Steam Boasts 7 Million Concurrent Users Over Thanksgiving

[Atmos Duality]

Always on, yeah. Heck. D3 was Blizzard saying. We only care about the NA and UK markets forgetting that gamers exist in other countries. Steam woks... it's unobtrussive and painless and ironically steam saw more concurrent connections than WoW this past week I think. Wow is dropping subscriptions fast....I blame Steam and Gog... giving people alternative outlets for that cash.

What? Competition is GOOD?
What a novel concept! So strange how certain big companies seem to act like they own the entire market.

Really I understand why the companies are hung up on DRM but really the point is lost when the drm becomes a deterrent to legal purchases. The others want always on becauyse really it allows them to enforce 'planned obsolescence'. You see, Blizzard will have an easier time getting folks to shift to say D4 wby simply shutting down D3 Servers. That's what I don't like about always on where the company controls the online aspect.

Oh, there's so much more than planned obsolescence.
By wresting total legal and practical control from the consumer, they can impose all sorts of bullshit money making and marketing schemes. Jacking up prices, targeted invasive advertising, subscriptions-for-nothing but to ensure your continued investment into their platform...it's scary.

 

[Atmos Duality]

And that's why I got out of WoW and refuse to buy D3... which is weird, I've been with Diablo since the first game and have always loved it but I don't like it. Never mind it's also rather hostile to the modding community.

Blizzard has been hostile and controlling vs all of their customers since the Glider vs Blizzard case.
Lets just say that in hindsight, that case was the point where Blizzard's handlers changed their entire business philosophy, and slowly started working towards long term dominion. The rampant long term success of WoW only reinforced their ideology of an entirely service-centric prison for their games, and now, they're beyond reason.

Diablo 3 was just...an utterly reprehensible game. Not because of its content, but because of its purpose, and its model.
It is nearly everything I fear gaming will become if Always Online takes off. And again, why Steam is so far, a great deterrent for that. (that, and the cost of hosting every game like that would be INSANE even with planned obsolescence rotating each game in and out as necessary.)

 

[JSoup]

7 million is an impressive number, but it's kinda dragged down when you look at the other number next to it, the one that represents how many of that 7 million were actually playing games. Less than half. It's that way right now, as I'm looking at it, 825K in game, 4.5 million online.

 

[Charli]

I have corrupted everyone I know. And my family.

It's hard to argue when they ask how I afford so many games on my meager spare cash and I show them that my history has shown that I have barely spent over 50 quid on steam. (Also I get the indie bundles when they look good) For nearly 60 games (this past sale brought me to 59).
Good games. Indie, mainstream, triple A alike. Sure I have to 'wait for the sale' but fuck it, it's a hell of alot better than the sales elsewhere who shave a poxy 20% or 10% off theirs. So...yeah welcome to the future.

And when things are more readily available to you people are more generous and giving with their cash and purchases, my friends and I all buy steam games for each other over the holidays, and it's great, because most of them cost less than a sandwich and a coffee.

 

[Solesoslav]

The only backdrop is the maintanance cost I have to fight for, to keep the PC up to date. (2 or 3 years back in parts for that matter....)

Really. The computer I built before this one is a 8800GT, 4GB RAM, 3GHz-ish dual core machine. It was mediocre when I built it back in 2005. It still runs almost every game on at least medium, if not high settings. I could honestly still be running it and not be much worse off than with my current machine. Keeping a PC 'up to date' costs around zero dollars unless you go for the bottom shelf crap every time you upgrade. Having to upgrade you PC every year or to 'keep up' hasn't been true since the millennium shift.

Yeah, except that the 8800GT was released at the end of 2007 and was the third fastest graphics card on the market at the time of release(it was the fourth fastest of the generation with the 8800GTS pushing it back a place). Don't misunderstand me, I love the 8800GT, I bought it as soon as it became available in stores, but that doesn't change the fact that it can't run modern games to save it's life.

That's a graphics card that cost around $250 when it came out six years ago, so you can't reasonably expect it to perform well, but the 3 year old GTX460 can barely play Need For Speed Rivals in 720p at High details. The new Assassins Creed, CoD and Battlefield fare even worse. Not to mention that a dual core processor from 2006 can't possibly run new with a reasonable minimum framerate. Even if you do upgrade every 2 years, you can't always muster $300 dollars for a GTX280X or what not, most of the time us low end gamers need to be happy with a HD7700, maybe a GTX650Ti if we're lucky and that makes me a sad gamer. It's always better to invest $250 or $400 in a Wii U/PS4 and know that you're covered for the next seven years than to buy a crappy PC for the same money and pray to god that Crytek doesn't make Crysis 4.


Hardware aside, you guys can't possibly compare a steam acount with 60 AAA games to one with 60 indie games. It's simply not possible indie games are mostly fun little games, but they are little games. You can literally play CoD or Diablo or Skyrim for hundreds of hours and still have a good time, while most indie games last a fraction of that and most often than not provide less fun per hour spent. Sure, you can get AAA games on steam for cheap, but how many years after the release of the game?

 

[TKretts3]

Steam Autumn Sale. Total spent: $60.
Games purchased:

1) Papers, Please
2) Outlast
3) X-Com: Enemy Unknown
4) Counter-Strike: Source
5) Garry's Mod
6) Bioshock Infinite
7) LA Noire
8) FarCry 3
9) Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Steam tends to have four big sales every year: The Summer Sale, Autumn Sale, Winter Sale, and Spring Sale.

If I were buying games for a new console, I would have been able to get a grand total of, about, one game. As long as this is the case, I don't see PC gaming being dead for a looooooooong time.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

While I do look forward to the Steam Machines... I don't think that you can play DotA 2 on a controller.

PC gaming isn't dead, but it's definitely its own beast. I don't think that PC gamers and console gamers really overlap, and if they do, they usually purchase both anyway. It's not really like you "choose" PC or console. Aside from the odd exception with the diehard fanboys, most gamers I know that play PC also play console.

 

[Vigormortis]

snip

Just a small correction:

The account numbers for Steam are for active accounts, not overall registered accounts.

7 million concurrent users? Kinda puts that whole billion dollar Obamacare website in perspective doesn't it?

Sad that a small, private company with around 300 employees can create server farms and a client program that can handle that many simultaneous users while the federal government can't.

 

[Vigormortis]

7 million is an impressive number, but it's kinda dragged down when you look at the other number next to it, the one that represents how many of that 7 million were actually playing games. Less than half. It's that way right now, as I'm looking at it, 825K in game, 4.5 million online.

Well, to be fair, not everyone spends every second of their time logged onto Steam playing a game. Sometimes people log in and browse the store or chat with friends[footnote]Sometimes to setup a game.[/footnote]

Granted, some of those millions may be logged in simply because Steam auto-started for them, but I'd wager that the vast majority are logged in to play a game at some point in the immediate future.

Blizzard has been hostile and controlling vs all of their customers since the Glider vs Blizzard case.
Lets just say that in hindsight, that case was the point where Blizzard's handlers changed their entire business philosophy, and slowly started working towards long term dominion. The rampant long term success of WoW only reinforced their ideology of an entirely service-centric prison for their games, and now, they're beyond reason.

Diablo 3 was just...an utterly reprehensible game. Not because of its content, but because of its purpose, and its model.
It is nearly everything I fear gaming will become if Always Online takes off. And again, why Steam is so far, a great deterrent for that. (that, and the cost of hosting every game like that would be INSANE even with planned obsolescence rotating each game in and out as necessary.)

Which is such a shame. Blizzard was one of the few shining beacons in the PC gaming industry. They were both masters of exquisite game design and avid supporters of the modding community.

Now, though, it seems almost as if they're primary motive is to become "dark overlords".

I wish I could blame Activision for the change, but the changes began well before the Activision merger.

 

[Denamic]

The only backdrop is the maintanance cost I have to fight for, to keep the PC up to date. (2 or 3 years back in parts for that matter....)

Really. The computer I built before this one is a 8800GT, 4GB RAM, 3GHz-ish dual core machine. It was mediocre when I built it back in 2005. It still runs almost every game on at least medium, if not high settings. I could honestly still be running it and not be much worse off than with my current machine. Keeping a PC 'up to date' costs around zero dollars unless you go for the bottom shelf crap every time you upgrade. Having to upgrade you PC every year or to 'keep up' hasn't been true since the millennium shift.

Yeah, except that the 8800GT was released at the end of 2007 and was the third fastest graphics card on the market at the time of release(it was the fourth fastest of the generation with the 8800GTS pushing it back a place). Don't misunderstand me, I love the 8800GT, I bought it as soon as it became available in stores, but that doesn't change the fact that it can't run modern games to save it's life.

I think I was thinking of the Xbox 360 when I wrote 2005. I also bought it for myself when it came out as I had just gotten a load of birthday money the month before. And it can absolutely still run games. It'll choke on some newer releases, but any game that runs on a 360 or PS3, an 8800GT will also run fine, seeing the 8800 GT outperforms the cards the PS3 and 360 has by a fair bit. I was still using it up until recently. I have space issues in my apartment, so I opted to dismantle it and use the 8800GT for physx in this machine instead.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

While I do look forward to the Steam Machines... I don't think that you can play DotA 2 on a controller.

Wrong. I believe someone was quoted saying "You CAN play Dota 2 on a controller... You just can't win".

... What?

 

[Atmos Duality]

Which is such a shame. Blizzard was one of the few shining beacons in the PC gaming industry. They were both masters of exquisite game design and avid supporters of the modding community.

Now, though, it seems almost as if they're primary motive is to become "dark overlords".

I bet Blizzard doesn't picture themselves as that, but as a champion for producers' rights.

I understand wanting to protect one's work from pirates and such, I really do...but when the model starts pissing off the paying customer and encouraging adding more useless busywork into the game design, I draw the line.

I wish I could blame Activision for the change, but the changes began well before the Activision merger.

Aye, that would be Vivendi Universal's doing.

Following the buyout I recall some of Blizzard's internal developers having it out, and leaving the company.

Blizzard North disintegrated entirely (the people behind Diablo 1 & 2) as a result of that, which I suspect is why they didn't bother trying to produce a sequel for so long after D2. Well, that and all that easy WoW money. Didn't want another service-centric grindfest competing with their golden goose after all.