Steam

[spaceboy]

I know the love of Steam and online games etc. has been discussed a few times, but I didn't find an exact topic.  I found this link I thought some of you would find interesting.

PS.  I LOVE MY blu-ray game discs baby...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/steam-user-violates-subscriber-agreement-loses-1800-in-games.ars

[Art Blade]

quite a shocker but..

Spoiler

..but

Valve has since posted on its forum that the account has been re-activated.

[PZ]

That is outrageous behavior!  ???

Spoiler

I'm sure they did not want a popular uprising on their hands so the reinstated the account.

[spaceboy]

ah, that's good to know.  I know I'm from the generation of wanting physical media for games, but things do change overtime.  I have download only titles of course but, you know.    With music I still want CDs to own, but of course I rip them and use them on my mp3 players, but I like knowing that disc is sitting there waiting for me if I need it. :)

[PZ]

ah, that's good to know.  I know I'm from the generation of wanting physical media for games, but things do change overtime...

Same here, but even if you have the physical media, the installer forces you to use Steam to play - you need an account, log in, and Heaven help you if your Internet connection is down.

[fragger]

Admittedly, some store-bought Steam-powered games such as Civ V will let you play offline, but from what I can gather, many don't. As for games bought online through Steam, this is my chief concern:

I bought the Orange Box package (Portal, Team Fortress, Half-Life 2 + Episode 1) online from Steam as it was considerably cheaper than buying from a store, but I neglected to take into account the downloading time and how it would impact on my ISP's DL allocation. I essentially ended up blowing through about a month's worth of DL getting the games down during the course of a full day in total (I didn't do it all in one hit). But this is my worry - If I acquire a new rig, which I want to do in the near future, is it going to mean that I have to go through all that again if I want those games on my new PC? Maybe I have this wrong - admittedly I'm not hugely clued in about how Steam stuff works - but I'm under the impression that I can't just copy the games over to the new HDD as they have to be installed, and I'm assuming that means having to log onto Steam and do the whole thing all over again. Not an attractive prospect, especially considering that since I bought those games there's now a bunch of hefty upgrades for them all, most of which I've left in pending limbo because I don't want to wait freaking hours for them all to come down to me and use up scads of my DL allocation in the process.

So I guess when the time comes I either bite the bullet and squander much of my time and DL allocation getting my games back, or I just leave a collection of games for which I've paid good money sitting on a server somewhere. I call that Hobson's choice :D I wish now I'd bought the flipping disks, it would have been cheaper in the long run.

I want to point out that it's not my intention to start up the great Steam debate again, we've been over all that :-() My hope is that someone can tell me that there's a way I don't have to go through all that rigmarole again. As I said, I don't know a lot about how Steam handles things like reinstalls.

But having said that...

Spoiler

space, that article made me see redder than I usually do when it comes to Steam >:((

[PZ]

It should be relatively easy to move to a new PC - check this thread for a few ideas: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/12695/move-steam-games-to-new-computer

... and this one: http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/26165239

[fragger]

 :) Thanks muchly PZ, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Phew, what a relief...

[PZ]

 ;) :-X