Steam: Valve's best move yet?

www.bit-tech.net/column/25

 

Good article. And i think the end point sums it all up well, HL2 better be good!
I did hate steam at first because it wouldnt work at all and all i got was useless and regurgitated answers like 'check XP's firewall setting' and 'open these ports' Only after a huge trawl through google and some random luck i stumbled across some ports that Valve dont tell you to open. And now it works!
Steam is a great idea, however i think this type of thing will take on a bit better when everybody has a mean ass 8mbit connection

 

good article more game makers need an online distro sytem. also online music still cost about the same as a cd at aound 99cents a song

 

I think Steam S**** myself. There are always Problems with it. Like everytime I uninstall Steam & then Reinstall Steam my Friends list is Gone. Steam likes to run Errors sometimes During Game Play & most of the time my Steam will Stop Responding when Joining a Server.

There is a Few Cool items about Steam tho, the Feature to Update with Ease & the PreLoading Feature. As for using Steam in the Future I really have no Choice since my Favorite Game in the World is going to be Using it...

If I had the Power Steam would Dissapear

 

I really like steam myself. I don't have to worry about CDs and that alone makes it worth it. It tends to be pretty stable for me (save CS:S which has its bugs of course). Yeah it has its issues but most of them seem to have disappeared so it's good enough for me. I wish more games would let me have these CD-less setups.

 

Good article. I wasnt too keen to swap over when won actually died. I had tryed it before and it well it sucked back then, but now i love it.

Go steam!

 

It's not good news for my little 56k connection.. I don't want to download HL2

 

lol , My steam Crashed when i tried to preload HL2.
Also.. i miss 1.5 . they shut down the servers..

 

If they used a bittorent-esque system, they would have the ability to distribute the game at high speeds to every gamer who wanted in with practically no cost compared to any other method of distribution.


I eagerly await the one to do this first. Surely it would save a ton of money. Offer gamers 5 bucks for seeding for three days, or something.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong (as if you wouldn't) but I don't believe you have to redownload everything after a reinstall, as the article says. You can back up the steam directory and just reload it after the reinstall.

 

Nice article, personaly I havent had any problems with steam.
Well some small ones, the only time I seem to have a problem is when the cs patches ar out, and waaay to many geeks try to download from steam content servers (nr23 )

But the idea of having a platform for authentication and distribution is sweet

\\Balder

 

The main problem with it that I see is the inability to run games in Steam without being connected to the 'net.

If you're running a LAN party, and you don't have 'net access, this can be a MAJOR stumbling block.

Similarly, if you have a LAN party, ideally you'd want some way of hosting the files locally so your 'net connection (If you have one) isn't raped by many users updating. A sort of "Local Network Cache", if you will.

 

Unless if you have the 1.6 LAN version, you dont need internet.

 

We held a lan the other week and played cs fine with no net access its painless you just dont log out of steam just close it and it will go into offline mode.

as for steam it can be a flakey beast at the best of times but I do think valve have been very clever in going for this with everything. It could mean big money for them in the future. Sure when massive numbers of people try to get the same file at the same moment its a nightmare but so was it with patches etc.

One of the biggest pluses of steam for valve has to be the anti piracy aspect as it has to be the best method of securing their products. If bypassed they can update it whenever the feel like it with having to release a patch.

 

I've never had a problem with steam (touch wood i guess) and i'm on 28.8k (pair gain - telstra - australia, thankyou) dialup, so it took 5days to update all my games, so i dont think i will preload hl2

Unless i can copy the preload files at a lan and make steam incorporate them (possible??? maybe a update steam full cache download)

i think steam is the way of the future, if people stopped bagging it because everyone else is bagging it and actually tries it now that it is working alot better.

Oh and if the big telco companies in australia stopped giving people shaped unlimited (10gb or 20gb) cable and dsl, it might work better, and get rid of my pair gain, and i'd use steam to buy games, instead of just patching and playing through it.

A bit-torrent system would be nice, if it were completely secure, which would be a big thing for valve. And to above, yeah just copy your steam folder, then when you reinstall overwrite all the new files with your copied version and there you go.

 

Nice article! A couple of things though:

In the Steam Developer Interview on Gamespot, Gabe details the reasons: chiefly because Valve got tired themselves of the hours spent finding and installing patches, and because the sheer amount of content they and other were producing was unmanageable.

It's illegal for Valve to release on Steam before the game hits the shelves - they would be pirating their own software!

 

How is that , they are entitled to release their own work at any time and for any cost surely?

Unless they have signed a deal with a publisher that prevents them (which I cant see happening)

 

techinical issues, the bar header on the main page linking to the article is missing a chunk

also the forum link at the bottom of the article, the entire sentence mouseovers

Ibe refreshed and they are still there.
(Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9)

 

people say steam is good, yet when trying to register counter-strike with the client my legally-bought serial number was deemed a duplicate and i couldn't use it. so i IMed a guy that always has a ton of warez stuff, and he gave me like four different CS keys that he'd gotten from various friends off their CS cases, and assured me he knew they hadn't registered the keys yet. but none of them worked...no CS online for me.

 

ever thought that your cd key might have been listed in a keygen. etc? and you should do a little web work and get a new cd key, that is if your cd key is legit of course