Letting off some Steam™

Digital Distribution gone wrong?

I guess that I'm not afraid to admit that I am a pretty "hardcore" gamer, in that I like to play games a lot. With my current Steam stats showing approximately 49.2 hours in the last 2-weeks (and a life-time total of 550+ hours in Team Fortress-2 alone)

If those numbers shock or surprise you, then I should explain that before I quit World of WarCrackcraft I had clocked up a ridiculous 130 days of /played (which worked out to about 3200 hours of continuous play!)

So now that I've covered off my addiction hobby I can explain why I felt compelled to write this post in the first place.

Other gamers may have noticed the portmanteau in the title of the post, with me letting off some Steam and Steam being amongst other things a games portal & digital distribution client.

So as usual Steam was having one of it's regular sales, only this time the specials they had on offer actually convinced me to whip out the credit card and place an order (or two or five...) alas at the end of it I now have a veritable butt-load of new games.

One game in particular I was looking forward to playing (and quite pleased with myself that I was able to get it cheaply) was Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® II and after setting my computer to download it overnight (yay for 6.5 GB downloads) I figured I'd fire it up and hopefully confirm my bargain purchase.

Game loaded fine, intro movie piqued my interest in what laid ahead, and then... Games for Windows kind of just happened. Essentially the game wanted me to sign-in with my Games-for-Windows account to get the most out of the game, such as online ranking, achievements, community etc... wait a second... isn't that exactly what Steam does already?

Obviously THQ the developers of the Warhammer games have some kind of deal with Microsoft (perhaps to ensure better Xbox publishing rights?) to use their online connectivity suite (or perhaps the Steam API is just too difficult for THQ to implement?).

At any rate I couldn't remember if I had ever signed up for a Games-for-Windows account, so I plugged in my trusty gmail account only to be told, "yep this is in use, please give us your password to login" after about 20 minutes of frustration I determined that no my gmail account wasn't actually a login but my @hotmail account I hadn't used in ... 5 years was and my gmail account was linked (but the login script didn't inform me of this in any shape or form) and so my attempts to login with my @gmail account were in vain.

After trying my best to navigate the Games for Windows horrid site (it is obvious the site has been built for Xbox users and then attempted to ported over to Windows) I realised I couldn't even change my Windows login from my @hotmail account at all and so I have given up.

What I don't understand is why the developer would force its players to use such a inhibiting tool that is Games-for-Windows when the alternative (Steam) is much better?

Now I still haven't actually been able to "play" the game that I purchased but I expect that without using the Games for Windows plug-in I will probably be missing out on a large proportion of the game, which is quite disappointing and leaves a bad taste for any future THQ purchases.