Online Distribution System - Confirmed

[JobJenkins222]

I don't understand the antipathy from some members regarding Steam... From some of the comments it sounds like you tried it over three years ago when it was still a crusty beta, being run on a DSL server on one of the Developer's basement via your dial-up connection...

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a stubborn Old Fart that prefers to buy games in boxes, but, I have to let intellectual honesty prevail and tell you that for a product subject to as much flakiness as game software, where Fans expect it to run on millions of hardware configurations, some of them patently ridiculous -- services like Steam make sense and more importantly Steam now works very well for the vast majority who use it.

It also warrants mention that for the most part you'll only read forum posts by people having issues with a product or service, not success stories. The millions of Steam users that the service works flawlessly for aren't posting about how great it is, they're playing games, the service itself is transparent and about as important/unimportant to them as posting their hair color on a military games forum...

One great feature of Steam is that you can buy a game on CD/DVD, and use the product id/serial to download the game (it would be perfect IMHO if they'd just apply a discount the other way, so you could download and then get the media at a discount).

But why would you want to buy a CD and then download anyway? Well it turns out that direct downloads with the latest updates are a lot like slip streamed installations of Windows with Service Packs and Updates integrated; i.e. the game performs a bit better with all updates integrated at download, and you get the additional benefit of not having to dig out your media and risk beating it up...

Obviously Steam is not for everyone, but it can work, and work very well even for people on dial-up and even with very large games! I'm not kidding! Here's how: the downloader itself is very robust, supports stop, resume, and even repair, but if your impatient and want to get your game faster then a dial-up download Steam allows you to back up your game image, so, all you need is a friend that has broad-band and get him/her to download and back up the game image for you; then you can install it on your dial-up system. Updates are typically small fast downloads and come from one no hassle source (download stop, resume and repair apply here too), and there are none of the hassles of having to hunt for a decent download server, or having to re-download an entire patch because it's corrupt.

I'm not saying Steam is perfect, but statistically it's better behaved on as many systems as most well made games...

Very well said. I myself am primarily interested in LAN gaming so Steam would not fit what i want to do.

When i play lan with someone, i don't go buy an extra 6 disks and cd keys, i use the same one and swap the disks. That isn't something that can be done on steam. If a friend of mine has his own copy then thats up to him.

[Berghoff]

Jezus Hoak, are you trying to promote Steam with all those links in your post? Haha.

[Hoak]

LOL No! I just made a little VB DOS BB Code editor, and it whent crazy with the replace...

But I guess I tcan think of worse things to promote then Steam...

[Grunt_AS]

I have purchased mulitple pieces of software via download.....and all of them work just fine. As long as they give you all you need so you can make a CD yourself...for reinstalls..then how could this not work. You download the software...you get an install key....you install...you make a proper backup (including the key)...you go online and kill stuff......mmmmmm....mommy.. I WANT IT NOW!!!!!! *** .

[Dwarden]

in what way Steam preventing You to play on LAN ...

except You mean using SINGLE copy (ID/key) for multiple LAN computers ...

of course most of games trying to prevent that because of warez (avoiding master servers by using Hamachi etc) and such trend will grow ...

[Frederf]

Actually many games are specifically designed to allow more than one copy of the same purchased game for LAN gaming. Sword of the Stars was released without this but it was quickly fixed in a patch for example. LAN gaming is an excellent advertisement method and can actually _decrease_ pirating.

[Placebo]

This is not a steam thread yet again however it's being dragged that way, perhaps there is no point discussion any further the online distribution system until further information about it is released.