Steam (the gaming kind)

[glenos]

I'm curious to know how steam works. My son wants to get terraria for the PC and he can get it from a shop on CD/DVD or from steam, but I have NFI how steam works, can anyone enlighten me?

 

[Mong.]

Steam is basically an online games store, games library and social network in one. It started as a repository of sorts for one game developer (Valve) and has expanded into a huge platform for PC gaming. Basically, your son would make an account on Steam which would then store the games he would purchase from the store. The store is typically decently priced against brick and mortar stores, and often has exceptional sales. Steam also has some decent free to play games, so there's a decent amount of extra value to be had by using Steam. The social network element is both a community (which I never use) or a friends list, which has a chat and voice client and facilitates you playing online with friends.

I suspect there's a few people on Steam here from OCAU. I've been using it since Half Life 2 came out which must be 8-9 years, and I'm still on there, so that's probably a good indication of how I rate it.

 

[eggbert]

It's also work pointing out that with steam you only have to buy the game once and can play it on any other PC which had steam running on it (although you would have to download the games on each PC).

 

[filobiblic]

It's also work pointing out that with steam you only have to buy the game once and can play it on any other PC which had steam running on it (although you would have to download the games on each PC).

So there are versions for different OS including Mac and Linux.

 

[eggbert]

Not all games have Linux or Mac equivalents but more and more are getting ports. If there is a port for the game you are interested in you can generally buy one licence and play it on any of the os's

 

[JugV2]

I'm a steam user and have been since Half Life 2. Currently I have over 100 games on steam and I find it to be vastly superior to the old method of buying discs and then having to store them, lose them or they get scratched.
Steam is probably the pioneer of digital distribution and there are now several others in the market but steam is the most widely used.
I don't ever use the social community side of it. I just use it as a games wallet.

 

[Mong.]

Not all games have Linux or Mac equivalents but more and more are getting ports. If there is a port for the game you are interested in you can generally buy one licence and play it on any of the os's

I have a copy of Steam running on Ubuntu, and it has perhaps 5-10 games at the moment. Mostly Valve games, like Half Life, Team Fortress, maybe even Dota 2. It's slowly expanding, there are a couple of third party developers getting involved now so there should be some growth there. It is nice to have the option to play a couple of my purchased games on a different OS.

One thing to point out with Steam is that you're not actually BUYING the games. You don't own anything with Steam; you license it for use as long as they provide it. It's unlikely to go bust, and Gabe Newell has said that if Steam were to go bust as a service, they would provide the opportunity for users to claim their purchased games. Whether that's even a possibility, I don't know, but Steam is a huge community and business now, so I'm not concerned about the license vs. purchase nature of it. My 153 games is probably proof of my confidence.

 

[glenos]

My wife went and bought the CD today, I hadn't said anything about getting it on steam and I think for her a physical disc made more sense. Anywhoo, it turns out the disc is just a setup file which gets stem installed and setup and there is a code inside the box to activate the game on steam.

 

[eggbert]

Good job she got it now and not a few weeks back or you would be talking about the amount of money you "saved" during the summer sales.

I managed not to buy anything this year but did get gifted the game sleeping dogs by a friend.

Now I just need a PC I can play it on.

 

[Pjotr]

I hate to state the obvious, but steam is something you get out of a kettle.