A digital distribution service owned by Valve Corporation. Originally created to distribute Valve's own games, Steam has since become the de facto standard for digital distribution of PC games.
In a nutshell, I love it. For more detail, see below:
The Good
No copy protection hassles.
I've got a central hub for all my games, as even non-Steam games can be added.
It's convenient to keep tabs on your friends and invite them to join your games.
Achievements and stat tracking are nice bonus features.
With so many payment options, buying games have never been easier, and you can get some real value for money with Steam sales!
The Bad
Occasionally, games will be "currently unavailable" without any further explanation. Can usually be fixed by restarting, though.
I've had cases where I had to re-download gigabytes for a game that hasn't even had an update released. This is quite a problem if you've got a monthly cap.
The Ugly
Steam still automatically makes my status "Away" when I'm sitting right there. That can be annoying.
I get the impression Steam servers are not optimized for my country's poor internet speeds. Sometimes the GUI just hangs for long periods of time.
The store's "Recommended For You" can really use some tweaking.
I'm sure I forgot something important, but there it is.
If not for steam PC gaming basically wouldn't exist but regardless of that I would still think its effing awesome anyway. I really don't have any complaints with it at all and in fact am quite annoyed when PC titles don't support it fully.
i think steam is great , valve were pretty early with this service , and as long as they keep on top of their game , i think this should be the place to get new downloadable releases.
stuff like the origin store that ea is making , if successful , will just have every other publisher make their own online store , and i dont want 50 accounts and 50 different sevices running in the background , thats why i try to stick to steam as much as possible.
They have a clever business model, in that they convince you to buy things that you don't really need/want, just because of how cheap they are. I personally don't like how much of a monopoly they have on PC gaming, especially as new releases on Steam are very expensive (sometimes almost double what a physical box will cost you).
I'll just join everyone else and say it's a brilliant piece of software.
@WinterSnowblind said:
They have a clever business model, in that they convince you to buy things that you don't really need/want, just because of how cheap they are. I personally don't like how much of a monopoly they have on PC gaming, especially as new releases on Steam are very expensive (sometimes almost double what a physical box will cost you).
I guess that depends on the region, since Steam is usually cheaper than retail where I'm from. Granted, after shutting down a few stores in my town, I don't check them out so often (since I would have to go to another city to see up-to-date stuff), but things couldn't have changed that much.
I personally don't like how much of a monopoly they have on PC gaming, especially as new releases on Steam are very expensive (sometimes almost double what a physical box will cost you).
I guess that depends on the region, since Steam is usually cheaper than retail where I'm from.
Same here. I find that in my country Steam prices are often better than the retail prices. At worst, they're about the same.
Steam is an interesting tool, I have a love hate relationship with it. I love the fact that I can access all my games from one nice little icon, I love that the servers are fast to download from, and I love that everything is DIRT cheap compared to retail games. But the little things about it irritate the living hell out of me, like random disconnects from the cloud even though I'm still connected to the internet and could watch YouTube videos while I'm disconnected from the cloud, or the Ad popup after you exit a game. I know they need it for revenue and all that jazz but it's almost worse than YouTube ads for me. I suppose the goods outweigh the cons but they still exist. -Ghooble
Steam is like being a crack addict and living with your supplier. I should stop buying shit but everytime I open it up to play some games its there, tempting me with cheap prices.
all of the games i'm playing on windows right now are through steam, except for one which is available on steam but i bought a boxed copy. i'd greatly prefer being able to play it on steam instead, because the boxed copy has the securom installation limit AND a disc check.
i thought i'd just keep on buying boxed copies of games and if they used steam that way (the orange box and civilization v, for example) then i'd use steam but mostly i didn't care about it. then i noticed a couple sweet deals on old games while playing civilization v and bought those. when portal 2 was in preorder i saw that the physical copies were being handled by ea, which is the company who put two highly inconvenient forms of drm on the same game (and does plenty of other consumer-unfriendly things), so i decided i'd rather preorder on steam and hopefully avoid ea getting any of my money.
that really broke the seal, and now i'm up to 56 games on my steam account.
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