Steam now the greatest Download system for games?
September 18th, 2008When asked about online gaming and what people play you will more than likely get told by the person that they play one of the many games made by Valve. For example Team Fortress 2, Counter strike, or even Source are the main games. But then you will get others saying games like Call of duty and Crysis to such an extent. But many of these people haven’t actually left their house to buy this product.
Many people are now using Valve’s Steam platform to buy and download games, whether
it be new users who have never played online before or old users who have cheated, got banned and want a new account. This is steadily making steam to be the biggest download manager system on the market in terms of purchasing and downloading the games legally. The only main rival to the Steam platform would be EA Games Download system. On that note though, we saw the new the other day that EA games were going to be releasing the new Crysis on Steam.
Now if EA games were really that good with their download system, then surely they wouldn’t rel
ease it through steam. Does that by default make Steam the #1 download system out there? Defiantly and I’ll explain my reasons for this now.
Valve has for a long time being releasing games through their Steam platform and as a result there are now over 440 games in their collection that can be bought and downloaded. That’s more than any other downloading programs, which are legal. They also have all their games available on very fast Steam content servers, which might I add are apparently like gold dust as they are hidden away in secret locations around the world. This means that as soon as you’ve paid for your game, you can download at the maximum your internet can take.
Paying for things couldn’t be easier either, with the options to use paypal or bank cards to pay for games, making games available to everyone. You also have the steam community system, which allows you to speak to your friends while playing games, so you can play together on servers, chat while you play or just find out what your friends are up to. Its not quite a rival of xfire or msn, but it works in the same manner.
Now ofcourse there are bad points about it, as there is always a downside for everything. With the purchasing of games via steam and not directly from the shops, it means you don’t have a disk or CD key, which means if your steam account was to get stolen you would have to rely on the email receipts. What could potentially go wrong there though is if your email is then hacked as well, meaning you have no access to the games you played for. It does seem like it might never happen to you, but it does to a lot of users all the time.
However this is then counter balanced again with more good things, such as the ability to download the game to any PC that you are at and just play the game from your steam account. There is also no need to
worry about the game disk getting damaged or going missing as there are no disks involved at all. You even then have another good thing with the payment system, as the system doesn’t remember your details, meaning you won’t be open to fraud through steam atleast.
In overall contrast it does make it look like Steam could well be the best download software out there on the market for purchasing and downloading games. Nowhere else offers anywhere near the number of games available on steam, for the prices they offer, and the service they offer.