Steam users to be barred from community until they spend $5

[GuidoLS]

"100+ AAA games"? You must have pretty large disk to store that lot on, either that or most of the 100 are Indy "pocket games". I've been doing offloads of my (tiny) Steam library because I'm having trouble fitting current titles in my (previously capacious) 500GB SSD. Then again, mainstream titles seem to need 50GB+ these days - so if you were using just these kinds of titles then you'd need a 6TB drive!

GOG is not a service I've used, but I've generally heard it praised - I really must get around to having a look. In fact, the only recent criticism I've seen is this "GOG Customer Service Rep Argues With Customer over Transphobia in Pillars of Eternity" and even there I'd say the company behaved reasonably.

As noted, there's no need to download all of them at once. And I currently have a 320gb Velociraptor as my primary, and 3x1 TB hdd drives for everything else. More than enough space. Any more, you can by 3tb drives for under $100 - everyone's fetish with SSD's seems to have made people forget that spinners work just fine to this day, and they're incredibly inexpensive. As for GOG, you really should look into it. In terms of customer service, they're almost a complete 180 of what Steam is, and that's only because Steam has finally made some improvements. They don't have quite the selection of new games that Steam does, but they do have some of the bigger and better names, and their old game library is second to none.

[ZaO]

As noted, there's no need to download all of them at once. And I currently have a 320gb Velociraptor as my primary, and 3x1 TB hdd drives for everything else. More than enough space. Any more, you can by 3tb drives for under $100 - everyone's fetish with SSD's seems to have made people forget that spinners work just fine to this day, and they're incredibly inexpensive. As for GOG, you really should look into it. In terms of customer service, they're almost a complete 180 of what Steam is, and that's only because Steam has finally made some improvements. They don't have quite the selection of new games that Steam does, but they do have some of the bigger and better names, and their old game library is second to none.

Traditional hdd's are alright for some games, but they can result in slow loading of textures, causing noticeable "pop in" in modern demanding ones, not to mention slow loading times in general. An ssd is real nice to have for your os, main programs and games that can really benefit from it. But, a hybrid (or regular hdd) drive is a nice option for less important games and programs. I mainly only like to use hdd's for media and storage now. I'm not sure if you've used an ssd much before, but I'm sure you'll be convinced if you try it

[MinoruXIV]

About time they have done this
i get 15 friend invites a day from random lvl 0 private profiles
i don't know who is real and who isn't so i ignore every invite i get >.>

[GuidoLS]

Traditional hdd's are alright for some games, but they can result in slow loading of textures, causing noticeable "pop in" in modern demanding ones, not to mention slow loading times in general. An ssd is real nice to have for your os, main programs and games that can really benefit from it. But, a hybrid (or regular hdd) drive is a nice option for less important games and programs. I mainly only like to use hdd's for media and storage now. I'm not sure if you've used an ssd much before, but I'm sure you'll be convinced if you try it

The two primary reasons I haven't purchased an SSD is I'm cheap, and the cost/gb is still too high, and I dual boot, and am not in any particular hurry to fight with that kind of transfer. First new investment will be a new graphics card, and then maybe an SSD. I've reached EOL on socket 775, so a new mb, cpu and memory will have to be in the eventual picture as well - all of which will take priority. And while there may be a big difference between an SSD and a standard 7200rpm drive, on a system that's still running 3gbs max SATA, there's not a lot of difference between an SSD and a Velociraptor. And trust me, my current gaming demands probably wouldn't be helped overly much without the GPU upgrade first.

[tribaljet]

There isn't a lot of difference between SSD and faster HDD drive types? Actually there is and quite significant at that. Performance isn't measured purely through throughput.

Being cheap is one thing (a perfectly acceptable personal preference), but putting any sort of mechanical drive on the same tier as a flash-based drive is nonsensical.

[GuidoLS]

I didn't say same tier... I said not enough of a return in value to make it worth the upgrade, especially from an already existing Velociraptor, which came at a premium, still works, and if SMART is to be believed, still at 100% health wise.

I'm not a pro-gamer. I'm not an e-athlete (as ridiculous as it sounds to say or type that out...). I don't see performance hits, because I really don't play games that stress out my 2008 system. Some things may benefit - I don't know. Maybe once things start to die off here, I'll find out. But I haven't paid $500 for a drive for a LOT of years - back when 20mb drives dropped to that price in the 6502/8088 days. I'll not pay that much now PER drive to replace my current system, and another $200 or so to pick up a reliable drive in the same size range as my primary.

[tribaljet]

I agree that you have a quite good drive, one that I sure would personally want to use for as long as it could run.

One thing that SSDs can help (aside from gaming, which also benefits from such drives like when dealing with data streaming) is in sheer system responsiveness and that is a very palpable difference from any mechanical drive, even when talking of 15k SAS drives. The most baffling aspect of the current SSD market is that even lower end drives are getting to a point where they can start to be considered as valid replacements for mechanical drives on all metrics barring (as expected until now and for the relatively short term foreseeable future) price/capacity ratio.

It is expected that until the end of the year, the next desirable capacity range, namely 500-512GB, will have further declining prices, which will make them more appealing still.

But in the end, you do have a higher performing mechanical drive than average so do take good care of it so it can last as long as it can. However, I will suggest you avoid using systems with SSDs installed as you might find the difference to be bigger than expected, even on the smallest of tasks

[GuidoLS]

Once the higher capacity SSD's drop in to the $150/tb range, then *I* think the pricing would be considered reasonable. That's still 3x the cost (retail) of most mechanical drives, but slightly less than 1/3rd the current price. Until such time, I'll simply stay in the slow lane.

[ZaO]

Once the higher capacity SSD's drop in to the $150/tb range, then *I* think the pricing would be considered reasonable. That's still 3x the cost (retail) of most mechanical drives, but slightly less than 1/3rd the current price. Until such time, I'll simply stay in the slow lane.

Fair enough. ssd's are still a bit expensive. They're a joy to use if you have one. But as you say, you'll want a faster mobo first anyway. I ran an ssd on an old board with sata 3gbs, and while it was definitely faster, it wasn't really worth it! I really admire people who can happily keep older hardware running for a longer time than most I always try my hardest to get the highest performance stuff I can manage I just get really frustrated when my computer doesn't respond as quick as I want it to. I'm currently running a real budget machine with 7200rpm hdd in it, and it just kills me after having a much faster setup with an 840 evo in it last year! >_<

[EndlessWaves]

They're effectively saying that if you want to use their service, you have to have paid them some money to use it. Which is fair enough, just wish they'd be a bit more open about it.

It would be fair enough if it was optional to use their service. Unfortunately there are hundreds of games that only work on steam and only allow other stores to sell steam keys.

Hopefully this will prompt developers to stop making steam exclusives, otherwise it's just further pressure from Valve to push other game stores out of business.

As gamers we should be wanting to see Valve going the other way, removing their storefront from the steam client and actually trying to compete as a store rather than these nasty lock-in tactics.

[kalniel]

It would be fair enough if it was optional to use their service.

The community things they're talking about are entirely optional.