Opinion of Valve's Steam

[unreal]

Don't tend to use XFire to d/l patches and upgrades. I find it most useful for contacting friends, especially in game, and generating server lists. The one annoyance at the moment is that I can't seem to start BF2 from X-Fire. The country-based server listing is a lot easier to use than the excruciating server browser in BF2..!

lol I am quite the avid user of X-Fire btw, as seen in my sig (and my profile) and I have been using it for around a year so I know it pretty well. My BF2 X-Fire joining works, and yeah I agree the BF2 browser is incredibly poor. If it had a server browser as good as Steam it would be ultra good.

[Mutley]

Hey, unreal, a little off-thread, but how did you get XFire to launch BF2 into a game server?
I can get it to launch BF2, I then have to enter my id and password, but all that happens is that game loads and stops after the login screen. I then have to copy the IP address of the server I want to join.

[toppers]

I'm not much when it comes to the technical end of steam or the games themselves. I just know what I like and don't like.

I do not like Steam...reason is, freedom of choice has gone away. I had to dump my MW 2 and can only upload it from steam. I have a high speed internet hookup runing at 1.5 and it will take hours and hours to reload the game from steam. I do not have the choice of reloading it from disk, which would only take a few minutes.

Sometimes
Under cloak of darkness
Computer based applications
Knowingly
Show their greed.

[TAKTAK]

I'm not much when it comes to the technical end of steam or the games themselves. I just know what I like and don't like.

I do not like Steam...reason is, freedom of choice has gone away. I had to dump my MW 2 and can only upload it from steam. I have a high speed internet hookup runing at 1.5 and it will take hours and hours to reload the game from steam. I do not have the choice of reloading it from disk, which would only take a few minutes.

Sometimes
Under cloak of darkness
Computer based applications
Knowingly
Show their greed.

You should have bought a physical copy rather than a download then....

(PS, BUMP of the year so far?)

[Neo_VR]

I like steam.. its got massively better over the years..

I would buy more stuff thru it if they actually got the idea that digital downloads should reduce overhead... and make stuff CHEAPER than a retail box copy.. but i guess this is probably a game publisher decision rather than valve.

Cant beat the 4-way multipacks though

[Ciber]

[Iasthai]

Having been using steam since it first came out and the only issue i ever had is that the friends list STILL has issues sometimes!

I cant wait to see what Valve has in store for steam in the future.

[Fraz]

Man... I was reading this thread for quite a while before I realised it was from 2005. Grrr.

[Jay]

Even though I know this thread has had a massive bump I'll still post in it!

I have to say its a load of tosh, eats up cpu at times for no reason, has been very very buggy in the past. I have quite a low steam ID and have had Steam since it came out (I remeber WON) and I have never ever been a fan of it.

[Fraz]

I have had absolutely zero issues with steam. I really can't fault it tbh. I'm surprised at the hatred for it. Admitedly I didn't use it until ~2006, so maybe I missed the bad times.

[cptwhite_uk]

Any game worth it's salt is available to download through Steam. I think as a system it only has two major flaws:


The inability to de-register games and sell it to friends.
Although any system that allowed this could be abused, so I fully understand the commercial reasons for not allowing this. Maybe if they made you "transfer" for the price it's currently selling for (because you're only passing on digital rights, second hand doesn't really apply). Or at least only 10% less than retail. This way the seller gets good value, the buyer gets a slightly cheaper price and and transfer of goods requires electronic funds to pass between the two parties (which could be tracked by Steam maybe). This system would require further thought I suspect...

The second problem is the pricing
Steam has no equal for digital content distribution (in terms of choice, userbase etc) and so it's pricing can be quite high compared to buying hard copies from retail. There's no reason for this other than greed. They do fantastic weekend offers, but what I'd really prefer is knowing I'm getting a very competitive price from there, without having to check online e-tailers before hand. I often want to buy from Steam for convinence, but found out I can get the game £8-10 cheaper online. Money talks, but I'd prefer to have all my PC gaming tied to the Steam system to be honest, for back-up purposes.

Hard copies of Steam games can always be made if you're a safety freak who doesn't like the idea of having to download Gb's of data in the event of a HDD failure.

The friend and invites system I think works really well. If they could sort out these two issues, I would give Steam a fully glowing report.

[Lucio]

Mostly I'm happy with Steam, there's some odd quirks and lord knows what it'll be like when I finally upgrade my PC, but for general convience of not having to worry about looking for patches and being able to get new games relatively quickly it's all good.

[kingfoo]

the pricing on some games are very expensive and the steam program is to powerfull

[GheeTsar]

I agree that new releases are overpriced, but the weekend specials and the big sales can be extremely cheap.

I hated Steam when HL2 came out, now I really like it and I get annoyed now if I have to go and hunt for the physical disk to play a game already installed on my machine or if I have to go and manually patch a game.

And to the thread resurrector - you can backup all your Steam games to save redownloading them.

[Syllopsium]

I have no problems with Steam the program aside from it being extremely slow on very low end systems. I ran it on a PII 400 a while back and it was grindingly slow - especially when Steam are selling ancient games like the Lucasarts adventure pack they should expect to run sensibly on old computers...

Steam the system I have rather larger issues with. I'm not fond of DRM and especially not keen on software that could stop working at any time in the future (if Steam died, so would all the games). As such I only use it for significant games which are unavailable in any other configuration (Half Life 2) and cheap sales. I'll continue buying boxed games until forced down the activation route.

PK

[menthel]

Its a little overpriced but its convenient and it means I don't have to have tons of boxes scattered all over the house!