The age of Steam

The gaming minefield

PC gaming is in a bit of trouble.  Piracy is rife and aside from having to make a game that'll work perfectly on a wide variety of hardware configurations, they also have to deal with the fact that a significant proportion of their revenue will be lost to piracy.  The other big problem with PC gaming is that inevitable need to patch your games.  Unforseen bugs will rear their ugly heads at inconvenient times and ruin your gaming experience until a patch comes out to fix it.

There are ways to try and combat piracy and nearly every game available has some form of copy protection, be it SecuRom, Starforce, Tages, Safedisc etc.  Most of these prevent piracy by installing a hidden device driver on your system which runs in the background to watch what you do with your software.  These are known to conflict with virtual drives and a quick search of the internet will bring up spirited opinions from users who blame a copy protection program for all of the world's ills.  Starforce has developed a reputation for slowing CD & DVD drives down by causing errors that force the drive to spin slower to maintain an effective transfer of data - faster drive speeds are more prone to errors - in theory.

Steam Power

Following the success of Half Life - the first-person shooter that spawned a thousand mods, such as Counter Strike and Day of Defeat, Half Life 2 came along and achieved enormous success, mainly because it is probably one of the best first-person shooters available (in my humble opinion), but it came with a sting in it's tail.  It was one of the first games to require an internet connection to play and it was all down to Steam.  Unfortunately it came at a time when broadband wasn't as common as water and using dial-up to authenticate your installation and download the updates was a nightmare.  This put Steam in a bad light with many people straight away as they resented having to go online to get a "single player" game running and the fact that once you've installed Half Life 2 and bound it to your new Steam account, you can no longer sell the game on once you've finished with it.

Steam is a digital download service, a product activation service, an instant messenger service and a server browser for multi-player gaming.  All you have to do is go along to www.steampowered.com and download the Steam installer.  You then create an account and browse the store.  If you've bought Half Life 2 on disc it'll prompt you for your Steam account details when you install it and it'll proceed to download updates, but for best results you can buy things from the Steam store which is priced in US Dollars so you can make the most of the favourable exchange rate.  Steam accept all major credit cards and paypal payments.

So far this doesn't sound terribly remarkable, but wait, there's more.  If you suffer a catastropic hard drive failure or buy a new PC all you need to do is reinstall Steam and all of your games will download straight to you, regardless of where you are in the world.  No more having to install each game in turn.  Secondly, there's no needing to hunt around for patches as Steam will automatically patch your games for you without your intervention.  Want to play Counter Strike Source?  No problem, Steam has its own server browser and its own anti-cheat system.

Vista users with DirectX10 graphics cards have an added bonus because both of the current DirectX10 games - Lost Planet and Company Of Heroes are available to download from Steam.  More and more publishers are discovering the wonders of Steam because it means they don't need to produce discs that'll just end up going to waste and they don't have to worry about piracy because there isn't any - you buy software to use with your account - if you don't buy it you don't play it.  THQ, Eidos, Activision and more are selling their games on Steam, as well as Valve, Steam's creator.  There are also no nasty device drivers to be installed without your knowledge.

Got Vista 64?  Buy Half Life 2 and you'll get the exclusive 64bit version of the game with extra eye-candy and optimisations!

If you've finished a game and you don't want it clogging up your hard drive, simply use the Steam browser to delete the local content - the game is still yours and you can re-download it whenever you want.  Don't want to have to download a 4gb game all over again? No problem, just use the backup service to create a DVD or CD to restore them with.

Carelessness Costs Games

Of course, Steam isn't idiot proof.  Some people have been known the give their Steam password's to their friends and are surprised when they can't get into their own accounts because their "friend" has locked them out of it by changing the password - don't be one of these people, its not worth it.

From time to time, Valve will provide you with a "guest pass" which you can send to a friend to allow them to play one of your games with you.  You provide your friend's email address, Valve will email them, prompt them to sign up for a Steam account and allow them to download the game for use as long as the guest pass will allow.

Best of all, a Steam account is FREE (the games aren't obviously).  There are freebies to be had though - demo's and trailers can all be downloaded to your system in two clicks.

Steam on Vista

If you want to buy anything from the Steam store, you need to run Steam as an administrator or some of the links won't work properly, but you get used to it.