Hello fellow PC gamers!
Steam has gotten a lot of hate over the years. And in the beginning, a lot of it was deserved, since servers were overloaded and network was not developed enough - resulting in slow/no downloads.
But few years down the road made Steam a ton better. All the technical quirks have been worked out, the network bandwidth/infrastructure is staggering.
Now it has not just HL/HL2 catalog, it has long list of game publishers that moved their entire catalogs to Steam, resulting in hundreds upon hundreds of titles available.
Steam is particularly attractive (at least to me) for these reasons:
- Content download and re-download, no need to worry about disks getting scratched or lost.
- Incredible prices on older games, bargain bin "superpacks"
- Pre-release downloads and reasonable prices on new releases. (I look forward to downloading GTA 4 on PC few days before release date, paying less than I would pay at the store, and avoiding the hunt for a shop that has it in stock on release day.)
- Huge catalog of available games, demos, manuals, and trailers
- Ability to play games on multiple PCs without lugging DVD packs of games back and forth (you can play only on one computer at the same time).
Only downside I can think of is that one cannot re-sell games. But I personally never sold a game. I keep everything, even if the game sucks.
Oh, and you cannot play offline unless you tell Steam to go to "Offline mode" when you are online. But how many gamers don't have Internet these days?
What are your thoughts on Steam? Comments?
If you never tried Steam (or tried it before but were disappointed), follow links above and try it with some free games, demos, or trailers.
Steam has gotten a lot of hate over the years. And in the beginning, a lot of it was deserved, since servers were overloaded and network was not developed enough - resulting in slow/no downloads.
But few years down the road made Steam a ton better. All the technical quirks have been worked out, the network bandwidth/infrastructure is staggering.
Now it has not just HL/HL2 catalog, it has long list of game publishers that moved their entire catalogs to Steam, resulting in hundreds upon hundreds of titles available.
Steam is particularly attractive (at least to me) for these reasons:
- Content download and re-download, no need to worry about disks getting scratched or lost.
- Incredible prices on older games, bargain bin "superpacks"
- Pre-release downloads and reasonable prices on new releases. (I look forward to downloading GTA 4 on PC few days before release date, paying less than I would pay at the store, and avoiding the hunt for a shop that has it in stock on release day.)
- Huge catalog of available games, demos, manuals, and trailers
- Ability to play games on multiple PCs without lugging DVD packs of games back and forth (you can play only on one computer at the same time).
Only downside I can think of is that one cannot re-sell games. But I personally never sold a game. I keep everything, even if the game sucks.
Oh, and you cannot play offline unless you tell Steam to go to "Offline mode" when you are online. But how many gamers don't have Internet these days?
What are your thoughts on Steam? Comments?
If you never tried Steam (or tried it before but were disappointed), follow links above and try it with some free games, demos, or trailers.
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