Valve announces Steamworks

[Tibbar]

I don't find Steam to be that much of a hindrance because it doesn't lock you to any one particular computer. You just have to log in, and if someone else is using your account, I believe your login will kick them off.

[Koogle]

well I can't stand have that pile of shit running on my computer... infact the only games I do play much online are the ones that aren't on steam.. really can't even be bothered with it. TF2 CSS and other games I just wish I had never had purchasing through that junk. I just haven't bothered playing on any of them anymore. Valve should be working on providing top level anti cheat protection for there games not DRM crap and having to let cusomter rely on their steaming shit slow servers before they can even get onto a game.

[Lordiego01]

Great! I love Steam!

It works fantastic for me, and I have never, ever had a problem with it.

Good luck Valve!!

[JohNLA]

Steam has made me cuss out loud many a night. I share a dsl line with my girl.
Why the F does it need to go online everytime I want to:banghead: play a single player game like Portal? Okay, get girl to give up internet, so I can play my single player game. No I have to wait again for it download all those stupid adds.
Valve makes fantastic games but I don't know if I will buy more just because of my hate of Steam.

[Saurus]

Steam is cool. I like the fact I can install games on my home machine and automatically have game available at work for installation without having to have original disk to install let alone start the game. Now if they can only transfer saved map keys.

[blank]

Go into steam settings > account tab > theres a tick box that says

'Dont save account credentials on this computer'
(recommended for public computers.
Note this will disable 'Offline Mode')


so make sure its unticked and you can play offline so no need to kick your girlfriends or partners off the internet anymore.

I love steam never had any problems with it except it making it easy to spend more money when I'm bored :)

[captainchet]

I love steam and i think this is a great way to reduce some of the overhead game developers have to deal with.

[bluecanvas]

I think its a great way to kill PC gaming altogether. I go into a store. Pay for a game. Take it home. Install it off the DVD. Wait patiently while it shovels 9 gigs of data on my harddisk. And then run it.

No wait a sec. It doesn't run. It needs to connect to some Valve server through my Steam client and "Steam account" and go through some updating mumbo jumbo for the next hour.
And the game won't run without the Steam client, so I can never uninstall this piece of garbage again and have to live with it being on my computer permanently.

This wasn't a big deal in the past because only a handful of games require Steam. But it would be a big deal if all sorts of non-Valve titles start to require it as well.

I think I'll be buying a PS3 at that point. That's better than every PC game requiring some sort of online account or DRM dance before it works.

[Boone]

Re: bluecanvas

I usually get the feeling that PC developers use their audiences to do their testing for them, and thus seeing such a security system like steam seems a little too much. Perhaps if they set the release price for PC games to £20 there wouldnt be so much of a problem with Piracy. I can understand a program like Photoshop or 3dsMax using this kind of system but not for a mere game that will see the £5 bargin bin within two years.

Steam is a bit like Vista: Those who have no trouble with it will praise it til the cows come home, but those who have hassles will curse it until blue in the face. My foot is in both camps: I can appreciate what Valve is trying to do with Steam but unfortunately I found it more of a menace than a help. I too think that if every PC game ran under Steam I would pack up shop and stick with the consoles.

[gregsandor]

..........................

[DoubleSupercool]

Hmmm, before using it I thought steam would be a great idea. After using it, not so much.

I recall I had a helluva time installing HL2, then later when I lost my net connection for 2 weeks it wouldn't let me play offline. I finally configured it to let me do that and when I got my connection back it wouldn't let me log in and update any more (apparently a very common problem with no real solution back in the day). Seems to me the guys who got the pirated versions were subjected to less hoops to jump through than the people who paid for the game. Weird.

Then there was the recent issue with region pricing for games . . .

NEWSFLASH - - - I am downloading games from you because I can get them cheap because the "Internets" open up the world of the "Information Superhighway" (I read this in the newspaper). If I, as an Australian, want to pay twice as much as the rest the world for my games, guess what, I'll go into a store. A major point in favour of Steam was that, say, a game like Darwinia would cost USD$20.00. In Australia, it might cost AUD$50.00 on the shelf, but with a strong dollar, if I buy off Steam directly, it would be around UAD$28.00. This was actually working for a while but then they started region locking/pricing.

Can Valve give me a good reason why I am forced to pay more for the same product when it exists purely as a download? Oh, you mean I get to pay retail, I don't get a DVD and I use up 4-8gig of my download limit? So many positives that I don't know where to start.

I can see the benefits for publishers, but as a consumer I can do without that aggravation.

[bluecanvas]

I think game industry execs want to kill the traditional system

1) person walks into store
2) person pays for game
3) person walks out of store and disappears into the ether

That doesn't tell them the age of the person, the gender, the income bracket, what kind of hardware or other game systems the person owns, how much the person spends on games, what kind of other games the person buys, how much time he or she spends playing a week, and so on and so forth.

Enter online account based systems like Steam. Its like a TV ratings box for games. It knows where you are geographically (IP address). It knows what hardware you have. It knows what games are registered with it and when a new game is added. It collects data on how and how long you play games (TeamFortress 2?). And if you buy games through it with a credit card it even knows you by name. Splendid.

The privacy angle aside it will cause games to be dumbed down further, just like TV ratings sent broadcast TV content into the toilet. For every dumbed down piece of garbage published as a game you will have a producer justifying it with things like "well, we looked at what people actually play and....". That's precisely how Television went into the toilet. People want to watch trash so we give them trash. Lots of it.

With today's "lolz wtf roflcopter" generation of gamers its going to get bad. Real bad.

That's my prediction.

[Erklaerbar]

I dont like marketing, i dont like steam!

[richcz3]

For new game developers that can't break into the retail channel, Steamworks may be a great alternative.

I perosnaly have multiple Steam licenses on my rigs. I use Steam because I have to. For TF2 and some other Source engine games.

If there are games available at retail - I'll buy them retail. I don't want any uneeded client running in the background. Seeing as there is no significant price break anyway, I don't see the reason.

[Gwot]

If I ever opted to make a pc game on my own I'd release it through steam. I've been using it since it went live and as a gamer, it's the best thing that ever happened to my pc gaming experience. As a developer, it's a chance to get your game out there without selling your soul to a publisher. Go Valve!

[Kabab]

I love steam it kicks ass! i try and only buy games via steam... Sure it has its odd problem what heck what system doesn't.

Personally i can see Steam becoming a bigger thing for Valve then their own game production.

[salmonmoose]

Steam is a bit like Vista: Those who have no trouble with it will praise it til the cows come home, but those who have hassles will curse it until blue in the face. My foot is in both camps: I can appreciate what Valve is trying to do with Steam but unfortunately I found it more of a menace than a help. I too think that if every PC game ran under Steam I would pack up shop and stick with the consoles.

The real irony here is the reason I hate Steam so much is because it doesn't seem to work correctly on my Vista rig :)

Overall, however I love the idea, for the same reason I love XBLMarketplace, you can just conveniently top up an account and then buy what you want.

[sconlogue]

Regarding those "annoying and time consuming game updates" from steam people seem to complain about all the time. Correct me if I am wrong but just about any major PC game has patches released many times during it's life in your machine. Company of Heroes anyone... Oh and the BF series... no updates for Desktop Tower Defense though, you could play that!

On top of that you have to update to the latest patch with any game out there if you expect to play online? I don't like seeing ads when I have already paid but damn if it doesn't make me smile to NEVER have to go hunting for the latest patch. Then wish I had a "Premium" account to download it faster. Then install it to have it maybe, just sometimes FAIL halfway through (Company of Heroes anyone). Oh and I have 1.1 but need to get to 1.6 but I will have to get 1.2,1.3,1.4 you see what I mean. If you plan on keeping your games current in a hassle free manner STEAM is rather good at that. Besides it's pretty lite app so if you have a decent gaming rig how can you complain about running junk in the background? It downloads you updates as you sleep! I mean come on.

Oh, and ever loose the reg KEY that came with your disc. Ya, that's no fun.

[Olethros]

Right now I am only using steam for HL2 – Deathmatch. To be honest I never had a problem with it. Updates run smoothly once in a while, game plays fine. I even start to enjoy this little community thing. However I never liked the idea of having to create an account and be forced to be online whenever I want to install and/or play a single player game. In fact that was also the sole reason I didn’t buy HL2 when it first came out. I guess they assume that all who have a pc nowadays have a fast and reliable internet connection as well. I bet they wouldn’t have dared thinking something like that when pstn was popular. :D

[fuss]

Regarding those "annoying and time consuming game updates" from steam people seem to complain about all the time. Correct me if I am wrong but just about any major PC game has patches released many times during it's life in your machine. Company of Heroes anyone... Oh and the BF series... no updates for Desktop Tower Defense though, you could play that!

On top of that you have to update to the latest patch with any game out there if you expect to play online? I don't like seeing ads when I have already paid but damn if it doesn't make me smile to NEVER have to go hunting for the latest patch. Then wish I had a "Premium" account to download it faster. Then install it to have it maybe, just sometimes FAIL halfway through (Company of Heroes anyone). Oh and I have 1.1 but need to get to 1.6 but I will have to get 1.2,1.3,1.4 you see what I mean. If you plan on keeping your games current in a hassle free manner STEAM is rather good at that. Besides it's pretty lite app so if you have a decent gaming rig how can you complain about running junk in the background? It downloads you updates as you sleep! I mean come on.

Oh, and ever loose the reg KEY that came with your disc. Ya, that's no fun.

Yeah, every major PC game releases patches, but not every couple of days (as it often happens with current games on steam! sometimes even daily!) and you are not forced to install them if you do not wish to (and I usually only install patches for single player games *if* I experience problems with my current version, which means I actually rarely install patches for single player games at all). I like the auto-update feature for online games, but I HATE it for single player games. I do not have much time to play. I usually will log in to play for somewhere between 30min-2h *when* and *if* I have the time. Having to wait 30min or more for a surprise update for an offline game like Portal or HL2 really annoys me. And oftentimes the automatic download feature does not work properly or will not work at all, requiring all kinds of fumbling around, deleting local files, restarting or reinstalling steam etc. And don't even mention the slow download speeds...

Someone mentioned you can play offline. Yes, but in order to do that you have to

a) save your password locally, which I never do with anything, for security reasons
b) since I play online over steam I do try to stay online so I can stay up to date, so I do not have to download a huge update the next time I decide to play online, it takes long enough with the small updates already
c) correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to login first to set the option for offline play, and you can't do that if you can't go online in the first place (or did they change it in the meantime, I know it was like this when I first got steam about 3 years ago)!

Anyway, there are things I like about Steam and things I hate. We'll see what the future brings...

[simps]

Never had a problem with Steam. I like it. It wont keep me from buying games in the store but it makes downloading games like Halflife/orange box easier for me. Never had a problem.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.