Steam - why?
I don't really know much about steam, but I see from a lot of threads that it seems like a popular way to acquire games. My question is: why? From a quick look at their site it seems most things on there are more expensive than elsewhere, and lack other benefits such as physical media. Is there some huge benefit of Steam that I'm missing here? Or am I right in thinking people who use it are kind of.. "lacking a little consumer sense"?
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As for why would anyone prefer Steam over (e.g.) Telltale's own download service, I think the sole reason for that is to have all or most your games permanently in one service and one account. I didn't personally consider it important so I just paid up directly to Telltale for my Tales of Monkey Island and Sam and Max, but I still love Steam. Steam is just so convenient in so many ways. Automatic updates for all games don't hurt either!
-Steam doesn't give you a free hard copy of the game
-Having all your games on your hard drive taking up space
-Or wasting bandwidth downloading them again every time you decide to play something else.
also if you want phone support (even for billing) forget it, they dont offer ANY
I suggest you re-read the Steam TOS.
There are some solid reasons some people prefer to use Steam instead of buying everything retail, that's all.
Why have a collection of boxes sitting on a shelf in your house taking up square feet (that you pay for in rent)? Magnetic and optical storage have a very short lifespan. What happens when your collection gets attacked by CD-ROT? What if your house burns down, or gets broken into?
It seems strange to suffer through so much trouble just to have a physical copy of an intellectual property.
Couldn't agree more!
- You pay more than in a normal store.
- You don't actually get anything.
- If the price is $30, you have to pay €30 in Europe instead of €20 at current conversion rates.
- If you make a few typos in your serial and/or you have daemon tools installed, your entire account with all your paid for games is deleted without any kind of refund.
- You lose download quota to download it (yes, my country still has monthly volume limits)
- A crappy client is loaded at boot time, it sits in your system tray, interferes with everything and slows down your system to a crawl, randomly downloading stuff, especially while you're connected via mobile connection.
- If you're not online you can't play games.
- If they're not online you can't play games.
- If they find they made enough money, you lose everything.
ok, so I'm not really fond of steam...
So paypal them some American currency, chump.
Wrong. I have Daemon tools running and I've mistyped serials (although games purchased on Steam enter the serial automatically so you never have to mess with it, so this only applies to games you bought at retail) and this has never happened. You're just listening to liars. Buy a better computer, or don't run steam when you're not playing a game.
You don't sound like you really have any experience with Steam at all. You're just listening to a lot of old people talk about scary new technology.
With that said, the old method is inefficient. There is little reason to sell PC games in stores anymore, quite frankly. Granted, Steam is an imperfect product - but the fact that Steam has flaws does not mean that the concept of digital downloading is flawed. Like all new technology, its currently experiencing some growing pains. As technology develops, digital downloading will become far more reliable.
Um what. Steam has an offline mode. I haven't used it extensively but as far as I can tell it works the same as running it normally, except you obviously can't play multiplayer and it doesn't record your played time.
I originally got into Steam just because I could get copies of hard to find games for cheap. Then I discovered weekend deals and it all went downhill from there.
I spent about 3 months detached from the internet (and most of society), and I can confirm that steam worked just fine, and so did my games. I have used offline mode extensively.
Tying your license to a physical copy has many benefits. You can sell or trade your license, because it is in physical disc form. Until digital distribution channels allow you to remove a product from your account and sell, trade, or give it to another person, physical media will continue to have that extra value. This may not be an inherent benefit of the disc-based medium as much as it is a side-effect of the way in which digital distribution shops view digital licenses, but as long as this viewpoint is in place, it continues to be a benefit. In terms of games with limited installs from disc, this of course does not count, but those are receiving a lot of backlash lately and I'm seeing a lot more companies releasing their PC DVDs with only a disc check.
Optical and magnetic storage have a tendency to fail, it's true. But I have yet to have a CD or DVD fail on me personally, other than physically breaking. In that case, yes, a digital license on a cloud serer somewhere would be helpful. But I think you have a completely different risk with such services, and that being the service going down completely. While the liklihood of Steam going down anytime soon seems pretty silly at the moment, so does your house burning down or having a burglar snatch all of your DVDs, or all of your disc-based media suffering disc rot at the same time.
While physical media has its drawbacks, so do all current implementations of digital distribution. So far, the distribution model that is closest to perfection in my eyes is Telltales, providing the benefits of both forms of distribution.
We disagree here, as I don't believe that second-hand video game sales are a good thing for the video game industry. GameStop makes half as much money in a year as the entire game industry combined. Or if you prefer to think of it this way, GameStop has made more money from Halo than Bungie. We can make the situation more obvious by extending the second-hand video game market to its (consumer-GameStop) ideal situation where a single copy of a game is purchased first-hand and is resold second-hand 100,000 times.
I guess what I'm saying is fairly obvious, which is that the second-hand market flourishes at the expense of the first hand market. I prefer to give money to people who actually worked on a product, so I buy my games through Steam and other first hand channels. Your mileage may vary!
As an interesting sidenote my bro has a hard copy of it lying about so I tried to install from that, but it still required more updates anyway, which Steam automatically done. If it were a traditional version i'd have had to do all that gash myself
I like to buy the games from smaller studios directly, because I like supporting more indie efforts. But when you have something like Halo, the latest Mario game, or the latest EA offering, it's hard to feel a sense of altruism and support in favor of a price that is a good deal lower than a retail price that is static for long stretches of time after the game's release.
There's also the idea of what you're really buying. Does it retain value? From a purely practical standpoint, for the consumer, the physical copy retains transferable value while a digital one does not. It's kind of hard to argue, to the consumer, who approaches things from a consumer rather than a developer standpoint, that they should switch to this new form of ownership in which you pay the same price while getting no transferable value.
It's $5 USD in the US Steam store. And I'll never argue that Steam's sales are not excellent and a great value. Almost every single game on my Steam account was a sale item.
What is the greatest lie ever created? What is the most vicious obscenity ever perpetrated on mankind? Slavery... the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police... dictatorship... NO! It's the tool with which all that wickedness is built. Altruism. Whenever anyone wants others to do their work, they call upon their altruism. "Never mind your own needs," they say, "think of the needs of ..." of ... whoever. Of the state. Of the poor. Of the army. Of the king. Of God. The list goes on and on. How many catastrophes were launched with the words "think of yourself"? It's the "king and country" crowd who light the torch of destruction. It is this great inversion, this ancient lie, which has chained humanity to an endless cycle of guilt and failure.
My journey to TellTale was my second exodus. In 1919 I fled a country that had traded in despotism for insanity. The Marxist Revolution simply traded one lie for another. Instead of one man, the Czar, owning the work of all the people, ALL the people owned the work of all of the people. And so, I came to America, where a man could own his own work ... where a man could benefit from the brilliance of his own mind, the strength of his own muscles, the MIGHT of his own will.
I had THOUGHT I had left the parasites of EA behind me. I had THOUGHT I had left the LucasArts altruists to their Star Wars games and their... more Star Wars games. But, as the Valve fools threw themselves on Gabe Newell's sword for the good of the Half-Life, the Nintendo fanbois drank deeper and deeper of the Mario poison, spoon-fed to them by Miyamoto and his Wii Motion Plus.
And so, I asked myself, in what country was there a place for men like me? Men who refused to say yes to the parasites and the doubters. Men who believed that work was sacred and property rights inviolate. And then one day the happy answer came to me, my friends: there was NO country for people like me. And THAT was the moment I decided... to bui... er, go to TellTale!
Do you object to used book stores as well? How about public libraries?
"Public" utilities are a tool of the Parasite. Does not the author DESERVE to reap the benefits of the sweat of his brow? On the surface, the Parasite expects the doctor to heal them for free, the farmer to feed them out of charity. How little they differ from the pervert who prowls the streets, looking for a victim he can ravish for his grotesque amusement.
Likewise, charging money for a product or service instead of giving it away for free is a producer benefit, not a consumer one. What's best for the consumer doesn't always result in a sustainable industry for the producer. Ultimately both the consumer and producer suffer (fewer products, less competition, higher prices, &c.).
It's an interesting thing to consider. A pirate doesn't pay anybody. A second-hand market purchase actually pays the producer's competitor.
If there were a single used bookstore earning enough profit to rival the combined income of all publishing houses in the world, I might raise an eyebrow.
The problem is we treat intellectual property as goods, when in reality it has more in common with a service.
I totaly agree with you 100%. But I have a question what about those game that are hard to find, and can only be bought at a gamestop, and not on steam. I'm a fan of buying used games in some cases, like if it's hard to find or I don't have the money at the time and it's cheaper used.
But developers should still a get a profit off of it, if the second hand market is making more than the primary.
Look, at a certain point we all have to be honest with ourselves: Ultimately, digital copying and emulation is the only means by which games can survive long-term. Anything you try to do besides that will ultimately fail. It's an ironic reality that ultimately pirates preserve art. Eventually you will be playing your old games this way if you play them at all.
That isn't to say I condone piracy. I'm a very large consumer of games, and I know how important it is to support the companies that make them. But when we're talking 10, 30, even 30 years down the line, it doesn't matter how you bought the game anymore, you're probably not going to be just installing and running. How you enjoy your game right now is a temporary situation.
I think copyright should lapse into the public domain after 15 years of being out of print rather than 70, personally. It doesn't make sense that it's as long as it is now.
15 years would be way too short.
I agree that physical media is generally a waste of space, but I don't really see why someone would pay more not to have it. And in the case of Tales of Monkey Island, it was more expensive on Steam than on the Telltale store, which also has the advantage of letting you download the game straight from the website without another layer of software.
I can't really relate to this to be honest. Most of my games are in one service - that service being the windows start menu. If I played 40 games and formatted my hard drive every month it might be pretty useful to be able to download them all at once but.. naah. I'd probably prefer the physical media in that situation actually, because swapping DVDs is far quicker than waiting on 8gb downloads.
Then on the flipside, how many games would simply not exist today if not for piracy. How many retro compilations have come out that either used code from public emulators or used ROMs distributed illegally? It's quite a lot.
I know most people think companies have a big vault with all their source code in it, but they don't. It's insane to actually depend on people breaking the law in order for games to not be destroyed permanently. There needs to be a way to make that legal.
85% of silent films no longer exist in any form because no one bothered to preserve them once they were no longer commercially viable. It'd be a shame to see the same happen to games because we're cracking down to hard on crazy copyright crap for no good reason.
Bear in mind companies would be able to renew their copyrights for as long as they want. But they'd actually have to keep the game in print in one form or another to do so. Which could prove to be great for the industry because companies would be more likely to keep their library available.
1) Games are substantially cheaper on Steam. New Release games are released at $49.95 - $79.95, whereas at retail they are released at $110. Even with american prices that's still a big saving.
2) Most internet providers have a server with steam, so you can download games unmetered
3) They have weekly sales and you can often get games in combo bundles to save money
4) Pre-orders are released on the hour they are released, unlike retail stores where they release them the next morning. They also often include the first game as an incentive if you're buying a 2nd game.
5) It's a huge, safe website. Biggest game distributor on the web. So you can trust them with your credit card details.
6) It's got great community features, and it's really easy to gift games to friends (and cheaper too)
So people aren't lacking consumer sense, Steam is easier and cheaper.
Blame it on the Mouse.
Just allowing a company that may or may not even exist anymore have "dibs" on something to keep people from pirating it until 70 years after the author's death is just insanity in today's market where publishing is virtually free. Copyright was originally 10 years unless renewed, and then 28 years, and both of those numbers make more sense to me in 2009.
I agree. If you can't buy a game anymore, if it's no-longer for sale and isn't on something like Steam, then piracy is fine with me.
However, I think Steam (and the XBLA, Playstation Store etc) are going to keep retro games alive. Games on that service aren't going to be removed from sale, as they still make money and take up a small portion of the servers, servers update but the games don't get bigger, so a "massive" 1GB game is nothing after 5 years.
I don't know how copyrights work with digital distrubiton, but I think it's really good for finding games that are just so hard to find in stores.