Steam being open.

[DrOswald]

A gigabyte of ram? That sounds a little weird. Are you sure your computer isn't messed up or something? my steam client uses less than a tenth of a gigabyte.

Seems pretty much even across the board to me. I have noticed that amazon sometimes has better prices by a couple dollars, but not consistently and Steam has frequent sales and additional advantages such as storage of your games on their servers (instead of easily lost CD's and install keys), easy install, and a huge library of indie games that can't be found at standard retailers.

In my experience the Mac client isn't as fine-tuned as the PC client and as I stated I no longer use it and it's being a while since I even had it installed. So it might have being fixed by now. I don't know. My computer is doing quite well, I doubt it's a problem on that end.

Over here, prices in retail just drop a lot faster then on Steam, you can buy say new game A for 30,- after as little as three weeks. That doesn't happen on Steam in my experience. But that's not really a reason to dislike the client...

Steam is a U.S.A. based company and their prices pretty much reflect standard U.S.A. prices (ignoring Steam's frequent and significant sales.)

By the way, where is "over here"? Australia? New Jersey? Sea Land?

I don't use Macs, so I can't really speak on the quality of the Mac client, but I'll ask a friend who uses steam on a Mac and report back what his numbers are.

 

[Aidinthel]

Well, a lot of people don't seem to realize Steam has an offline mode and assume it's always-on DRM.

And everyone else is just being petty about a mild inconvenience.

the offline mode only works if you start it when your online, so basicly not when you need it.
so you can't play steam games when your internet connection fails.
dont mind it, used to mind steam when the resopurces steam used while running where a problem (in the 512 mb ram days^^)

I just disconnected my laptop's wifi connection and the program started normally.

 

[Cornish]

Steam is a U.S.A. based company and their prices pretty much reflect standard U.S.A. prices (ignoring Steam's frequent and significant sales.)

By the way, where is "over here"? Australia? New Jersey? Sea Land?

I don't use Macs, so I can't really speak on the quality of the Mac client, but I'll ask a friend who uses steam on a Mac and report back what his numbers are.

Be that as it may and to be frank it isn't. We pay significantly more than the U.S.A. prices (we pay the standard EU prices and ?/£60,- > $60,-), there was a time they were based on the U.S.A. prices, but that time has long gone by. (Sadly.)

Europe represent! The Netherlands.

 

[Generalissimo]

what's that?
.....
.....
oh yeah!, i belive that's the sound of no-one caring!

 

[DrOswald]

Steam is a U.S.A. based company and their prices pretty much reflect standard U.S.A. prices (ignoring Steam's frequent and significant sales.)

By the way, where is "over here"? Australia? New Jersey? Sea Land?

I don't use Macs, so I can't really speak on the quality of the Mac client, but I'll ask a friend who uses steam on a Mac and report back what his numbers are.

Be that as it may and to be frank it isn't. We pay significantly more than the U.S.A. prices (we pay the standard EU prices and ?/£60,- > $60,-), there was a time they were based on the U.S.A. prices, but that time has long gone by. (Sadly.)

Europe represent! The Netherlands.

That sucks. I wouldn't have figured that Steam would charge that much more for games in Europe than standard retailers, steam games are really well priced in the USA. Maybe Valve Europe or whatever they call it is full of idiots. Hopefully that will improve in the future.

P.S. I know a guy who lived in the Netherlands for 2 years. He says it's a great place.

 

[Farther than stars]

And everyone else is just being petty about a mild inconvenience.

Mild inconvience my arse! I once had to wait a full day for all the patches to upload. A day! That's right, it only takes a few minutes to install any other game on my PC and then I get to play it straight away, but some games that I buy in the store, force you onto Steam and all the excitement you had about playing them slowly drains away as you go to bed, sleep, wake up, have breakfast, go out, have lunch, come back home, have a meal, watch some TV and THEN sit down to play your game.
I miss the days that I could just buy a game, slip it into whatever machine/console and just start playing it. In fact, these days I'll even consider buying a game just because it's not on Steam. That's right, Steam is so pedantic that a game with no connections to it, actually gives that game a recommendation.
So there's why Steam is so bad, Amishdemon.

 

[Farther than stars]

Steam best buy game stop
Modern Warfare 2: $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Bioshock $19.99 unlisted $19.99
Dawn of war II: retribution $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Fallout New Vegas $19.99 $19.99 $19.99
Civilization V $49.99 $49.99 $49.99

Edit: Crap, formatting for the chart didn't carry over, sorry. First number is steam, second is Best buy, and third is game stop.

Yeah, except Best Buy and GameStop aren't the only places you can buy hard copies of games. Sure, I admit that Steam has some pretty good sales on, but whenever I want a specific game, I've always been able to find it cheaper somewhere else, usually on Amazon.

 

[mavkiel]

Eh the offline mode seems kind of hit or miss. I have had it turn on for no real reason. My main problem with it is the patching. Steam is really really god awful at patching.

-- Some games require special steam versions of patches. Which tends to mean if your game is broke your going to wait awhile.

-- You cannot choose your patch version. Take for example fallout 3 or fallout new vegas. Both games have had some pretty horrific patches that have flat out broke the game, sometimes taking months for them to address an issue. (If you can select which patch to use however, you can simply skip that patch until they get their act together)

-- Steam bugs. Again, lets call up the fallout new Vegas as an easy example. It released with a steam "feature" of cloud saving on. Unfortunately it didn't work. It hid your save games. Eventually this was fixed, but it should never have happened. Also, it creates additional hurdles for people trying to modify their game. Want to play with more then 4gb of ram? Tough cookies unless you download more programs to trick steam into not f'ing with your game.

 

[GiantRedButton]

Well, a lot of people don't seem to realize Steam has an offline mode and assume it's always-on DRM.

And everyone else is just being petty about a mild inconvenience.

the offline mode only works if you start it when your online, so basicly not when you need it.
so you can't play steam games when your internet connection fails.
dont mind it, used to mind steam when the resopurces steam used while running where a problem (in the 512 mb ram days^^)

I just disconnected my laptop's wifi connection and the program started normally.

worked on my old pc too, but i have had that problem everytime my internet failed now.
and a bunch of my friends too.
I think it's dependant on if you save your login info.
If the game has steamworks thats a big plus for me though. i'm not offline often and have 170 games or so on steam and still pay less then i did when console gaming ans only buying very few games.

 

[GeorgW]

Could someone enlighten me, don't you have to be online to log in before you can go to offline mode? Or is there a way through it I haven't found?
I don't mind it, but it could maybe be a little more convenient.

 

[DrOswald]

Steam best buy game stop
Modern Warfare 2: $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Bioshock $19.99 unlisted $19.99
Dawn of war II: retribution $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Fallout New Vegas $19.99 $19.99 $19.99
Civilization V $49.99 $49.99 $49.99

Edit: Crap, formatting for the chart didn't carry over, sorry. First number is steam, second is Best buy, and third is game stop.

Yeah, except Best Buy and GameStop aren't the only places you can buy hard copies of games. Sure, I admit that Steam has some pretty good sales on, but whenever I want a specific game, I've always been able to find it cheaper somewhere else, usually on Amazon.

Like I said in my post, Amazon can have better prices than steam, but not really consistently. Besides, when you take into account that you also have to pay shipping amazon is usually more expensive than steam. Then you have to wait at least 3 days for the game to get to you (unless you pay even more to get it in 2). Very inconvenient.

 

[Wintermoot]

Well, a lot of people don't seem to realize Steam has an offline mode and assume it's always-on DRM.

sadly off-line mode doesn,t work.
OT
it,s annoying if you want to play some steam games on a laptop without a internet connection.

 

[Hamish Durie]

Steam best buy game stop
Modern Warfare 2: $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Bioshock $19.99 unlisted $19.99
Dawn of war II: retribution $29.99 $29.99 $29.99
Fallout New Vegas $19.99 $19.99 $19.99
Civilization V $49.99 $49.99 $49.99

Edit: Crap, formatting for the chart didn't carry over, sorry. First number is steam, second is Best buy, and third is game stop.

Yeah, except Best Buy and GameStop aren't the only places you can buy hard copies of games. Sure, I admit that Steam has some pretty good sales on, but whenever I want a specific game, I've always been able to find it cheaper somewhere else, usually on Amazon.

sacrebleu *faints*

 

[Sixcess]

sadly off-line mode doesn,t work.
OT
it,s annoying if you want to play some steam games on a laptop without a internet connection.

As others have said, it does work so long as you're online when you log in. I've had virtually no internet for the past week or so, but if I can piggyback someone else's unsecured wireless for the minute or so it takes to log into Steam then the games play as normally.

Thank god for unsecured internet

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

The Steam client uses roughly a single gigabyte of memory on my Mac. That's a lot of memory for what it does during play; nothing. And I don't mean that in the literal sense. For me as a player, Steam doesn't contribute to my playing experience. It subtracts from it by using resources that could've being used other-wise.

That sounds far from normal. I've used the Mac version on and off since it first came out, and while it's always been a bit flakier than the Windows version, I've never seen it use too much over 100MB of RAM (which is a good deal more than the Windows version, but OS X in general is pretty RAM-happy). I use the Windows version on my desktop much more often than the Mac version on my laptop, but I haven't heard anything exceptionally weird like that from the people I game with weekly who mainly use the Mac version. I've had more trouble with its CPU use while it's (supposedly) idle than anything else, where it sits there using a good 5-10% of my CPU to do absolutely nothing other than display the game list in a window in the background.

 

[Eliam_Dar]

Never saw this as an annoyance, in fact steam let's me get to my games faster, and keep them updated. I realize that it may use some resources, but I got a high end PC, it really doesn't bother me at all. In fact I use it to launch non-steam games as well.

 

[Von Strimmer]

I dont like steam for one simple reason. I have an older laptop and steam chews through my RAM making it harder to play my games.

 

[Senaro]

And everyone else is just being petty about a mild inconvenience.

Mild inconvience my arse! I once had to wait a full day for all the patches to upload. A day! That's right, it only takes a few minutes to install any other game on my PC and then I get to play it straight away, but some games that I buy in the store, force you onto Steam and all the excitement you had about playing them slowly drains away as you go to bed, sleep, wake up, have breakfast, go out, have lunch, come back home, have a meal, watch some TV and THEN sit down to play your game.
I miss the days that I could just buy a game, slip it into whatever machine/console and just start playing it. In fact, these days I'll even consider buying a game just because it's not on Steam. That's right, Steam is so pedantic that a game with no connections to it, actually gives that game a recommendation.
So there's why Steam is so bad, Amishdemon.

You should try playing games on a console. Skips that whole installing process, unless you do it because you feel like it.

 

[Something Amyss]

Though I made a clear choice; I stopped buying from Steam and any product with Steam. I don't see a reason to bicker about it. Simple problem; don't like what a retailer is doing. Simple solution; stop buying from the retailer.

The gaming community as a whole does not seem to want to give up games, even if they have a problem with them. It's unfortunate, but almost universal.

 

[viranimus]

Ok, I know I have railed on steam many times in the past, but in this instance I wont talk about loss of control, destroying ownership rights, overpricing like I normally would.


This is an issue about the steam client only. I personally dislike having to keep the client running. the thing hogs up at best case situations 40 mb of ram. Now granted that does not seem a lot, but its 40mb that serves no real purpose, with its only real function being an indirect form of DRM. I am a process scrooge. I run win7 at a base 28 processes. (this habit came from the days when I had a relic of a computer, but has served me well) 28 processes is basically unheard of on win 7. My sisters dell laptop boots with over 100 processes on startup from primarily bloatware from Dell by way of example and her system takes at least 5 actual minutes to boot up and work its way through "brain freeze"

Steam is a useless process, that is not only eating up memory resources, its also eating up bandwidth resources while running underneath by reporting a constant stream of data exchanged back and forth between your pc and their servers even if the game is not online.

Again I know 40mb doesnt seem like a lot. My system has 8gb of Ram, and thats more than sufficient for a modern PC. But every little bit you chip away at your memory is that much more that is taken away from your overall pool of resources and slows reaction time across the board. In short, theres no good reason to keep it running if it in effect does nothing, but you do not have that option if you want to play your licenses.