I'm not sure to buy civ 5
 

I've read up on that other site's discussion on Civ 5 and Steam and all. And I'm now not so sure to buy civ 5, since I'd like to own a disc to always play a game without the need to go online and receive Steam's blessing for me to play it. I really think this Steam set-up is a bad idea.

What's your opinion?

You can set it so you only need to go online once and still buy it with a disc, unfortunately this seems to be the way forward in terms of games so I don't really see any way to avoid it!

Stop playing (and buying) their games ? :confused:

I dislike Steam quite a lot. But having to be online is less cumbersome than having to insert the DVD every time. [tongue]

Silly Socrates, the way to avoid annoying commercials on tv is not watching tv, I suppose?
If one wants to play Civ5, and most of us do, then there might be no way to avoid Steam. [rolleyes]

As BCLG says. Personally I prefer Steam to SafeDisc or SecuRom and a disc in the drive all the time.

I have a lot of games on Steam, so no issues with it. I prefer other online stores (Impulse since they avoid DRM for the most part), but Steam is not, for me, a reason to avoid buying Civ 5. However, some of the gameplay changes they are making are giving me pause...

My case. [^] TV is almost pointless anyway !

I've bought a couple of games that use steam and despite some inital reservations i've found no issues with it. If anything i'd be holding off on buying civ 5 to see how many bugs it has that will need a patch to come out a couple of months after its release

What happens when steam is out of business and I want to install the game 5 years from now?

Nobody knows. Valve is considering removing the DRM from games they no longer support, but since they're still supporting all their games it's pointless to debate that. And Valve is not the publisher of the game, it's up to 2K what they do with it. There are two sides to this: playing multiplayer will be impossible, as you can't join servers. But this is something that doesn't have anything to do with Steam, but rather with the fact that 2K wants to control who's playing online. This is the ultimate form of copyright protection for most games (since most games are played online these days). You can play single player in offline mode, so that should still be possible. For most games there are workarounds anyway.

FYI, there's a discussion on Steam here.