Downloaded first and last game with Steam-give me a DVD please

[Childs]

LOL, my god, you are a cry baby that goes and cleans up his posts. Funny, I never called you a name (till I called you a bitch, which I stand by), boo hoo got you this butt hurt? My god man, you need to freaking grow up.

Also, mods, if you are reading this, feel free to look at my PM's he sent me, more lol there.

I got cited for telling someone I should shove their degree up their butt, which IMO is not as bad as calling someone a bitch. The mods sided with a Nazi sympathizer. This might not go the way you think it will...

 

[Craig234]

I had a negative view of Steam early.

Who wants to pay a middleman who takes a cut of all the games? Wants to give them control over the games, what if they do something you don't like - or close?

I liked CD's. Fast to load, no 'digitial worries'. Packaging.

But, ya, the sales and convenience - 'where did I leave that CD, it has to be patched' - make Steam pretty useful. Now I have several hundreds games on Steam. Including a number that are re-purchased that I have on CD. I still do prefer the paper strategy guides to the online version, though. But I haven't used the online ones much yet.

Steam seemed unlikely to catch on at the time. Well, it sure did.

 

[power_hour]

Personally I would prefer a game ripped to iso format and sold on a USB stick. Where I live my Internet D/L limit makes buying more than a few games per month impossible. Otherwise I think Steam is a 'decent' service but I don't trust it completely. I think its too easy for them to change the rules and make your games unavailable. Not that has ever happened to me. But lets face it, anytime you store stuff in the cloud, anything can happen!

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I had a negative view of Steam early.

Who wants to pay a middleman who takes a cut of all the games? Wants to give them control over the games, what if they do something you don't like - or close?

Because when we let developers do their own thing we invariably get one or two Ubisofts?

I liked CD's. Fast to load, no 'digitial worries'. Packaging.

I did too...until Baldur's Gate 2 required 4 of them.

But, ya, the sales and convenience - 'where did I leave that CD, it has to be patched' - make Steam pretty useful. Now I have several hundreds games on Steam. Including a number that are re-purchased that I have on CD. I still do prefer the paper strategy guides to the online version, though. But I haven't used the online ones much yet.

Steam seemed unlikely to catch on at the time. Well, it sure did.

Exactly. The advantage of Steam isn't just that it is a common access platform for games, it allows games to run with minimally invasive DRM and at relatively low prices (during sales, for example)

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

Personally I would prefer a game ripped to iso format and sold on a USB stick. Where I live my Internet D/L limit makes buying more than a few games per month impossible. Otherwise I think Steam is a 'decent' service but I don't trust it completely. I think its too easy for them to change the rules and make your games unavailable. Not that has ever happened to me. But lets face it, anytime you store stuff in the cloud, anything can happen!

Aside from not requiring you to sign into offline mode once to make it work (because of encryption key passing with steam?), I think steam is the best platform for PCs. Cheaters, who ruin online play, can be banned from any VAC (steam anti-cheat) enabled servers, but no limitation of using the actual game. I don't really care if cheaters go play with other cheaters or people cheat in single player games, but playing against cheaters online should be a choice not a requirement because of the lack of safe guards. Go check out O-ther services and see if the same would even remotely happen or if their entire account is banned.

Aside from valve going under, steam will be around for a while. At least you can safely assume for the life of steam, any games using steamworks won't up and randomly quit working because the publisher has no server running anymore. I mean honestly there seems to be a better chance of a random company getting gutted, bought, bankrupt and the game becoming worthless. What happens when that $40 game doesn't work because the publisher required some 3rd party activation and their servers were taken offline as a "reorganization" or something.

Games being sold on discs seem to be shrinking aside from consoles. Best Buy seems like they are going to do away with any physical media for any software soon enough. Best Buy is pushing their digital store and EOL'ing even relatively recently released games.

I mean let's be honest, out of all the people that purchase software, how many go out of their way to get physical copies? The bottom line, the cost of doing business in the digital space is significantly less than having all the overhead with physical locations. I think sooner than later physical media will become the way of cassette tapes (I'm not that old ).

Maybe as that shift happens people's internet will become faster as more people use it more heavily. CDs transferred around ~5MB/s and DVDs around ~20MB/s on the fastest sequential speeds. When internet speeds are >= 5MB/s ~20gb games take about an hr to install, which honestly isn't that terrible.

 

[PowerYoga]

OP has bad internet, problem not found.

 

[imaheadcase]

Steam is the greatest thing ever. I've never had any problem with it to date.

If you don't have broadband, sure its going to suck, but that is not steams fault. It does give you plenty of options to pick closest server to download from. The default one is not always the best for you.

I suspect the OP does not have fast HSI. It only takes like 15-20min to reinstall windows 7 for me

I would never buy a physical copy of any media anymore, no reason to, its a waste of time and resources. I threw away most my game CDs a couple years ago. Lots of people have approached that critical state when its faster to download/install a game that actually install it from a DvD + patch.