4 ms·
Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price
by abrookewood 9y ago
Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.
- maccard 9y agoFor me, it's not about the price (within reason). If it's reliable, easy, and centralised, along with an (albeit weak) guarantee that I will have content access if steam goes belly up, I'm in.
- setzer22 9y agoAnd you're forgetting download speeds. When steam started being successful it would take me a full day to download a game, while in steam I could get it in a couple hours maximum. Maybe that's not true anymore. But I'm sure contributed to steam's success.
- slau 9y agoI think there's another point that is very important: Steam was the original cloud. Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it." "You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs." "Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed." Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).
- komali2 9y agoSave files and settings were sucked into the cloud as well (sometimes). Great for little games I like to play on multiple computers.