Steam: General Discussion

[Juiposa]

Steam, as many of you know, is a very important part of a PC gamer's system. Why it has never garnered a thread such as this, I do not know, but I figured I would.

This thread can be used to discuss anything in relation to Steam, sales, new products, updates, outages, your collection, freebies, recommendation from the store and the lot.

Normal rules apply.

On to discussing!


Side note: If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this OP, I'd great appreciate it. Or mods if you just want to make any changes yourselves that's welcome too.

To start, today, after buying Metro 2033, I noticed Napoleon: Total War was in my library, but not downloaded and having a tag of "two days left". Unannounced freebie of such a game! I'll take it! Anyone else get this? It's not on the front page or anything.

Anywho, downloading it now, will be playing it in less than 10 minutes 👍

It's a free weekend for the game! And it's half price all weekend, since I have it downloaded already, I will be buying it.

 

[Submerged]

.... and that's how Steam gets its money with those free weekender play sessions of those games.

I also have Steam, but it was generally as a way of getting fairly recent and old games, rather than newer ones. I kinda got fed up of waiting for CD or DVD games to come down in price and decided that download options (Steam and other retails) would be the way forward.

Lately, I've got quite a few but I have noticed that I don't always play all the games. It is largely depends on my moods what I actually play. Additionally, having to be online most of the time can be annoying (I know you can set Steam to be "offline", but you still need to dial home every so often).

Some of their deals are rather good value, as it ticks the easy purchasing option for me and the price requirements are relatively low, depending on the games.

Really big bugbear about Steam. If they fail, you can't play your games. There is no way of getting anything back if they fold. At least if you had CDs or DVDs, you could still play the games (with difficulties of Operating Systems if they are old!).

 

[sesselpupser]

To be fair, though, Valve would have to do something incredibly stupid to go under at this point, they're practically running a monopoly.

I have >200 games on Steam thanks to huge sales, indie bundles that register on Steam and DLC that bizarrely counts as new games. Of those I've played maybe 10 or fewer for any decent amount of time... But it's nice to know I've got almost every game I've ever played or have wanted to play plus some that are supposed to be good that I've never touched (like Bastion and a few others). I can count on one hand the number of times I've paid more than £10 on a game, too: Mass Effect 2, Fallout New Vegas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sniper Elite V2 and Race 07 (with GTR Evo and Race On). Borderlands 2 and possibly Max Payne 3 will be additions to that list this year I think.

Oh and you all need to get Alien Swarm, it's free, made by Valve and it's really good fun.