Steam appreciation thread
 

I feel Steam is not getting the love from Abandonia. In fact, its still pretty much disgust, fear and hatred for some reason. For those people who still think like that, I advice pulling their head out of the ground, because, simply put, Steam is awesome!

Yeah, I didn't like Steam first place. It was heavy, clunky and it ate quite a lot of RAM. That was over 2 years ago though, and my quantity of ram has quadrupled. Not to mention it has been improved over the years and it runs great for me at least.

However, the real gold is the games available and the prices. I realized around January that my Visa works on Steam and as of today, I've made 19 purchases (Plus Mount & Blade Warband, but that was offline purchase), all of which were easy to purchase and couple of which were ridiculously cheap. Hell, If I didn't prefer hard copies over download-only, I'd probably own the entire Steams catalog of classics by now. Then there's the weekly deals, weekend deals, daily deals, Summer/Christmas sales....man those chew up people's bank account. A lot of times they offer whole bunch of games with the price of one.

Not to mention there is a great balanced selection of new games, old games and indy games. Steam has done a lot of good for the independent gaming scene (check out the Portal 2's potato sale, where bunch of indy games were brought together to promote Portal 2). It even managed to save Introversion (Makers of Darwinia, Uplink and Defcon) from the brink of bankrupt.

You have to be online to use it? So what! If you cant go online then play something else. "But oooh, its DRM and I hate DRM!" Oh just shut it and show some trust to a developer for a change, rather than taking your time to torrent everything. GOG has better selections and is DRM free? Maybe, but that depends on point of view. GOG is pretty much for old-school lovers. As for DRM.....well, lets just say GOG's games are popular downloads at Underground Gamer.

So get into program and learn to love Steam! It is worth it.

I'm in the same boat as you, a few years ago it gave me horrible, horrible moments. I'm still not a fan of having to activate games with steam etc, and I totally disagree with you about the DRM thing, but I've got to say, this time around the service has impressed me. Particularly when I was able to transfer my games ridiculously easily to a new machine after the first one died painfully.

Also, dive in and join the AB steam group you hooligans! :D
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Abandonia

DOSBox and Hamachi are the only two things I need, Steam is only a luxury toy I play with occasionally.

There's only one thing that really bugs me with Steam, and that's steamworks-only games.

By this I mean games like Empire: Total War, Batman: Arkham Asylum and so on. Non-Valve games that are tied to the Steam distribution platform. It pushes people towards Steam in a way that no other distributor can compete with fairly.

Their dominance is cause for concern, but the other distributors really need to up their game as well.

I do use Steam though, to take advantage of some of the deals. Also useful to have an account if you're looking for multiplayer gaming. From what I've heard, it's far better than similar services (Gamespy, Games for Windows Live)

At the moment, I use Good Old Games, GamersGate, Steam and possibly Origin (I used the EA Download Manager to get Mass Effect 2 (free gift from a friend), so I guess that has become an Origin account?).

And here I am, ol'school gamer.
Bye bye flea markets were you can dig through piles of (older) games, bye bye second hand markets etcetera etcetera blah blah.

And of course bye bye abandonware.

And yet, I guess it's progress, after all, sooner or later (prob will be sooner then later) we'll all work in the 'clouds' , so yeah, I guess that steam and alike are the future.

Can't stop progress, isn't it?

Progress? There is not much progress in the games industry right now, more like regress. But we had that in an other thread already. Just to connect it with Steam - games are a dying branch and DRM is just one of it's signs. I won't ever support DRM, because its model on Steam was inspiration for some other, even more annoying and crippling methods of other publishers, I'm sure you all know what those are.
I might begin using Steam for games, but there's GameStop shop here where I can get pretty much every recent and few years old game. No thanks.

Some of us don't live in places where they stock games in our language blah blah blah, Steam is neat for that.

Yes I agree with that :)

So far so good... I took advantage of two special offers: the whole UFO/XCOM series for 5 €, although I've only played XCOM1 so far, and I figured from the start how to extract the files and place them in my usual virtual C: mount; and Portal for free I think--which I haven't played yet either? I've been toying with the idea of playing the Civ5 demo and see if I like it, it's only available through Steam that I know.

It's a perverse mechanism.