Steam Game Purchases

Recently, I decided to start using the Steam service to buy games that I wanted.  Here is my experience so far.

Steam is a web based purchase and download service mostly for PC games.  It allows you to buy a game and download it to your PC instead of having to go to the store to buy a copy.  It also has a full community section in it so that you can keep in contact with other friends that may use Steam.

Steam originally started out more as a way to eliminate piracy as running a game that requires Steam or that you bought on Steam also requires that you are online and that you have a valid account.  If you are lacking in either way, you will not be able to start and play your games.  I will now direct you to a VERY good writeup on Steam in reference to anti-piracy.  TweakGuides Article.  I recommend reading the entire article but I have linked to the page with the info recgarding Steam.

So far, I have bought a total of 20 or so games and I have not had a negative experience yet.  The newest game I bought was Left 4 Dead and the game that got me to get onto Steam was Half Life 2.  HL2 was also the first game that REQUIRED Steam.  I bought HL2 because I finally wanted to play it.  L4D was a guaranteed buy because the demo was awesome and was made available via Steam.

Installation of games bought on Steam are very nearly justification alone for a service like Steam.  You buy the game and it simply shows up on your list of games you own.  From there, you choose to install it and when you do, it starts downloading the game and then installs it all nice and automagically.  There is even an option to do a backup of all your currently installed games so you can avoid all of the downloading if you need to reinstall you PC or if you get a new one.  I have used this feature and it works quite well.  The nicest part of it is that you can choose to make the backups into chunks small enough to fit onto DVDs or CDs or whatever you want them to fit on.

Over the Christmas holidays, the one thing that I noticed was the sales.  Wow!!!  They had a ton of more modern games on for about 20 to 30 percent off but the biggest deal was the fact that they had a pile of still fun games from 3+ years back that were bundled together for a very compelling $22.  They also had titles from the 7 to 10 year ago range for as little as $0.99!!!  Now granted it does not address the one pricing issue I do have.  That is the fact that where there is no shipping or materials cost, there should be a lower price for the new release games than at the stores.  The infrastructure to run the Steam system cannot cost that much and allows for access to a much larger instant audience as it lets one preorder the game and have the download staged and started before it is even in the stores and on the release day, your installed copy goes live.  Any needed patches are automatically downloaded on that day.

Which leads me to the next great thing about Steam.  Patches.  On todays games, patches can get big.  REALLY big.  Company of Heroes has over 2.5 GB of patches to download if you buy the game at the store.  However, if you get it on Steam, it downloads at whatever the latest patch level is and if there are new patches, they are downloaded automatically.  This beats the pants off of the old struggle to go and find the patches, download them and then install them.  There are some tradeoffs like not being able to easily control exactly what patch level you want to be at but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a great deal in my opinion.

If you have not tried Steam yet, I suggest you do.  I have had a wonderful overall experience so far…