Pro's and Con's of Steam

[Valdus]

Big Con, can't have one without the other. I tried Magicka and despite meeting all the requirments it doesn't work. Whenever I used the auto-option to remove harmful stuff from my comp only Steam was removed.

I now can't play Magicka because I need steam to run it.

 

[Frybird]

Pros:

You can download games anywhere, regardless of it being a retail release or not. (With steam enabled games, you'll never actually have to get the Disc out of the retail box, just enter the CD Key in Steam to activate it...VERY good feature when you accidentially trash your Half-Life 2 Disc...*cough*...)
Automatic Updates
Community Features
HUGE Sales

Cons:

Download Speed can go down pretty severely
If you get your Steam Account banned, you can't play any of the games anymore, on or offline

and most of all:
you will buy lots and lots of games you will never actually play longer for more than 1-2 hours thanks to the sales.


I love Steam for what it does.

 

[Exterminas]

Here is my list of pros and cons, regarding Steam as a whole, not just the multiplayer:

Cons:
- The regular store prices are fucking expensive here in europe.
- You don't get a hardware copy of your bought games.
- One additional agent in the process of aquirring a game that might screw up (See: Selling of unauthorized Crisis keys. But to be fair this doesn't happen often)
- No official servers for multiplayer, gives fertile ground for a lot of servers with annoying premium programs. However there are still a lot of normal servers around, that work on a donation basis
- No Used-Game trading

Pros:
- Fast selling of games of all spectrums around the clock
- Automatic updating
- Great Sales
- Did I mention the Sales again?

In general I like steam. It offers a nice amount of services for minumum trade-off. However I still prefere to buy "meaningful" games as a hard copy so that I can keep them around to show my grandchildren. Steam is great for buying stuff on a sale you wouldn't have checked out otherwise.

So basicalls Steam is a great online 5-buck-bin, if you use it that way. If you use it like any other store, it is a giant, money-munching-machine. (At least in Euro-Land)

 

[GiantRaven]

Con:
You don't own what you pay for on Steam

That is enough for me to never use it, despite all it's other flaws and the aspects of it that could potentially make it worth using.

 

[Kiefer Killjoy]

Steam is the bane of my wallet.

Why?

Because the sale prices are ridiculous.

Just last week I spent £10 on 4 games in the EA Sale.

Seriously, how do they do it?


Anyway, Steam is one of the best things I have ever downloaded on my PC. Any issues I have ever had with a game have been easily fixed by just checking the steam forums on that particular game.

I have downloaded about 90 games off steam which has taken around 500Gb of my HDD space and I'm still finding stuff every week I want to buy.

Spending £2.50 on a game twice a week hardly breaks the bank and you get some top quality games to boot.

Pros:

Immensely cheap games
Payments secured by Paypal (If uneasy with details being on steam).
Community
Steam Overlay
Forums
Dedicated Server Tools
100% free games ever now and again (The original Portal a while back!)
Most game have no DRM whatsoever and can downloaded as many times as required.

Cons:

Seriously, I can't think of any...

 

[Danzaivar]

Cons? This isn't 2002. Steam doesn't have cons.

If you were talking about Steam in the early stages where they hadn't phased WON out yet, and all the fucking HL mods got raped by Steam's uber-lag, that's different. But modern day Steam is excellent. No flaws that I can think of, and I rarely give this kind of praise out to anything.

I've had a Steam account since 2001.

The swarth of new PC games I bought on Friday but couldnt start playing any of them for 4 hours due to updates and 'decrypting' and stuff says otherwise. It's alright once everythings been set up though.

 

[Plinglebob]

I've been weary of Steam ever since it refused to let me connect for 9 months for some unknown reason. In the end I got it back when I a full format and re-install. I agree its a good system and if you have a shortage of places to buy games from in your local area its a great asset. However, as others have said, there are no physical items so you need to be very careful if you have a limited connection and getting a game is hell if you have a slow connection.

Also, when (not if) the servers eventually close, you will lose every game game you are unable to get downloaded in time.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

steam doesnt like mods, you can do it, but i had to jump through a few hoops to install nehrim on my oblivion copy of steam. Thats the only con i can think of, and it isnt a huge one.

 

[OaKleIgHy]

snip

It rarely works for me, if I shut down my PC and steam is in off-line mode when I then start my PC back up with no internet it refuses to let me play until after I have got my internet back up and logged in. Steam have given a lot of people trouble with its off-line mode all in all. To state different is just wrong.

Cons:
I can't play games without an internet connection

Yes, you can.

imgs

WHY U NO UNDERSTAND, INTERNETS!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Anyways, with that out of my system, I can't think of any cons. At all.

Just because someone says something, and there's a button for it, doesn't make it true.
You can win a million dollars.
Win [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdf5n-zI14]

Anyway, Steam's offline mode is very, very spotty. You CAN get it to work, but you practically have to plan ahead for it, make sure the games you want to play are available in offline mode, and then not turn your computer off once you've set up offline mode.

I am actually surprised to hear that people have had issues with the offline mode. I have had Steam since Empire Total War came out and never had any issue with the offline mode. I never got asked to go online when I did use it on the go on my laptop. Only games that do need online are stuff with publisher DRM like Ubisoft games. I might have just been lucky, but from my end that has yet to emerge as an issue. I am certain however that the need for "constant" internet cnxn is overrated. I basically only use the internet with Steam to update games, purchase games, talk to friends or browse the store.

If you do have access to relatively good internet I doubt you'll ever encounter a problem even if the issues pointed to by some are in fact more serious than I have experienced. If your internet is not that good then maybe you should research those claims more thoroughly.

If you do have an internet cap that maybe an issue...but thats in my view an internet provider/country issue rather than just an issue with Steam (whole other topic).

Sales on Steam are really what made me check it out, before I only used it to run Empire (coz you have to). Since I bought Mass Effect 2 on it however its become my primary source for purchasing games...especially since here in Australia game retailers basically rip you off blind and never have sales like steam to make up for it.

Cons may include the lack of a physical copy but thats kinda minor at this point (I prefer digital, but not all people do). Also if you are online and a game starts to update I THINK you can't play it until you have the update (if you are offline, from my experience you can play normally without the update in most cases. Also you need good amounts of hard drive space.

Recommendation: get it and try for yourself..you'll probably like it even as a secondary game source

 

[Hiphophippo]

I can honestly say that I've never had any problems with steam sans when it first launched and was almost complete shit. I'm always online anyway, and if for some reason I'm not I've always still been able to play the games on there.

I think a lot, though probably not all, of anti steam talk comes from people who hate large cooperations as some sort of cyber boogyman. Steam is the biggest game in town, but it got that way by being awesome.

 

[SilverVirage]

I really cant think of a single con. At all. Great games and incredible sales every almost every day. The only problem I have with it is the "Start in Offline Mode" occasionally says "This function cannot be preformed in offline mode", which makes no sense, but it happens very rarely and I just have to restart my PC to fix it.

 

[Wayneguard]

Con: voice chat works maybe 1/3 of the time.

 

[Longsight]

Cons? This isn't 2002. Steam doesn't have cons.

If you were talking about Steam in the early stages where they hadn't phased WON out yet, and all the fucking HL mods got raped by Steam's uber-lag, that's different. But modern day Steam is excellent. No flaws that I can think of, and I rarely give this kind of praise out to anything.

I've had a Steam account since 2001.

The swarth of new PC games I bought on Friday but couldnt start playing any of them for 4 hours due to updates and 'decrypting' and stuff says otherwise. It's alright once everythings been set up though.

This only happens with pre-loaded games though, because you download them in encrypted form and then they're unlocked on release - meaning that on release you only have, say, a 10-minute wait to decrypt them rather than a 10-hour wait to download them.

Honestly, if you're ok with the concept of not having a physical copy of your games (and let's face it, this is the route all the major publishers are going down these days), and you've got reasonably fast, uncapped internet, there's no good reason not to use Steam for just about everything these days.

 

[archvile93]

The worst thing I can think of is that there's no returns for purchases, and that includes preorders. Otherwise it tends to work pretty well.

 

[Anjel]

I'm a Steam fanboy and one of these days I had to come out of the closet and say it!

-Friends list (with right-click 'invite to game' menu option)
-No damaged CD's - re-download if you need to
-Automatic updates and patches
-Offline mode for people who think that all non-internet based games run on the internet if you're on Steam (weird)
-SALES! I've had so many cheap games my account is worth over £1500 yet I've spent probably £200 on it. Admittedly games are sometimes priced a little higher at launch but they hit the sales a lot quicker. Plants vs Zombies GoTY £2.60, Portal for free, Gothic collection for £13, Borderlands with all DLC for about £10, Napoleon: Total War was about £4 I think.
-Sometimes preordering a game gets you free games (Mafia II preorders got Mafia for free)

Okay I'm a fanboy so I'm biased but I'll let other people list the cons, I've not personally had any issues with them.

The worst thing I can think of is that there's no returns for purchases, and that includes preorders. Otherwise it tends to work pretty well.

I have only preordered a few games and I have only ever wanted to return one of them - All Points Bulletin, I had no issues getting a refund though.

 

[Longsight]

I've had a Steam account since 2001.

I call shenanigans on this; Steam didn't exist in 2001.

I'm not normally one for posting funny captcha codes, but the hell is with ofewdo Δswitch? That's a delta symbol right there. That's not even on my keyboard, I had to google it.

 

[Danzaivar]

Cons? This isn't 2002. Steam doesn't have cons.

If you were talking about Steam in the early stages where they hadn't phased WON out yet, and all the fucking HL mods got raped by Steam's uber-lag, that's different. But modern day Steam is excellent. No flaws that I can think of, and I rarely give this kind of praise out to anything.

I've had a Steam account since 2001.

The swarth of new PC games I bought on Friday but couldnt start playing any of them for 4 hours due to updates and 'decrypting' and stuff says otherwise. It's alright once everythings been set up though.

This only happens with pre-loaded games though, because you download them in encrypted form and then they're unlocked on release - meaning that on release you only have, say, a 10-minute wait to decrypt them rather than a 10-hour wait to download them.

Honestly, if you're ok with the concept of not having a physical copy of your games (and let's face it, this is the route all the major publishers are going down these days), and you've got reasonably fast, uncapped internet, there's no good reason not to use Steam for just about everything these days.

Nope, updates and decrypting on physical games bought from a shop. After installing them, 4 hour wait before playable. Because of Steam.

 

[L3m0n_L1m3]

Cons:
I can't play games without an internet connection

Yes, you can.



WHY U NO UNDERSTAND, INTERNETS!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Anyways, with that out of my system, I can't think of any cons. At all.

Maybe you can, but I have never been able to play without internet.