Hold your breath, count to five

[cyrano]

Does anybody have experience or anecdotal exposure to Steam the 'download your game' game portal?

Comments

[likable-lemur.livejournal.com]

Hiya CJ,

Steam is, to use the colloquialism, "fuckin' awesome." I've used it since inception, and after the initial rockiness (in like 1998), it's been a solid, powerful platform ever since.

While you can't sell or lend games through Steam (which is a sticking point for some people), you get the convenience of never having to remember serial numbers (in most cases), and the instant gratification of digital delivery. Steam games are also generally less expensive than physical media (Portal 2 was 40 bucks when I bought it), and your "games library" can be accessed without hunting for CDs or things like that.

Overall, I really, really like Steam. Note that you do NOT get away from draconian DRM schemes with Steam; the service has its own rather-relaxed DRM, but publishers can choose to add their own on top of it. This has been a problem with EA games for some folks (SecuROM does not play well with other children), but in my experience it has been a non-issue, even with additionally-protected games.

You generally CAN play your games without a 'net connection, so long as you have activated them first (download the game, open it, the game will say "completing installation," then you are done). Steam will show a 'net connection failure, but if you have an offline game, you can generally play it if you're not online (I played Portal 2 and Fallout New Vegas while my 'net connection was down just the other day). The caveat to this is that, again, if the publisher has mandated an Internet connection (this is a separate requirement from Steam and would affect you even if you bought the physical copy), then you're boned anyway. This is getting less and less common, and if you spend a few minutes looking around, you can find *cough* perfectly legitimate *cough* ways of circumventing the 'net check on games lumbered with particularly horrible copyright controls.

Steam will update itself occasionally, and this takes about a minute. It's a total non-issue.

Patches for games are delivered automatically, but they are downloaded and applied when they are available; this may lead to a few minutes of staring at a progress bar when you open your game. Then the game will launch, and life will go on. I have never had Steam update my video drivers.

Your games are tied to your Steam login, so if you ever replace or rebuild your computer, you can just sign back into Steam, download your games, and woohoo, you're back in business. Saves are generally kept locally, so you'll want to back those up, but the game data itself will just flow through the series of tubes and install on your computer.

For online gaming, Steam is very difficult to beat. The platform supports very robust social networking (from instant messaging to player groups that can organize events), which is helpful if you want to bug your buddy to see if they want to play some Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead. This all exists in the Steam overlay, which does not intrude meaningfully on your game experience, and is instead accessed by a key combination from inside the game you're playing.

You can even register games you already own, on physical media, through Steam (Provided the game is also available on Steam). If, for example, you bought Portal 2 on DVD, but you want to have it in your Steam library, that ability is supported, at no cost to you. It gives your physical copy of the game all the advantages of the Steam platform, without having to buy it again.

I guess the short version of all this rambling is: Steam is great. It's the future of game delivery and content management, and Valve have done an amazing job of making the service excellent. It is objectively better than Impulse, GameSpy, and EA's half-baked offering. If you want an analogy, it is the iTunes of gaming: Digital content delivery at low prices, in a reliable package and a good user interface. It isn't perfect - but nothing is, now is it?

Cheerio!

[reluctantgenius.livejournal.com]

And I totally don't work for Valve at all

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I can vouch that he doesn't. Although I sort of wish he did, since then we'd be living in Washington instead of Arizona. :)

[likable-lemur.livejournal.com]

If I worked for Valve, not only would I probably have gotten a deeper discount on Portal 2, but I probably would have spent the whole time talking about the snack bar.