Do You Steam?

[Kalah]

This <a href="/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1745 ... masutra</a> article outlines the effect of Steam sales. You'd think that giving big discounts on games would cause losses to the developers, but the thing is that developers are actually making quite a big chunk of money on them.



<i>"We find that we get several thousand percent increases in units and revenue on the days of the Steam sales, and unit sales are usually about double the normal for a few weeks after the sales are over,</i>" Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer says."



So how about you - do you Steam at all?

If you would like to take a look at the original page visit this link:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/1343224457

[Torur]

Steam is great. I buy most of my games through steam now-a-days...

[GreatEmerald]

No. I refuse to use anything that has restrictive DRM, and Steam sure has it. Plus, I disagree with its subscriber agreement, so I won't even install it.

GOG is the way to go.

[jeff]

I never have and am not familiar with it. I heard you had to have some of their software to run the game so never bothered. GOG is the way to go, but I heard they may be going away.

[hellegennes]

Wow, how smart these marketing people are! They amaze me! They figure out that discounts actually bring in more money, about 4 decades after customers knew. They are so smart!

[YoshMaster]

I bought for over 230$ of games during the sale.... ouch!! Haha I may have gone overboard a little !!

[Datau]

Meh. I like Steam; it updates your games with the latest patches and you don't have to search and download them manually.

On the other hand, users should be aware of one HUGE inconvenient: you don't have a boxed version of your game.
A game like Shogun TW 2 takes about 20 GB on the HD to be installed. you have to download it to install. At 700KB/sec.It.Takes.EIGHT.Hours!

If that makes sense, I like boxed versions of games available on Steam.

[CloudRiderX]

For those of you who haven't tried Steam or don't know what it is, its basically like UPlay or Origin, but better. It combines a digital store and game cloud with social features that allow you to connect with other Steam users.



@Datau

You should at least mention the positives, to be fair. Steam actually has good download speeds, especially for games made by smaller companies where you would otherwise need to download it from their website at much lower bandwidth.
Edited on Wed, Jul 25 2012, 19:54 by CloudRiderX

[Coldy]

Yea I bought quite a few games on Steam during the sale. Bloody amazing prices as well

I know it's a sort of DRM but at least it works fine most of the time. I do not have any major complains about steam.

[GreatEmerald]

>For those of you who haven't tried Steam or don't know what it is, its basically like UPlay or Origin, but better. It combines a digital store and game cloud with social features that allow you to connect with other Steam users.

In other words, DRM + store + XFire.

[Torur]

And not to forget, that you can run steam in offline mode and still play your games. I do not understand ppl complaining about Steam, all in all it makes finding, buying and playing games easier.

[Tress]

Sure you can't play bought game multilayer with one copy even in LAN, but you can play game offline even on several pc at once, so it is not that bad. I am way more pissed at steam for completely retarded regional restrictions.

[ThunderTitan]

>>Wow, how smart these marketing people are! They amaze me! They figure out that discounts actually bring in more money, about 4 decades after customers knew. They are so smart!<<

4 decades... try more like 4 millennia of humans trading stuff... cheaper product = more units sold it's 11th grade economics.

[CloudRiderX]

@GreatEmerald

It's a very loose adherence to the definition of DRM. All of your Steam games are installed on your computer like any other game, allowing you to play them by their own connection rules.

[Angelspit]

And not to forget, that you can run steam in offline mode and still play your games. I do not understand ppl complaining about Steam, all in all it makes finding, buying and playing games easier.

And cheaper, we could keep ourselves busy for years with only $50 worth of games on sales (some of which are still very recent).

[GreatEmerald]

>It's a very loose adherence to the definition of DRM. All of your Steam games are installed on your computer like any other game, allowing you to play them by their own connection rules.

No, they're not. All the games are put into some crazy "steamapps" folder that is in a really long path, which interferes with certain games, such as Unreal. A path with spaces and/or a path with more than 60 characters is death for anything Unreal Engine 1 Editor-based. You can't even select another drive to put your games on! What fun when you have a small SSD as the C disk!

And while you can put it in offline mode, it doesn't help with the responsiveness and portability. You still need to have Steam loaded on the system - which takes a rather large amount of resources, no less, and each time you launch a game or any part of it, Steam has to pop up and do its checking, even if it's local, which delays the start up time. Even if what you're launching is the map editor! That's just crazy! As a mod developer, I don't find these delays at all a viable thing to have, as any delay means increased debugging time.

Plus, there's all those clauses in Steam's subscriber agreement where they reserve the right to install malware on your PC (and you don't know whether they do or not, as Steam isn't open-source), or ban you for things that are not related to Steam at all.

And finally, they break the Gamers' Bill of Rights clauses 4, 8, 10, and possibly 1. Not to mention what happens to all your games when they go out of business...

[Avonu]

And not to forget, that you can run steam in offline mode and still play your games. I do not understand ppl complaining about Steam, all in all it makes finding, buying and playing games easier.

And cheaper, we could keep ourselves busy for years with only $50 worth of games on sales (some of which are still very recent).

Yes, of course especially with all this 1$=1€ policy.

No, they're not. All the games are put into some crazy "steamapps" folder that is in a really long path

I for example like to put game in my own folder, so this is another annoying thing of Steam.

You still need to have Steam loaded on the system - which takes a rather large amount of resources, no less, and each time you launch a game or any part of it, Steam has to pop up and do its checking, even if it's local, which delays the start up time. Even if what you're launching is the map editor! That's just crazy!

And we have the same issue with HVI and Ubisoft's YPlay.

And finally, they break the Gamers' Bill of Rights clauses 4, 8, 10, and possibly 1. Not to mention what happens to all your games when they go out of business...

Until they fallow 3DO steps (too much money and resources spend on too many projects), I don't think they will be out of business anytime soon. As you can unfortunately see, many game companies want to have their own Steam-like platform (Origin, YPlay, etc.)

[Torur]

@GreatEmerald

"And while you can put it in offline mode, it doesn't help with the responsiveness and portability. You still need to have Steam loaded on the system - which takes a rather large amount of resources, no less, and each time you launch a game or any part of it, Steam has to pop up and do its checking, even if it's local, which delays the start up time. Even if what you're launching is the map editor! That's just crazy! As a mod developer, I don't find these delays at all a viable thing to have, as any delay means increased debugging time."



That's just nitpicking. Steam provides a great service with a few drawbacks. And waiting for the steam popup to finish is a minor inconvinience, besides what are the alternatives these days?

[GreatEmerald]

>That's just nitpicking. Steam provides a great service with a few drawbacks. And waiting for the steam popup to finish is a minor inconvinience, besides what are the alternatives these days?

How about, you know, CD keys? GOG is doing just fine with only that kind of DRM for all of their games. Stardock is doing just well with the same thing, too. And if you're asking for a service alternative, I've been using XFire for a long time without any issues, and it covers most of what Steam has to offer without any inconveniences.

[GreatEmerald]

> Until they fallow 3DO steps (too much money and resources spend on too many projects), I don't think they will be out of business anytime soon. As you can unfortunately see, many game companies want to have their own Steam-like platform (Origin, YPlay, etc.)

Of course, they seem to be here to stay for a decade or so. But you can't predict what will happen in the next one. With media without DRM, you are safe knowing that it will last as long as you want it to last.