Biggest downside of Steam purchases:
1. You get none of the physical box contents like maps, manuals, etc...
2. Licensed per-user with no resale or moving of licenses to another account
nevermind the idea of parent-child-sibling sharing of a title.
3. Can be even MORE draconian than disc-in-drive protections.
4. Autopatching is FORCED, not optional, so if a current update is crap you have to
take it rather than waiting for it to be revised.
5. Price tends NOT to be better than street price AND then factor in #1.
All that said #2 is has to be fat Gabe's biggest sin! I have 2 kids here who I've got
to spend $40/ea to get Orange Box despite already investing $90 to buy myself HL2
gold & Orange Box.
Most recently Valve has thumbed their nose at existing owners of STALKER SoC or CS
who bought retail licenses vs. steam, we users can not get upgrade pricing for the
CoP the 3rd stalker game via steam which is like 1/2 the best retail price out there.
On 2/18/2010 9:54 AM, Brian Weeden wrote:
I second Arkham Asylum - great game. Also if you like Bioware RPGs, check
out Dragon Age: Origins. And Torchwood is great if you like Diablo-style
games.
Steam is a delivery service for games. Basically, instead of going to a
store and buying the disc in a box you can purchase the game through Steam
and download a digital copy. Over the last couple of years I've been
getting all my games through it for a couple of reasons. The big one is
that I am in Canada, and I got frustrated going to the store only to find
the release date for a game up here is different than in the US or they are
out of stock. I've also have never had a Steam game give me a problem with
crashing or drivers - they do an auto update patching system that is pretty
nice. Other benefits are the ability to sync save games and settings across
multiple machines through your Steam account.
And yes, there are a lot of games on Steam which also have demos, but not
all.
Steam is not a monthly subscription and it offers both purchase once games
(like the ones mentioned above) and some MMORGS where you pay per month. It
has a pretty huge selection of game types, including a lot of casual ones.
And they occasionally have huge sales. Over Christmas I was able to get
Warhammer DOW II for $20, Mirror's Edge for $5, STALKER for $2, Left for
Dead for $7.50, and Prey for $2.
That's a lot of fun for little cost right there :)
