That said, the requirement of Steam does seem particularly unreasonable considering that Portal is a single-player game. I urge you to play it anyhow – it’s great fun, and can be finished fairly quickly if you have limited time – but use a friend’s Steam account or something.

*can only be played over steam*

what?!? so i’m paying money- real money- for a game, and not just some unlock code, an actual disc with all the ones and zeroes on it. I HAVE THE COMPLETE GAME IN MY HAND- but i can only play it if i want to log into steam-assuming i have an internet connection- and play that way.

to me that’s a gross insult, and not a great way to do business.

When I bought the game, I bought it for what it was, and for what it promised. I’ve never been a big fan of “unlockables” that give an in-game advantage, but it was on sale and back then the differences between the base configuration and the options wasn’t so huge.

Then things started getting weirder and weirder. It wasn’t bad at first; Sniper/Spy wasn’t that big a deal although my slightly laggy connection prevents either class from being very playable to me. Then came the Engi update, which basically introduced at least one completely new character *that I couldn’t play even though I’d bought the game!*

Then the latest patch, and “oh hey, you *can* play all those cool new things that are radical changes to playstyle even if they aren’t that thematically different… just pony up the cash (again).” Sorry, not even remotely interested. I don’t play the game enough to get the drops in a reasonable timeframe, and I don’t like Valve enough to be willing to pay again for a game I already own just to keep up with people who play way more than me (or were willing to pay again anyhow).

If they’d stuck to hats, polypacks, and other cosmetic changes being available for purchase I’d have been fine. If they’d avoided the drastic changes but opened upt he minor things for purchase I’d probably have grumbled a bit but otherwise been fine. If they’d made the new and different gear available to everybody (who’d bought the game) I’d have jumped in the moment I could. If they’d released an expansion of new content that you had to pay for to use but which could only be used with others who have it, I’d have been fine with that too.

They didn’t do any of those things. They took a game that used to be my fun little 30 minutes 2x a week timekiller and made it into something completely different – a money machine where the obsessive get more content and the high-spenders get better gear (every item has tradeoffs, but some of them really are just better in most cases). That’s not what I paid for, and it’s dampened my interest in buying anything from them again.

Say, for example, you can’t wait to try out the new items released in a future patch? Either play as you normally do and get the items slowly, either finding or crafting them, OR drop $10-20 and get them all right off the bat. And that makes a lot of sense to me. The breaking point is when you start offering content via DLC that offers something you CAN’T get through just playing the game. Not that it’s inherently bad, it just turns the game into something it wasn’t previously.