Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.mcvuk.com/features/808/OPINI ... l-vs-Steam is a great rebuttal to the recent handwringing by "retail giants" that Steam is killing the retail PC gaming market.

Some choice quotes:

Valve have said that (some) retailers have told them that when a game goes on sale on Steam, the exposure sees B&M retailers also sell more of that title. At normal price.

I think that Steam us a brilliant system, although I am more likely to impulse buy from a shop, it is the immediacy and the conemience of being able to get a game quickly when you are discussing it with a chum.


Those figures are astounding, though.

Hmm. I totally agree with that.

(and yes I have read it haha).

The problem as I saw it with PC games were the amount of returns. Basically people going in there, not reading the minimum requirements and getting it home only to find it doesn't work. At which point they return it, get told to fuck off and WW3 breaks out.

For them to whine about that is a bit stupid.

I like Steam, I do. But with the restrictions placed on my connection I can only like it so much. Placing an online order for a game takes far less bandwidth than using Steam although I do use it where possible.

Good thing is that most of the games I buy now are all Steam compliant any way and auto attatch themselves to it. There's a great social vibe on there too, I've spent many nights just voicing with mates and forgetting to actually play a game

Oh, also, several fantastic indies have said that Steam has made them lots of money/saved them.

Introversion has said that they would have definitely shut up shop without Steam.

Also, this is what highstreet retail think of PC Gaming.

Conversely, this is exactly the attitude that pisses people off about digital downloads. 7 times the return, for less effort on behalf of the company, and no actual physical media for the end client. By all means take some extra profit, but how about reducing the price to the end consumer as well, they might find that digital downloads increase even further if they were a reasonable price to start with!

I do have a lot of respect for Valve, I have to grudgingly admit (I say 'grudgingly' because my Englishness demands that I hate the successful), and for all that I dislike about it, I can't deny that Steam provides a tremendously popular and respectable service that far outstrips that of pretty much every game shop I've been to.

The bottom line is that retailers are living in a free market environment. It's how they made their money for years, and the fact that the competition are beating them simply by doing a better job is a pity for the 90% of employees who just want to get on with their jobs, but otherwise, y'know, tough shit. Do a better job at competing, or quit whining and fuck off.

You mean like in high profile, enormous sales, for example?

viewtopic.php?p=491488#p491488
viewtopic.php?p=489842#p489842
etc etc -- there are loads.

Yes, exactly that, hence my point.
Sell the games at a reasonable price point to start with and people will buy them, as shown by the success of the sales.

The last time I was in a games shop, the PC section was relegated to an area the size the CPC was getting in 1991/2. Just a couple of shelves at the back of the store, with a sign above it saying "Beware of the leopard".

Isn't that likely to be an even bigger problem with Steam though? Back of box spec requirements are more prominent than they are within the Steam store, that's for sure.

At present I have no games that I bought in a box installed on my Windows partition. I am surprised too!

Isn't it a lot to do with the way gaming shops have treated customers like idiots over the years and now there is an alternative people will use it and shove two fingers up at places like GAME when they walk past or is that just me?

Some of those places can be appalling if you are a girl, you get patronising looks and the "are you sure it will run on your system" speach, went in there a while back with The Girl to buy a PS3 game and the guy on the counter went "are you sure this is the right one" "?" "this is the playstation version" "?" "we also do this on the wii" "does the wii version come with a free wii then?" "?" "nevermind" *walks out*

Yeah, standard prices for Steam are pretty high, but they have fantastic sales all of the time.

And Steamworks retail games are often discounted in the same way that retail ones are.

I have a few complaints with steam, but nothing major.

Steam rocks.

Retail shit on the PC for years, and wouldn't have cared if it'd died completely as a games platform (I guess the fact that there hasn't been a resale market for PC games has annoyed them, since that's where they make loads of their money from) - it may well not be an exaggeration to say that Steam has saved the PC as a viable gaming platform.

On top of which, it's just so fucking convenient, it's easy, it works.

I bought Hot Pursuit for my 360 a couple of weeks ago, had to make a 32 mile round trip in my car (so add on £10 in petrol), park up, trudge down to a shop, wait in a queue to get served by some arse who WILL NOT BE STOPPED IN DELIVERING HIS SCRIPTED SUGGESTIVE SELLS, walk back to car, drive home, install the whole fucking game to my 360's hard drive anyway and then still have to have the disc in the drive for it to work - fuck me, it's neanderthal.

On Steam, you see what you want, you pay your money, it delivers the game to you as fast as your connection can handle (I could have downloaded Hot Pursuit in the time it took me to go and physically buy it and install it), and from them on in it patches/updates it automatically, it allows you to install it on as many computers as you like, it has an offline mode for laptop users or non-net connected PCs, it increasingly supports Cloud Saving, it's got friends integration along with all that 'console stuff' like invites and join in game, and it's constantly got fantastic sales on.

The sooner the consoles move away from boxed retail product, the better, boxes and discs are a fucking annoyance, nothing more.

Yeah I know we can get dewy-eyed about our Megadrive collections and shit like that, but seriously, apart from take up room in storage, what are they actually any good for?......

Retail boxed PC games are unpredictable beasts that'll just as readily render your computer completely useless as work right. I don't even like Steam (in fact, I resent Steam), but I like boxed games even less.

Heh, just logged into Steam now, there's a big weekend sale on, one of the games in the sale is DIRT 2 which can be had for a colossal....... £3.75.

play.com have it at £17 on PS3, £25 on 360, or £18 on PC.

I wasn't a huge fan of the original DIRT but it did have potential, for £3.75, I'll take a chance on DIRT 2 (I paid more than that for a toasted panini on Saturday.)

Comments like this mystify me.

I don't think I've EVER had my computer be 'rendered useless' by a game (and nor do I know anyone who has), it was possible in DOS I guess, but since the advent of Windows, particularly XP and then Vista and then 7? Frankly, I doubt it.

And what's to resent about Steam?

By all means express an opinion, but statements like the one above need some backing up or else the call of 'bullshit!' is entirely justified.

Monster Truck Madness ruined my Win95 machine. I had a rather frought reinstallation before my dad found out.

Yes. And Steam don't give a crap tbh. However usually people that know how to use Steam know how to properly operate a PC and what they have in it. There are still big issues of course like compatability problems.

American sues Steam in game doesn't work properly and wins shocker.

#entry366147">http://forum.overclock3d.net/index.php? ... ntry366147

The case is proven!

How long ago was that, to the nearest decade?

Oi don't take the piss. I still have both motorcross madness and Midtown madness in my game wallet

Also this : Metro 2033. How to watch your PC shit itself.

I used to resent Steam for the simple reason the it is a complete surrender to the "buy the license, not the game" business model. But I have to admit that it works very well, and that Valve have done everything they can to make it as easy to swallow as possible. Especially now that they have added cloud saving and Mac support.

And anyway, DRM schemes mean that the "buy the license" bit is true for any PC game now. And a console game will only be playable for as long as you have a working console, and it should now be clear that current consoles aren't built to last very long (on purpose, I imagine). It is also highly unlikely that the next generation of consoles will be backwards compatible.

Not to mention XBLA and the PS3 equivalent. I still wonder what is going to happen once Microsoft and Sony pull the plug on the current networks and people realize that from one day to the next they will never again be able to play any of the stuff they have been buying over the years. I wonder what my own reaction will be at that moment, because I've bought loads of stuff myself.

In the end, Steam seems to have the edge.

Probably more that the game required various updates (drivers etc) and one of them broke the system - and no i've not had a game do that but i dont really use my pc for any gaming other than emulation.



And if you read Lewies bit on vg247 this week you could have the 360 version for another £1.22

http://www.vg247.com/2010/11/29/lewies- ... r-a-fiver/

Number of times a publisher has pulled a license out from under me: 0
Number of times I've had to rebuy a game because I've lost the media: several.

This only proves that your incompetence outweighs publisher evil. When you factor in that Activision and EA are cunts I'm afraid you don't look so clever.

Sweet burn.

It would depend on what the Windows version he was using was. 95 and 98 first ed were bloody awful as Microsoft had just introduced Direct X. Which in the initial releases was terrible.

I remember killing a 95 install trying to get Daytona USA running. It was one of the very first games labelled "Games for Windows 95" that could not be ran back to back in Windows and DOS.

It didn't help that 95 and 98 were both pretty awful until heavy patches came out either.

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AE. Dirt 2 is in a completely different league to Dirt. The Baja shit is quite annoying but the actual rally is fantastic. It was all a bit, how do you put it? stiff in Dirt.

Half life made my computer blue screen on boot until it was reinstalled.

Think it was XP but could've been 2000.

That's still not recent enough! Unless your PC died in the last WEEK because of a game, I do not recognise your example.

It's the rules man, nothing I can do about it.

Dirt 2 is all brum brum! Nyyyyyyyooooooooowwwwwww round the corner, bumpy bumpy bumpy.

In cockpit view, HUD off.

You forgot "Duuuuuude, that drift was freakin' SICK, bro!"

There's actually nothing quite like driving through a dirty filthy puddle and seeing it spray all over the windscreen and then being wiped away.

Windshield

I understand how people can dislike Steam due to the whole DRM thing, but the way I tend to see it now is that DRM is a fact of life these days. At least Steam's DRM is some of the least obtrusive out there. Plus Steam's other awesome more than makes up for it.

I just wish Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit was available through it. EA have their own digital download store now, which is presumably the reason, but I'd much rather get it through Steam.

I just discovered that some Steam games don't even use Steam's DRM (presumably it is the publishers choice).

AI War, if you get it from Steam, you can still just find the .exe and run it without Steam running.

Try a cork son.

As for DRM? I'll take Steam's approach over a spinning disc symbol (Securom) or simply not being able to play the game I paid for (Securom, safedisc ETC) any day.

That's actually one thing I love about Steam. Just simply load up my game list and play. No whirring DVD drive, no fuss.

I would normally say that I have little interest in PC gaming, but looking at my Steam account last night, I see that I've now bought from them fifteen times. Admittedly, it has all been stuff that was heavily marked down in their sales, but it's still fifteen purchases I wouldn't have made at all otherwise. There are hardly any places left that seem to sell any great selection of PC titles, with shops favouring consoles so much, so it makes sense for digital distribution to be the way to go.

Managed to resist the 50% of Peggle Deluxe that's on at the moment... not going there again!

Lots of Paradox Interactive games are like this.

edit: Thinking about it, there have been very few instances where I was unable to play any of my digitally downloaded games, but I definately remember having lots of trouble with secure rom on some shitty 4x CD ROM drive I had back in the day.

'cept for gog, getgames, direct "2" drive, probably a few others I've forgotten. Actual installers > directly installing the game via a client. If I'd bought most of the games I've bought this year on steam, I still wouldn't be able to play them.

But again, I acknowledge that this isn't an issue for most people, so it's hard to condemn them for it given their generally respectable behaviour.

GOG only sort of counts, and based on everything I've seen, more people have had trouble with Direct2Drive than any ever had with steam. Even with Steam being more popular.

GamersGate tend to have pretty happy customers too.

Relevant to this topic:
SavyGamer Awards 2010

Obviously skewed and only a tiny fraction of gamers, but it seems more people are universally happy with Steam/Valve than any other corporate entity in the games industry.

For £3.75, DIRT2 really is a seriously good chunk of gaming.

In some respects I think I should be fucking paid £3.75 for enduring the 35 minutes of mandatory Windows LIVE updating that it wanted to do (which required two restarts of the game and three lots of signing in to my profile, since the game/Windows Live randomly decided to forget some or all of my sign-in preferences on every restart, if I hadn't already had an XBox Live user ID to use, I fear murder may have been involved, I lost count of how many times I had to click on 'YES I ALLOW THIS PLEASE JUST START MY FUCKING GAME YOU ONEROUS CUNT' buttons) - HOWEVER:

Once I actually had the bastard running, it was just like the good old days of PC gaming, Hot Pursuit on the 360 had me getting used to that 30FPS sluggish and 'fuzzy' look that games have these days, but here was a game with immaculate levels of game world and model detail, rendered at 1900x1200 with 8xAA and the game on the default 'ultra' setting, managing an average of 58FPS in the benchmark and a low of 43FPS, so always faster and smoother than the 360 version of any comparable racer, and at a massively improved detail setting.

It's got all the console fireworks and light and sound of modern games, but it chucks a massive dollop of PC processing power at it too, so that even my distinctly mid-range PC can make it look like a proper work of art, especially when compared with the increasingly creaking 360/PS3 consoles.

I still love my 360, Pac Man CE DX (as an example) is almost worth the price of entry alone - but the 'current gen' consoles really aren't up to it, and they're showing it.

The two things I dont like about Steam are:

1. New games are almost always more expensive than retail despite being cheaper to provide and

2. Not being able to play two separate games online which I have purchased on the same account at the same time in the same house. eg, if I wanted to play l4d2 and the young fella wanted to play counterstrike on his pc it is not possible.

Other than that I love Steam.

so since i know have a steam capable mac (a macbook pro), i wonder who's active on steam, and which games you're playing that are crossover playable , i'm romanista345 on there...
first game i bought was flightcontrol HD ... lot's of planes there..

I'm "lasermink", unsurprisingly. Anyone here, feel free to add me.

JC set up a Beex group on Steam, so you should join that! I'm Zio360 on there BTW.

How do I does that?

Um, yeah. Can't remember. Something to do with the Community section of the Steam client. I might nip home in my lunch break, in which case I'll remind myself how to do it and let you know.