Opinions on STEAM

[pmistry 0]

I personally hate this service, after I picked up Half Life 2 and installed it, I had to create a new user account, register my CD Key, get updates installed (thank goodness I got broadband), and I had to wait for my files to get decrypted. Took about an hour before I got to play Half Life 2. Good game and even though I had no real problems with STEAM. I dislike and I hate having it running in the tray as it occupies 20 megs of memory and goes about its own business downloading updates.

 

For modem users, installing mandatory updates over STEAM could take days.

 

No offline patch installation pisses me off royally.

 

Steam...I don't like it, and I am worried that if something goes awry my copy of Half Life 2 may not work anymore and there goes 60 bucks for the game. Also what about a few years from now and I want to play Half Life 2 but I haven't used my STEAM account for years, will it still work????

 

 

[jmmijo 1]

Hmm, my install/decrypt seemed to take about 30~35 minutes

 

I do agree that having Steam running in the BG is not good as I don't always want to play MP games so there.

 

Perhaps Vavle will get feedback on this and correct it later on. I do however understand that they are trying to maintain the least amount of piracy but I don't think it's going to work as I've seen half a dozen different cracks on usenet, all purporting to allow you to use HL2 without Steam.

 

As for the account working/not-working after a couple of years of inactivity, I can't really say. What does Vavle say about this ?!?

 

I didn't find anything specific about account inactivity on the STEAM helpdesk site

[Wicked101 0]

I know what you mean, I got HL2 2 weeks ago, it took about 15 minutes to activate and another 30 minutes to activate Counter Strike. I finished HL2 about 10 minutes ago, it was pretty cool, the best I've ever played.

[Malaris 0]

Yeh mine took about the saem amount of time jmmijo

 

just some brief points about steam

 

1. Half Life 2 can be played with steam in Offline mode

2. You can turn some updates off (EG the latest one for CSS)

3. The memory that steam uses up IS included in the requierments for running HL2

4. Steam gives you latest gaming news/updates available, lets you download HL2 deathmatch and Codename Gordon.(extra games you don't have to pay for)

5. Steam servers are ultra fast!! 8)

6. It has good protection against piracy.

 

As you can probably tell, I think steam is a good idea, and personally I think this is the way forward for many games to have not the entire playable game on a CD, as this will also cut down on piracy.

 

 

I realise people seem to be having lots of problems with steam, but it has been working fine for me from day 1

 

[DosFreak 2]

I really don't want to see a flame-war about Steam on this forum. I ask that everyone go on over to www.arstechnica.com. Go to the Gaming Forums and read the HUGE STEAM thread over there. Discussing Steam yet again is quite pointless when all the information is already there.

 

With that said.

 

So to sum some of it up:

Online distribution is great but the Steam execution is terrible, Valve/The Internet obviously isn't set up well for the type of distribution they are doing, The Steam EULA is terrible, Paying full price for Steam games is crap, Steam is a bloated POS, It would be terrible if EA/Blizzard, etc. came up with their own Steam equivalent (Tons of Steam like systems to contend with), You can't sell your HL2 unless you sell your account, Distribution via Steam provides developers an incentive to push software out early to beta test, Jumping through hoops to play in Offline mode (authorization issues).

 

Did I leave anything out?

[Malaris 0]

Okay I won't harp on about steam but just one point.

 

All I had to do to play Half Life Offline was to select the offline mode.

 

What hoops/authorization issues did you mean?

[jmmijo 1]

Well I have not had any issues with the Steam connection problem that so many others seem to be having, however, since I'm running XP and I have it set to auto-connect to Steam on boot-up, it can't connect until I connect with my Email app or browser first.

 

Guess that thing about not loading the TCP stack is correct

[DosFreak 2]

Looks like there are different spellings on the net. I'll stick in my DVD and check out the subtitles.

[Brian Frank 0]

You hit the bullseye, dosfreak. The idea isn't the issue, it's how Valve has made it work out. The thing is that you have to install Steam, and if it wasn't such a problematic piece of software, I don't think you'd see nearly as many complaints. It's terribly slow at unlocking the files. The vast majority of people have paid for their copy, and if Valve insists on Steam, then they need to make it faster and have more bandwith available. Nov 16 was utter hell to register.