Well right of the bat i can name Skyrim & Modern Warfare 2, which FTR are on steam. Both games could not handle the pressure of day one. Skyrim came with a bug that prevented you from installing the game from disc and forced you to download the entire game from server. Which you could bypass but someone who is not that keen on computers would not have.
I haven't found info about the modern warfare 2 launch via google, but yeah i think i remeber that there was somethiong ... it wouldn't surprise me at all, since this games hat millions of 0day players
but how long where the drm servers overloaded? an hour maybe? can't imagine that it was much longer. at the very least i can't imagine that it was waaaaaaaay better than the diablo 3 and simcity launches.
as for skyrim this sounds like a problem with the installer not steam - without steam you would have probably have had to wait for an patched installer - would this have been much better - especially if it took longer for the patched installer to be made than downloading the game?
Also my biggest concern with STEAM is that WHEN valve shuts it down, and that WILL happen. You will NOT be able to install these games since they force you to authorize with servers when first installing. This would ofc not be possible if the servers were in fact, shut down. And this all comes down to the thing were A LOT OF GAMES out there force you to use steam when first installing it, which makes it (legally) impossible to install when and if steam shutdown occurs.
Also i would have bought Bioshock Infinite day one collectors ed and all if not for steam. I hate when they release "Collectors Edition" for games that have online DRM, because they can´t be collected in a fair mannet.
As a game collector STEAM & ORIGIN are plagues...
yes this sucks of course - i won't argue with that. their was a post some years ago by gabe newell were he said, that it would actually work to disable the drm system, in case it was needed. the post has since been deleted and is now only requoted again and again - there's no official stance on it right now. but actually i think right now a freak housefire seems to be the a bigger threat to ones retail dvd collection, then steam shutting down is to ones digital goods right now - they seem to do quite well.
but yeah you have the problem with any digital distribution platform. do you buy your games on gog.com? they might not have drm but when they shut down you also won't be able to download your drm free copies from them. desura? same thing.
of course in case of indie games (yay for indie!) you can often purchase and download from the developers themselves, but in all honesty this is to "stressy" for me - now that i also use desura and capsule besides steam and backed lots and lots of projects on kickstarter and indiegogo i'm getting kinda confused about which games i own/preordered and how to access them. i actually created the labels "key" and "preorder" in my gmail because otherwise i wouldn't no about half the stuff i purchased anymore , but this only makes it bearable - it's still not very comfortable - so if i have a chance to add a game to one or more of the mentioned game distribution platflorms instead of the email chaos: hell yeah!
also i really need to say this: i absolutely LOATHED cd/dvd drm systems and "enjoy" one time online authentication much more. in case of discs you were also quite screwed if your disc got scratched or you lost it. of course i understand that people with low bandwidth might see this differently.
oh and autoupdate! i friggin love autoupdate. this is also a thing where i think drm - if only in the form of being distributed by an online distribution platform like steam - is asolutely okay. some people just won't buy software i know that, i won't judge them or anything else, but i think it's quite okay or rather i hope that they have to do more work when using their pirated software e.g. by having to apply cracked updates themselves.
There was actually this case a month ago or so when i purchased Darkout when it was released. Liked it and told a work colleage about it. He of course pirated it. Thing is Darkout doesn't have any drm at all and has it's own unprotected autoupdater. so that guy not only get's the software like a paying customer does, but also the service!
this is not okay, in my oppinion, especially since server resources are limited and without some kind of protection pirated copies can decrease the quality of service for legal ones.
Lastly, please try to differentiate little more more between Steam and Origin. Funny thing is that i probably feel the same way towards origin as you do towards both of them. i simply won't buy games that are origin exclusives, i want nothing to with, if i would be forced to use it i would rage around quite a bit, but trust me when i say origin/ea is worse than valve/steam. steam never had code which searches the users hard drive for pirated copies of games like origin had when it launched (i dunno if they removed it in the meantime - i would think so since it caused an outcry), also valve never used an always on drm scheme like ea did with simcity. (steam does distribute uplay titles though, but that's ubisoft stuff)
ah! about what i mentioned in my earlier, that games do not require any kind of steam integration to be on steam:
terraria meanwhile actually complains when steam is not running - might have something to do with them adding support for the steam ingame overlay, which wasn't available at launch. still i found two games that did not require steam running. there are definitely a lot more but i only tested 20 games or so. anyways evochron mercenary doesn't need it and more importantly hotline miami doesn't either.
hotline miami is an interesting case because it actually offers steam achievements and uses the steam_api.dll but it actually asks you when starting if you want to enable/disable steamworks.
so it seems steam can be used purely for distribution without forcing anything else on the player (btw all of the f2p games that i tested on steam also started regardless of it running or not: planetside 2, blacklight retribution and tribes ascend)
PS: bioshock infinite ROCKS. you should have bought it - preorders even got XCOM for free
