Another annoyance with Steam - as you point out, wraith - and most other digital distribution platforms: They sell new titles at publisher's RRP. As a matter of fact, on average, digital distribution is turning out more expensive for new books, music or games (and, at first glance, movies if you buy them but I havent really looked). Somehow competition is not happening.

For example, a month on, Skyrim is £34.99 on steam and £19.99 boxed on Amazon (which activates on Steam). Even at launch there was a £5 difference. How dumb is that? Anno 2070, very recent too, 34.99 on steam, 27.99 on Amazon

It is in part as there is no cost for not selling - no stock paid for, using up space etc. In part because they can. In part because publishers resisted so long getting to online distribution that they got more power over pricing (the big ones. Little ones have steam put their product on sale, without them having any say, and take the rebate out of the publishers' cut, resulting in nearly no income from the sale except for Steam). Laws for online favor the copyright owners, not retailers. Laws on physical distribution tend to favor the retailer.

All I can imagine is that it matched some kind of fraud pattern (fake charity drive perhaps) that the reps had been warned about and the rep didnt go look at the site and people doing it, and just assumed this was someone trying a scam

Pretty painful to read

Steam is a mixed bag - but my main beef with it is that when I am somewhere with no internet connection I have almost never managed to play my games.

It comes up with the message that gives you the option to start in offline mode, but them almost always I then get a message saying it was impossible to log in or continue offline. This is most of the time due to a pending update that
1) that Steam somehow knows of (from the last time i was online prior to closing steam a few hours before)
2) but that Steam has not suggested installation when i was online
3) Steam is programmed that it *has* to install any update before it lets me do anything further
4) As I am offline it cannot install it so errors and exits

Result: if I am offline but steam thinks/knows it has an update pending (and that is just about every other day lately) then I cannot play any of the 100+ games I have paid and "own".

It infuriates me every time. It should not happen - I should be able to start "old" steam offline and install the update the next time I am online - at least to play a game.

No other online platform does that - and it makes me wish I could move some of my games from Steam to another platform