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To Steam, or not to Steam
celtzo
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Sorry if this topic has been hashed already, but it looks like the Search engine is down.
I have recently been forced to use Steam because of a Christmas gift. For some reason, in the past, I haven't wanted to use the Steam system. I feel that if I buy a game, I shouldn't be forced to rely (for non-online games) on the internet to play them. Yes, I know Steam has an offline mode, but it still has always felt wrong in my gut.
And so I open it up to the users here... am I nuts? Am I resisting the inevitable evolution of video games? Or am I right in that there is a secret conspiracy to monitor my video bloodlust? Is Steam good or evil, or is it all shades of gray?
Thanks, and take mercy in the responses....
I have recently been forced to use Steam because of a Christmas gift. For some reason, in the past, I haven't wanted to use the Steam system. I feel that if I buy a game, I shouldn't be forced to rely (for non-online games) on the internet to play them. Yes, I know Steam has an offline mode, but it still has always felt wrong in my gut.
And so I open it up to the users here... am I nuts? Am I resisting the inevitable evolution of video games? Or am I right in that there is a secret conspiracy to monitor my video bloodlust? Is Steam good or evil, or is it all shades of gray?
Thanks, and take mercy in the responses....
celtzo on
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It is so, so good...
A week or two ago I tagged along with somebody to a Best Buy while they looked for something they needed because I'm pretty much always up for a trip to Best Buy just to browse and I realized that I have almost no interest in acquiring a physical copy of any PC game now. Used to be I would always at least cruise through the software section. Now my thought process is, "It would be cheaper and more convenient to get it on Steam so why even bother?"
Even other digital delivery outlets don't interest me. I viewed having to purchase Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit from Direct2Drive with distaste. When EA flip-flopped and released a Steam version a month later, I raged.
One of these days I'm hoping to see the latter die off, so I don't feel uneasy about buying things off it because those Steam sales don't make any sense. I'm pretty sure Gabe Newell grows a white beard every Christmas and disappears for the night.
Convenience and cost will never be as good to me as being secure in the knowledge that I own and can access a product on my whims, though.
Shades of grey.
Ultimately I've come to terms with what Steam is. I lose some of the benefits of having stand-alone products, but they do offer benefits to compensate for that.
I guess I've just become more pragmatic about gaming over the years. I never would have started using Steam in the first place if it weren't for the cast-iron certainty that every game on it could be cracked and torrented should Steam ever go down. That's still always in the back of my mind in some minor way, utlimately Steam is a service based architecture. If Valve closes shop one day, I've lost my games.
Over time though, I've pretty much come to realise that except for extremely rare circumstances, I'm never really going to re-visit old games anyway. There's always something new on the horizon. If I look at my Steam list now, it's got loads of games on it, far more than I ever would have been able to purchase at retail, and at much cheaper prices. If I were to lose that collection today, well, I'd be annoyed, but I'd still be able to look back at everything and say "You know what? I got more than my money's worth out of those games".
The benefits, well I don't have to deal with storing or losing discs, everything's pretty much centralised. I don't need to go swapping discs every time I change a game, and once I'd gotten used to that, believe me, it's hard to go back. The last time a game asked me for a disc, I actually just double-clicked Steam and loaded up something else, rather than root around for the DVD. It might just take a minute or two, but I'd rather just play something now that have to take extra effort on behalf of another game. And the community system so far hasn't been matched by any others available, which is a huge plus.
If I have the option to buy a game off of GOG.com instead (completely DRM free), I'll almost always go with that option. But outside of that, Steam is probably the least intrusive form of DRM I've encountered so far. Whenever I've had connection issues, it's almost always allowed me to play in offline mode (this is admittedly, sometimes a little flaky still).
Pretty much the vast majority of PC games coming out in future are going to require some kind of online authentication or activation. That's largely inevitable at this point. Given that, Steam makes the process painless, and offers a ridiculous amount of value for money. As it currently stands, more and more games are starting to use Steamworks for their multiplayer and community features as well so you need to install it for those anyway.
So yeah. I keep in mind what Steam is, but ultimately if I had to categorise it, it's been far and away a net benefit all round. Buying and gaming, and gaming with others becomes a lot more intuitive and easy, assuming you've got a decent net connection to download the games from. No need for discs, just double click the icon and play. No need for crazy patching scenarios (I'm looking at you Company of Heroes), games are updated automatically. Getting someone a game gift is a cinch. As is gaming anywhere else, just run your account from whatever computer, and you're free to download your games onto as many machines as you like (as long as only one is running at any one time, a fairly understandable proviso). At the same time, you're still free to mod your games.
Gaming just becomes a lot more frictionless.
Hate to think I won't be able to play GTAIV in a decade when SecuROM and GfWL are gone. Similarly, I expect JC2 and SR2 to still be on my rigs ten years from now.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Personally, GamersGate's normally my first choice, followed by Impulse and then Amazon, if all else fails!
Still, Mafia II did only cost me $20, with all the DLC. Probably turn the savings into extra-bandwidth cost. :P
Edit: More anecdotal stuff, my buddy bought New Vegas while on vacation. He couldn't play it for those two weeks because it tried to update on installation. He was on a shitty hotel line at the time, then a cruise. Because he didn't install in offline mode, he was without access to a product he paid full price for, for two weeks. That kind of sucks.
I've actually made it my main chat client, as well: I can talk to family on other networking sites, if I'm online wanting to chill out, I'll chat with these fine PAers here, or other such friends from the internet.
:^: :^: :^:
Edit: And Steam just stopped responding again! I'm on an i5 quad core processor with 4GBs of ram and the damn client still just dives right and left even though I'm just running it and a web browser. I have no idea what they screwed up with the new client, but it's really, really annoying.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Edit: There are some games(*ahem* Ubisoft) that have stupid DRM though. Maybe like, 10, total.
I also bought a 2 TB HDD to store all my games. No more CDs for me!
Doesn't stop it installing Direct X for the millionth time fffffffffffffffff.
You can press cancel as soon as the dialog box pops up and you're good to go.
1. Valve has the capability to ban you from your Steam account, rendering everything you've bought worthless.
2. Its sometimes hard to tell when you'll be able to play a game offline, and when you won't.
3. "This game is currently unavailable, try again later".
etc.
It doesn't stop me from using it, but don't pretend the service doesn't have downsides.
Digital distribution is the way of the future. It's a good train. Hop on board.
Until my cable goes out for a day or two (Charter in my area is usually pretty stable, but during the rare times it goes down, it's down for ages), and Steam refuses to start in Offline Mode.
Then I look at my list of games and realize all but a small handful are on Steam and that I am unable to play 80% of my library.
That is one of my only real complaints about it. And the age gating that's not saved per account.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I advise against it. With some games it seems to be curcial to the installation. Napoleon: Total War being a good example. My fiancees brother bought it and all the DLC/expansions. I backed up my identical copy to an external HDD and had him restore the backup to his PC. The game refused to work. As it turned out, the restored installation didn't automatically install the directX files that came with it. Whatever those files had, the game wouldn't work without, even though he had the latest version of directX. but once we figured this out, it was easy just to find the DX install files in the game directory and manually install them.
The ability to see what your friends were playing, and just clicking on them, then "Join in game" would set me in the same game room as them? Awesome.
I hated Steam when I first used it a few years ago, but the software has come a long way and the service is second to none. The sales will rape your wallet and fill your heart with joy.
STEAM IS A COMPUTER ORGASM DIRECTLY ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE. DURING SALES IT IS COMPUTER BUKKAKE ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE.
STEAM TAUGHT ME HOW TO LOVE.
BUKKAKE IS NOT IN MY BROWSER'S BUILT IN DICTIONARY.
Steam = win. It's basically the only way I get PC games these days. If Steam doesn't have it, I am unlikely to buy it unless it's a Blizzard product.
I actually like the "Always On" nature of it. Just like I've built up a core set of friends on XBox Live I play games with, I've done the same on Steam. Even in the in-game chat overlay doesn't bother me. If I am being bothered by chat in a game session, I just set my status to Offline, problem solved. Most of the time though, it's a super handy feature. The act of hitting "shift + tab" to open the Steam overlay has become a pretty common keystroke on my system.
Here's another one of the best features of the Steam overlay: It has a god damn clock. I can check the time without alt-tabbing out of a game. Simple, but completely useful, feature.
On the front of "losing" my games, if it were any other company but Valve running Steam, I would worry about it. Valve has a proven track record of attempting their damnedest not to fuck their customers. If Steam were in a serious way, and about to go under (very unlikely at this point), I have no doubt Valve would give us notice and a way to unlatch all our games from the service. Of course, they may not, and that would really fucking suck...but it's really not something I foresee happening.
In the end, everyone has their own set of loves or hates with Steam, and there all valid. You just have to weigh whether the features of the system are something you want. Also take in to account that many of the features will grow on you considerably with use. The friends system probably seems gimmicky and silly when you first get on the service, but once you've used it for a while and you have a list of friends and groups built up, you start to realize the usefulness of the feature.
Or, to explain it in terms of Nextwave, Steam is like State 51.
When it started up, it was full of amazing marvels and wonders.
Unfortunately, it all was directed towards the slaughter of humanity, and then it was attacked by a drunken robot and his friends so it didn't work very well.
Then the dinosaur plotting world domination exploded, saving humanity, and the whole thing was taken over by a British monster hunter.
Alright, so they aren't that similar.
Why I fear the ocean.
I mostly ignored Steam until the PA forums convinced me a few years ago that STALKER and Vampire: Bloodlines were great games and that Steam was the easiest way to get them.
Now, I love Steam. It's like all of the nice features of Xbox Live, except you don't have to pay for the privilege and they keep you around with ridiculously amazing sales instead of having you over a barrel with lack of options. And the Steam overlay is officially awesome - built in clock, community features, and web browsing without having to alt-tab out (which many games still can't handle without crashing).
So yeah, Steam is great, and if you are at all a PC gamer and avoiding it then you're really only punishing yourself. The only thing about it I really dislike is regional pricing / availability, but it's not typically valve's fault (unless it is, like refusing to sell the complete pack in Aus because the OFLC fucked them on L4D2) and usually a friendly PAer is willing to help out, so whatever.
And honestly, given the choice of GfWL and Steamworks, I'm going to favor the latter every time.
Well that's because GFWL is a heap of shit. I was elated when Relic announced they were switching to Steamworks for the next DoW2 expansion (and I would assume for all games going forward).
Well, except for all the current Live games I already own. That'd suck ass.
That scared the shit out of me. 90% of my PC games are on Steam right now. The prospect of being unable to access them whenever I want, or even for an extended period of time, is just terrifying.
That said, the convenience of it is enough that I'll never give it up.
In my experience, I can't play 99% of the games I bought five years ago for one of three reasons:
1. I lost the disc
2. I lost the CD Key
3. It is incompatible with Vista
Steam solves all of these problems. So, on balance, if in five years I can't play them because the service randomly shuts down, it won't be such a great loss compared to if I'd bought all the physical discs ages ago. Furthermore, I reckon that the chances of Valve being forced to shut down Steam AND failing to provide a means to retrieve previously-purchased games are much less than the chances that I could lose a disc or, worse, a tiny slip of paper containing a CD key.
In the case of retail bought games, Steam is on the disc and the games won't install without Steam being installed. There'd be no way to patch Steam out of the games, without the individual games being patched. So the closest thing you get there is a Steam patch that sets it to make everything it touches active. Which leaves you with Steam, in all its glory, except completely useless.
Not exactly great endings.
Since when does Steam/Valve make things work with Vista/Win7? Asides from attaching DosBox to things (which I assume the developers are doing, not Valve).
The fear of not actually owning the game is irrational anyway, as nobody actually owns the games they buy. They own a license to play play the game, which is exactly what Steam is selling in a non-physical format.
There's also the fact that Gabe has publicly stated that if for some bizarre reason, steam were to ever tank, Valve would simply notify all steam users, thus providing them ample time to download and backup their entire steam library. Valve would also release a patch for steam that disables authentication, thus allowing any backed up game to be played after Steam goes under. Gabe said said Valve has tested this patch and it works.
I don't recommend doing this because sometimes it installs different variations of the game... And last time I canceled it I had to redownload.
But really I doubt most people spend alot of time offline. I know that when I want to play a video game, I have an internet connection.
And if for some bizarre reason I say, don't get internet for one week out of every year? Who gives a fuck. I'll deal with that and continue to enjoy my hugely discounted games every other week of the year.
I got a gift card for best buy and find myself paralyzed from buying anything because everything is so expensive. Steam has falsely implanted the idea that it is unreasonable to pay $20 for a year old video game, and that is awesome.
Yeah, except that while software companies engage in the fiction we don't own our software - mostly so we don't get any incidental rights to mess around the source code, we can resell the damn stuff. Steam and other digital download platforms are really about destroying our right to resell copyrighted materials by putting up technical barriers. I use steam a bunch for cheap things but I try to A) buy physical copies so i can give my games to other people when i'm done, and