Steam is Changing how we Buy and Play Games

Posted by Steve Lawrence to Gaming on 05th July 2010 - 0 Comments

Steam has been around for a while now and is redefining the entire gaming industry. It is one of the most innovative online companies out there. Owned by Valve, the guys who brought us classics such as the Half Life saga and Portal, Steam offers a huge library of games to buy and download instantly. In May they extended their service to Mac and announced at this years E3 that they will also be targeting PS3.

What they have done for PC gaming is massive in itself, to do this for Mac and PS3 as well is nothing short of incredible.

For those of you who haven't seen Steam yet here's a breakdown of how it works.

Visit the Steam website at www.steampowered.com and create an account. Browse their extensive library of both new and old games and get buying. They accept all major currencies so buying from Cyprus isn't a problem.

Once you've checked out you will be asked if you have Steam installed on your PC. This is the application that tracks your games, friends, in game achievements and everything else. Let it do its thing and install what it needs and it will automatically start downloading your purchases. Any subsequent purchases will be added to the download queue and install automatically.

By buying from Steam you know that the games your are purchasing are fully patched and will work on your operating system. Bugs are keenly tracked and repaired and fixes are automatically pushed to your computer.

You entire games library is transferable between computers and you can re-download a game if you lose it or have a problem (there's a built in backup application so this shouldn't happen too often).

I've found that downloading large applications such as games isn't as bad as I thought it would be. You can pause a download and resume at any time if you need your bandwidth back! I find that kicking it off at night gives the best speeds and my games are ready to go the next morning.

Now for the best bit. Steam loves sales, they regularly reduce their stock by huge amounts, sometimes as much as 90%. They can do this because there is no inherent cost per item for an electronic products. They would much rather sell you something at a reduced price than not sell it to you at all. This philosophy suits me, I don't mind waiting for the best deals and have managed to pick up some excellent games at bargain basement prices.