Steam Powered

I know that, at some point, I probably said something miserable about Steam. Ok, maybe a few miserable things. Quite a few. Fact is, up until yesterday, I honestly didn’t see the point – especially when you’re trying to install games you bought on CDs, that requires you to tie it to a Steam account before you can even launch it.

Score one down for sharing. I remember back in the late 90s when our whole street would be swapping 1.44″ floppies, registration be damned. THAT was social gaming – this new crap’s just competitive-slash-elitist.

Still, I hadn’t yet seen Steam in its Crowning Glory Mode: That is to say, digital game distribution. Then, yesterday morning, my SARS rebate came through, and since it’s money I didn’t plan for (at all), I figured I might as well poke around the listings. I quickly settled on a few games, based mainly on reviews and metacritic scores, purchased the lot, and started the downloads.

With the exception of Saints Row 2 (which I bought a disc for), My Games currently looks like:

That’s 3 games purchased and downloaded through Steam. I thought I’d probably stop at one, but then it proved itself to be a very capable system, with a much larger store than I originally anticipated. To date, I’ve spent nearly $80/R600 on Steam, and I’m willing to bet that, over the next month, it’ll become my first source for games. With several thousand in spend by this time next year >.>

Of course, in order to even use Steam, you first need ADSL. Preferably uncapped ADSL, in which you spend 1 amount per month regardless of usage (and then use the crap out of it). Which, in SA, costs an arm. Otherwise, you’re looking at additional costs to downloading your games.

For instance: The download for Dragon Age came in at 8GB, and just the game alone cost R370 through Steam. Add in topups for intl. cap to that, even at R40/gig, and you’re looking at a grand total of R890 to get the game. At that cost, you’re more likely to wait for the disc version.

Once ADSL is taken care of, Steam suddenly becomes easy, and much cheaper. With one advantage for trigger-happy psychotic reformatters like myself: Games are tied to accounts, which sucks when you need to activate them, but comes as a blessing when you need to change operating systems. Plus, Steam makes it easy to export a copy of your games. As a disc-less system, it works.

Now, of course, I need to turn all of that off. I promised myself I wouldn’t touch any of my purchases until my NaNo wordcount was back on track. And that’ll be quite a feat of authorship.