These days its not so much the mods as it is the unofficial fixes, New Vegas would still be unplayable for me if it wasent for the fixed DX9 dll. Locked down console's restrict mods but more importantly they kill fixes.

VTM:Bloodlines is a good example, had it been a console game it would still be unplayable. Activision forced it out the door to compete with HL2 then Troika went bust and wrote a single patch (unpayed), the unofficial patches are in double digits.

For me the biggest thing that valve did with this apology was give a DETAILED ACCOUNT OF WHAT WENT WRONG, and how it was fixed. The the L4D2 giveaway is just icing, a nice gesture.
Most companys would have flat out refused to admit it was their problem, nevermind apologise.

I read that as Microsoft shows off "Milo Hoffman", was gonna say fair play for having a sense of humour......alas i reread it.

Always fancied the idea of an Intimate Multiplayer games myself, think fallout3 with a persistant world but only 8-16 players or so. Admittidly the logistics of such a thing would be tricky but the payoff would be a truly persistant world, rather than 100,000 persistant worlds running similtaniously.

For me though thats EXACTLY THE POINT. Steam is cool i have no problems with its drm because it is dual sided, it provides something to the devs and the publishers while also providing something to me, the customer. Its all about give and take, as are most things in life. All DRM outside of steam is about REMOVING things from the value equation to benifit the dev/pubs.

Its being swamped with accounts thats driving me mad at the moment. Ive got an xbox live account and a steam account...thats all good. However because of DLC and free bonus's i now have an xbox live account, a steam account, an EA account, A bioware account, a ubisoft account, an atari account and the list goes on and on. It completly defeats the point of steam/live/psn.

Couldent agree with you more, but even single player games ship unfinnished, im actually quite terrified by what an 'intentionally' unfinished game would be like, perhaps the main menu and and a wireframe tutorial level.

I Joined up 3 days ago, created a science officer and have been dissapointed that EVERY mission has me as a soldier, no exploration, no boldly going where no toon has gone before just travel to here, beam down, fight a 1 man war then rinse lather repeat. When i do get a mission thats not combat based it usually takes all of 5 mins for it to degenerate into a frag fest. Its a shame too as theres a lot of things it does well, but for me it completly misses the point that star trek is not star wars. Ive got 2 months to run and will stick with it till then as it does have potential but ill have to seriously think about carrying on when the time comes.

I love steam, i spend more money in a month on pc games than i used to in a year (but get a hell of a lot more for my money). If i have one complaint though it is the classic games sold on steam, they hardly ever work first time, in fact they usually require a lot of messing about with config files and various other tweaks and still rarly run as intended. Ive bought a lot of old games i loved when i was younger simply because steam is so cheap and convinent but ive learned my lesson on that score. Its partly my own fault as steam usually removes headaches and as such i just assumed they had been tested prior to sale but that is just not the case. Biggest example off the top of my head is manhunt which flat out does not run on multicore cpus, not even a mention of this on the store page, admittidly its been fixed now but it should have been fixed BEFORE it was put up for sale.