What's everyone's idea on STEAM? At least *counts* 5 ppl here must have come in contact with it, so i was wondering about their feelings on it.


Personally I'm double, using it actively for a while now. On the one hand, it's a very direct and easy service. On the other hand, I don't like the fact that a corporation is-more or less-running a service on my pc, and the fact that I have to use it to play offline games. I mean, that's fux0red. Online games, fine, but the fact that you virtually need to go online to play an offline SP game...meh.

It's also bitter irony that a program used to better monitor the gamers is used for a game in which you fight an a total-control dicatorship.

I never used it, but I think it sucks anyway.

steam is one of those ideas that seems to be a good plan on surface, but crumbles under close inspection. Any method a company can come up with to prevent piracy can be undone more easily than it was created. That's the nature of programming. They should be more concerned about their utility pissing off legit gamers, since it'll be inevitably foiled anyway.

There are a few good things about Steam.

#1 you get automatic updates to games. no more having to hunt for a free place to download a patch.

#2 .... dont know

other than that its sucks but if you want to play CS:S or HL2, your stuck with it.

I never have trouble downloading patches for games. They're always on the maker's homepage, and sometimes even through an option in the main menu of a game (like in NWN).

i agree with arathorn, i keep a close eye on the developers websites of the games i play, so i know full well when a patch is available.

steam pisses me off big time when it simply starts to update on its own and simply that its another thing that delays a quick start up. i always end up shutting it off almost as soon as it starts.

and oh, that initial godamm circus of installing HL2 for the first time...

I agree with most people, Steam is shit. An autoupdater for games is cool, but you should have the option of whether or not to update. The initial HL2 installation (and decryption) was absolute bullshit. I was actually tempted to take the game back and boycott the company because of that crap.

Anyway, some level of copyprotection is probably a good idea, but when it makes life a bitch like Steam does, it's not worth the effort.

Y'know, this one time I bought a game. It had some copy-protection, but the really cool thing was that it allowed you to install multiple copies of itself on a lan. You could basically take 1 cd, make 10 installs onto 10 machines, and play a LAN game with people. For internet play or single player, you had to have the copy-protected CD in the drive.

Anyway, I thought that was really cool. Instead of locking us down more and more, why can't companies come up with creative ways of garnering gamers' attention like this?

Ditto. Steam is shit.

- Runs stupidly slowly.
- Huge file size for just a client applicaiton.
- Large amounts of bugs and crashes.
- Need internet access to play HL2 single player.
- Constant updating is a pain in the ass.
- Innaccurate ping quotes.
- Many more, but cant remember as it was so long ago

Oh. And i started a topic on this time ago... http://www.forums.clankiller.com/viewtopic.php?t=957&start=0

Sacred works like that, It's pretty good idea, and to make it even more "secure" the new expansion that they are releasing, you need BOTH CD keys to play the game online.

You need the Disk IN to start the game, then once it's started you can move it out to the next PC or whatever. The only real problem was, almost as fast as they were releasing patches and different copy protection versions, people were releasing cracks etc.

The game also had the idea of if you had any "virtual CD drives" (e.g. Demon Tools, Alcohol etc) it wouldn't boot up.

Never used this STEAM thing, never had too, which is probably a strange mix of a good and a bad thing.

I think that was even a very common practice, what Satis described. It's strange that they don't do that anymore. But LAN is losing some of its value, with connection becoming faster etc., so maybe no one will care anymore in 10 years. Though it will be hard to organize mass frag fests over the net. So LAN isn't out yet.

LAN is cool for uni students in halls, you can just whoop some ass on some poor freshers who you've never met. Great

And steam is anal, the installing was definately the most annoying thing about it, took like forever. So gay that i can't install it on both my pc and my bros pc, even if i'm not playing them at the same time. You have to completely uninstall it from 1 computer and close your steam account before you can start it again on another pc.

I do like the auto update, and once it's installed you don't need an internet connection to play HL2, which is something i guess.

Still i say it's wack