Why Valve Sucks More

So, I began commenting on Bobbicus' post, with a few more things to add about Valve's suckage, but it was a *tad* longer than I thought, so here it is. WHY VALVE SUCKS PART 2 1) This has basically already been said, but: Half-life 3. NO, I don't want another Half-Life 2 episode. Half-Life 3. Give it to me. It's gotten to the point where this is starting to turn into another Duke Nukem Forever (knock on wood). And we know how well that turned out. 2) And I know Bobbicus disagrees with me on this one: The source engine, it's old as fuck, we're talking 6 years here, that's my grandma in video game engine years. There's basic elements of the engine that are outdated and wonky, and no matter how much valve makes it shiny, most all other major engines around today offer so much more utility and realism. We need Source 2. Valve seems to be following the same style as Intel's CPU's (stay with me here). They only innovate when they have to, and then they just ramp up the clock speed of their processors to stay with the market until they start to fall behind, and need to innovate again. Sure their processors are the fastest, but is it really adhering to Moore's law? This is exactly what Valve does with their engine. It's lazy, and it needs to stop. 3) Two words: Lost Coast. 4) Ok, Valve Support, It's awful. There's countless stories of woe from the alleged, "Steam Support," but I think I'll share one of my own. I bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas through Steam, and for whatever reason, I was having issues downloading it. It took me hours of trying to fix my network until I found out in a small thread posted by a service rep on the steam forums, that the problem was in fact, on the server side. So I tried to call someone, and I quickly found out that there's NO ONE you can call for help. So, I "filed a support request" at steam support, which is basically just a useless FAQ, and how quickly did they reply? that's right, NEVER. Weeks later, through some miracle I finally got the game downloaded, and it wouldn't run. So I once again scoured hopelessly through the support forums, filled with people all having similar issues to me, all unresolved, and I finally figured out that the game had been released without being "optimized" for steam distribution (yea, oops). I had to download a patch, through steam. It took a week to download, and it still didn't work. You know how I finally got the game to play? I downloaded the .gcf files from some sketchy russian rapidshare site. To this day, I've paid for a game I don't own. Yup, digital distribution is the way of the fucking future. I can't wait. 5) iTunes syndrome: Like iTunes, everything you do in Steam has to be done the Steam way. You don't own your games, you own "a license to play your games." Valve reserves the right to do whatever they want with your games and your account whenever they feel like it. You HAVE to use steam to play your games. You MUST be online to play them, even the single player ones. You can't back up your games, unpacking a .gcf file is illegal. 6) The actual Steam software. Steam is bloated as shit, slow as shit, EATS bandwidth like nobody's business, crashes a lot, updates without telling you and forces a restart, downloads things without telling you and is all around a terrible program. It's no wonder Gabe Newell worked at Microsoft. As much as I hate on them, they are still the single greatest current major video game company (apart from maybe Stardock), and leaps and bounds ahead of ubisuck and electronic ass. Most of these complaints are more minor than I make them seem, and I'm literally about to go play Half-life 2 with my dad (a post on that later). If only it were Half-Life 3.