Someone at the LAN wasn’t sure what steam was, and so I promised to throw something up explaining it. If you make it to the end you’ve done well!
If anyone else wants a bit of extra info on a COGS topic, email us. Other ideas in the pipeline include game specific guides (if anyone wants to explain the controls for dwarf fortress to me I’d love to put that up!), LAN help, building pc’s, etc. If we really like what people write we might also submit it to the Epigram!
What is it?
Steam is the biggest online digital distributor of games. What that means is you can browse their catalogue of games, buy and then have it instantly available for download straight to your pc. Simple disk free installation and you’re good to go.
Why do we like it?
The reasons we like using steam are pretty varied. One of them is the pretty lame “because everyone else we know does”, but there are a couple of reasons which are a lot more pressing:
- Reasonable DRM
- Community features
- Price point
- Exclusive games
DRM
A lot of modern games have got some pretty hefty DRM on them which is designed to stop pirating, but in reality often does nothing more than inconveniencing legitimate players. Assassains Creed 2 springs to mind…
Steam on the otherhand is very reasonable. Once you have a game in your account it stays there. It’s available to download as many times as you want to, to as many computers as you like for as long as you need to.
By default steam additionally keeps all of the games up to date with the latest patches, and if you’re worried about not always having an internet connection don’t be; steam can boot up in offline mode so you can play single player games whenever you like.
Community
Although there are a few useful community features, the ones which gets the most use all centre around the friends feature. As in most applications you maintain a list of people you enjoy playing with and can see a a glance what game they’re playing if its a steam one, and if you have it you can usually join the server they’re on with a simple click, and if you don’t have it you can view the page where you can buy the game if you so wish.
Price
The main reason we like steam has to be the price. The software itself is free, but more importantly steam has a habit of selling games for a tiny fraction of their true value, and the Christmas sale has filled many members with games they’ve still not gotten around to playing. I can assure people that this did not cost this much! In particular I feel I should point out that there is currently a sale on for thanksgiving which is offering both single games and multi packs – see the COGSBay section in the forum if you need some people to share with!
Games library
The variety of games available is staggering.
- Exclusives – Half Life, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal…
- Top selling series – Call of Duty, Dawn of War, Supreme Commander 2 (alas, not the original), Civilization, Fallout, Dragon Age, Street Fighter…
- Indie games – World of Goo, Plants vs Zombies, Penumbra Overture, Beat Hazard, Audiosurf …
- Golden Oldies – Deus Ex, Age of Wonders, Sonic the Hedgehog, X-Com, Ecco the Dophin, Jedi Knight, , Monkey Island, Quake, Doom, Heretic, Hexen…
Combine those with sales that usually knock between 70 and 90 per cent off the price and hopefully people can see why steam is so popular!
Steamworks
Finally a feature of steam which makes disorganised people like myself particularly fond of steam is the “steamworks” initiative. What it boils down to is that select games can be bought in a store as usual – disk, manual, case, etc – and then simply by entering the CD key into steam you can then have the game permanently linked into your steam account, which means a game can be installed simply from the CD key, no need for the disk at all!
