turns out that Valve wants money for it, being a non-steamworks project, then i can understand that.

An indie developer may have no idea that they will have their game on Steam when they start selling through their own site, and they certainly don’t owe you anything if they later do. Clearly it’s nice if a company lets you access their game through Steam once you’ve bought it, but to not do so certainly doesn’t incur the rather remarkable anger you’re showing here.

For goodness sakes, just add the game to your Steam list and get over it!

It’s mostly Valve games, obviously due to the fact that retail copies = steam, whereas other games doesn’t need steam to be used.

According to the Steamworks page the feature to add retail products to steam is free, all you need to do is to provide them with a database of serial keys so they can be validated.

I’ve also heard them express that this is free as well even if it’s not Steamworks as Valve’s primary goal is to just get as many on steam as they can, they believe their other lineups will make up for the lost publisher cuts.

Oh and for hothead i was more annoyed by the way they treated us, there wasn’t a single shred of truth in any of their statements, and when they were debunked far enough to a point they could no longer deny it they just locked the thread.

So to be perfectly clear:
1. You give Valve a database of keys.
2. Customer enters key.
3. Steam handles it like it were a purchase, but with a voucher making it free.

So their claim that their licensing and DRM were incompatible were just stupid, if that were really the case then no copy would work, purchased or not.