Do you think the xfire store will be successful? I don't like the idea of competing online stores like this because if the xfire store becomes big enough, then pretty soon we'll start seeing an "exclusives" war and maybe even games exclusive to one store. Xfire is pretty big with almost 14.5 million users, and right now there are about 300k people online. I wonder what the numbers are for Steam.
It's true, I saw that happening on the xfire forums already. It's hard not to take sides when I've already built up my Steam game library, and I really don't want to have to split up my games amongst two applications, even if I do have both Steam and Xfire running at all times.
I don't like how xfire takes alot of cpu resources from my game and slows things down. Still I am very skeptical and I don't think it's going to be good as steam or that well supported. We will see won't we?
However I would be willing to be that most Xfire users have already had some sort of interaction with Steam in the past. So they would probably stick with one digitally distributed service. Then again who knows, if they can compete with Steams great deals they may have a chance.
Steam has established a solid userbase for not only Valve games but fans of other games by using weekend deals, national / global holiday deals and even just random discounts throughout the week for select titles. They've also garnered great support from developers due to their easy and friendly digital distribution agreement which is apparently very agreeable and profitable for all involved without it being too one sided in Valve's favour. RPS have a nice article detailing information about Valve and their Steam digital distribution agreement after some criticism from Gearbox's Randy Pitchford.
Personally I prefer Steam due to its user friendly nature and the benefits it provides for all the games I buy through it. There is also the fact that Steam helps promote some brilliant indie titles such as Audiosurf and World of Goo.
Personally right now I'd say any new online store is going to have a helluva time competing against Steam and D2D. But more so against Steam who have really set the standard on this sort of thing.
@Br3adfan: xfire and CS 1.6 never went well together, and plus this store has some pretty good deals (Fifa 09 for 9.95!) what i like about this is that you can back it up on another hard drive or DVD, while with Steam it's all online (which can be convenient at times, but in years time, we won't even have these games on steam anymore i'll assume.)
" @Br3adfan: xfire and CS 1.6 never went well together, and plus this store has some pretty good deals (Fifa 09 for 9.95!) what i like about this is that you can back it up on another hard drive or DVD, while with Steam it's all online (which can be convenient at times, but in years time, we won't even have these games on steam anymore i'll assume.) "
you can backup steam games to hard drive or DVD, you can do it by going File>Backup games, or by just copying the correct files over. That's how I transfer games from one computer to another, rather than redownloading.
you can backup steam games to hard drive or DVD, you can do it by going File>Backup games, or by just copying the correct files over. That's how I transfer games from one computer to another, rather than redownloading. "
oh, really? i never knew that. well, then again, i don't really sped much time on Steam because i have such a shit PC and most of the games i wouldn't be able to play :(
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