Steam - Worth it, or overpriced?

[Tav73]

Another pro with Steam:
It doesn't need a CD drive, so I can play games on my netbook when I'm away from home :3

And a con:
Erm..I guess not installing to a non-permanent drive is a con, except you can just move it to an SD card post-install.

 

[DM.]

Steam is great, the deals are great, I brought the orange box on there for £5.99. Not to mention the freebies you can get selected for. However the fact you need to be online for it to work is a complete suck.

 

[BonsaiK]

I don't know what prices are like for the OP in the UK but I can say that if you're Australian and you get Steam it's totally worth it. Most games are half price or less compared to in the stores!

 

[S53]

Its convienient, but I like having a physical copy

Especially when patching the game. Steam and Direct2Drive really screw them all up.

 

[Zer_]

Gonna bust what seems to be a popular myth when concerning Steam.

Yes... you can go into offline mode when you're offline. That's the whole point of offline mode...

The only time you absolutely must be online to play a game is when you are downloading it and activating it.

 

[Nmil-ek]

I find Steam tends to shaft the UK on prices that and its annoying to wait out two load times to boot what should essentialy be just an executionable file. I find much better deals on Amazon and a few sellers on E-bay like 15 - 20% better.

 

[CoziestPigeon]

I hate steam and I only have it installed for Empire: Total War, the fact a game requires it even adds to the anoyance. It wastes resources for no reason as well as Hard Drive space. Having said that I'm someone that wont buy Digital download and prefers a hard copy over downloading, atleast then I have a physical object I can show for my $$ .

How terrible is your computer that steam actually makes a difference to performance?

lol, well it can run ArmA II on normal - high and A2 makes Crysis look conservative with system demands

Then running steam in the background will literally make 0 difference. It's not a resource hog.

 

[Spirultima]

Its far more convenient then going out for a game, that i can say.

 

[Daedalus1942]

I'm thinking about starting to use steam - it seems like a good way of getting games hassle free.

But the games seem to come at a premium compared to normal prices, especially for games that are slightly older. On the other hand, it has a good number of 2+ year old games that would be near impossible to obtain legally, at a very good price.

Your thoughts, Escapists?

Steam is a buggy PoS, and i hate it. it's always been buggy and they will never fix it. That being said, unless you lose your account, at least you never lose the game once it's registered. I just like having the physical disc alot more.

 

[TheZapper]

Steam is completely worth it. Not only does it have a number of games that are hard to find it also regularly has special offers on newer games and the number of games it has is always expanding and adding more games, both old and new.

 

[Frapple]

Steam would be awesome if you could 'de-register' your games and sell them on to another Steam user.

Right now I have;

DoW+All Expansions
CoH+Expansion
GRID
etc
etc

...just sitting there unused for the rest of time.

 

[CheeseSandwichCake]

If you're a PC gamer by default and do everything on the PC you pretty much NEED Steam for gaming and as a social program, especially if you're like me and too lazy to go places for your games.

The special sales are so awesome you actually feel kind of guilty for depriving companies of their money.

As well as that Steam Community In Game is also pretty handy... even though I'm an Xfire user and Steam Community is pretty much the same as that...

 

[Bigeyez]

Most prices on Steam aren't much lower then standard retail, if even that. What I like about Steam are their sales. Fallout 3 for 24 bucks? Hell yeah!

 

[VTNC]

Is there any way to REMOVE a game from Steam? I bought Eets for 2 dollars and I really hate it.

I don't even want to pass on the suffering to anyone else; I just want to get it out of my list, it's like a scarlet letter(s) staring back at me

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

If nothing else, Steam has a decent message system that means you can keep up to date with friends and see what they're playing.

But Team Fortress 2 for £2.49? You're not gonna get that in any offline shop.

 

[Citrus]

Some of the sales on Steam are just amazing. The most recent one was selling TF2 for about $3.00.

 

[Pilot Bush]

definitely more convenient for me