Steam and people's opinions.

I've been using Steam since 2004 when I bought Half-Life 2. In those 9 years I think I may have had 2, maybe 3 issues, and nothing really serious.

Steam is pretty much the de-facto game delivery platform for many game developers for a myriad of reasons, including the stability of the platform.

One of the big pluses of Steam based games is that the game is always automatically updated... unless you stay off line. On the flip side, that can also be a bad thing, especially if a developer delivers a bad patch.

Also, a lot op people tend to blame Steam for game related issues when in actuality the blame lies with the developer, NOT Steam. Steam is merely the delivery platform, not the developer.

There is nothing wrong with Steam, and pretty much any serious gamer has it since as I said many game developers are using it as their delivery platform. Even EA used them till they started their own platform called Origin, which was to be competition against Steam, but so far that's yet to be seen. My opinion.

Steam = Good

Wishmaster said:

Mine shows 163 games ATM ... But I joined Steam in 2006 or 2007. Not a very long time, but long enough to build up a decent sized library.

Man I've been with Steam longer than you but don't have nearly the amount of games you have. I'm only sitting at 33

On the flipside I tend to buy purchase physical copies of my games so not everyone is going to register through Steam.

BTW I forgot to mention another good thing about Steam is that you can activate certain games to register with Steam. I just added Unreal Tournament 3 the other day and would up downloading the Black Edition of the game, which includes extras.

Activating a Product on Steam. Only certain games can be activated though - Retail CD Keys

I would by the DVD. I bought MW3 from steam and it took all day to download and if somethings happens to your PC and Windows needs to be re-installed, all of those games will have to be re downloaded taking a great deal of time.

Dude said:

You can also add non-steam shortcuts to you list, and still be able to use steam functions in non-steam games.

Yeah I knew about that part, I just forgot to mention it.

Gary said:

I would by the DVD. I bought MW3 from steam and it took all day to download and if somethings happens to your PC and Windows needs to be re-installed, all of those games will have to be re downloaded taking a great deal of time.

What Solar said, plus you could always install your Steam games on a different drive so that should you have to reinstall the OS, all you have to do is reinstall the Steam app and point it to the games drive... whalla.... no steam games need to be downloaded again.

I've done it plenty of times.

Golden said:

Use the STEAM backup facility guys:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_...8794-yphv-2033

That works I suppose, never used it myself.

Anyway if you keep your Steam games separated from the OS drive it's just simpler and quicker to just reinstall the Steam app and point it to Steam's game directory. With that, no games need to be re-downloaded since the drive was never touched.

I point this method out because as more and more people move to SSD drives, most will also wind up getting a spinner drive for the games. With this, you end up with your Steam games, and any other games, on a separate drive from the OS drive.