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Oh, I wanted to add that there are games out there which are doing exactly what you want on the PC. Plug in two keyboards and play Frets on Fire. Apparently you can play Left 4 Dead PC in split-screen co-op. And don't forget the piles and piles of indie games which have multiplayer. Trine is fairly fun single-player but immensely more fun co-op.

No, you can't.

steam policy: no refunds.

A lot of things come with no refunds. Most Steam games are either cheap enough that I really don't care, or have a demo version, also. So...

I bought batman:AA and it *sucked* to me. Nice idea, achievables make it crap for me, my own personal opinion. I decided this within an hour of playtime

Your fault you didn't play the demo, especially if it was evidence within an hour of playtime.

Think about it from Steam's point of view. It's far cheaper for them to send you a smaller demo, and both cheaper and more convenient if they don't have to deal with refunds all the time.

There's also the piracy aspect -- which is why, according to zorg50, many retailers won't allow you a refund once the game has been opened. Think about it from their perspective -- if you install a game even as old as Starcraft, and activate it with its CD key, tied to some online account, that means if you return it, and they resell it, it's now going to be worth far less to the next person, because they won't be able to activate it in that way.

You wouldn't want to buy a new Blizzard game and be unable to connect to Battle.net, would you?

Now, it may be different for console games, but that only applies to actual discs -- I don't know of any downloadable console games which can be refunded or resold.

2: steam goes down = services go down = you can't play your games.

This is only really a huge issue for single-player games. And I'll give you this one, since I haven't played it recently enough to notice, but I almost never see it go down.

Even from Direct2Drive, whom I prefer by a little, you download the actual CD image/executable and back it up, and have a CD key mailed to you.

Wait, so how's it "Direct 2 Drive" if it's actually direct-to-CD-then-to-drive, after you wait for something in the mail? WTF?

If you're saying you get that in addition to the downloaded version, fine, though not incredibly appealing -- a CD plus a CD key is far less convenient to me than a download and a password.

Oh, and you have refunds.

But, as Minwee says, only for games you haven't played, which means it wouldn't help at all with your Batman problem.

What would help with your Batman problem is to be a little less of an impulse buyer.

Whether or not it's allowed, Epic Megagames already does it. Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition on GOG.com is $9.99, but $14.99 on Steam. Just one example, I'm sure there's many more.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

Steam has the Valve titles plus a smattering of nice indies.

While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts, 2K Games, UbiSoft, Rockstar Games, LucasArts, and iD Software are hardly indies.

The patent was filed in 1993. In 2000 Uniloc was actively courting the gaming industry. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_Nov_10/ai_66803777/

I don't know of any games using hardware locks before 2000. Steam was released in 2003 and seems to use Uniloc for some of it's games http://store.steampowered.com/app/10560/

No, it is really a balance thing. Game not so impressive and the censors concern about children's access to that content is, borderline, a difficult thing to judge. So potential risk versus gain, so possible harm to minors versus profits for one amongst thousands of other games, and look to be honest compare these two pages http://store.steampowered.com/app/500/ and http://www.amazon.com/Left-4-Dead-Pc/dp/B000PS4X7S, what is the major difference, that's right ratings advice, so valve is looking pretty guilty of marketing unsuitable products to children.

Now the tests are will this post also get flame modded down, will steam , naughty naughty, make a correction to product sales page and, will you realise the only answer to the question you actually asked is yes (I think you might have unreasonably and ban the wrong way around) but, if not, just to be clear, yes they should ban 'unreasonable games' but I wont get that worked up over it either way.

Because that leads to dependency hell, and that leads to horrible user experience.

Hurry, better tell Valve! And maybe Microsoft, too, while you're at it! Or Apple, for that matter -- they love frameworks, as long as it's one they shipped with the OS.

Seriously, Linux has solved this dependency issue with package managers for decades. Contrary to popular belief, it's trivial to support multiple versions of a library. And with the App Store, no one can claim installation as a problem -- the App Store can easily be thought of as a package manager that only supports the official Apple repository.

I am a little sore that The Longest Journey is still shelved. If this MMO shares any elements, even the general feel of it, then I think it will be very interesting.

I still consider The Longest Journey to be the best adventure game and actually one of the better games I've played in general, if only in terms of story and world.

If you're curious about it, it's really cheap on Steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/6310/

Market share statistics are usually based on quarterly sales. So when AMD is up or down, between 15 and 25%, that's sales for that quarter.

Nobody knows how many millions or billions of AMD and Intel CPUs are out there, still functioning.

I would put more merit on the Steam Survey than this. Steam says 1 in 3 CPUs are AMD. That's a subset of the general populace - people that use steam and play games - but it reflects that heavy push a few years back as the Gamer's CPU of choice.

What if you found out that there's a PC version of Quake 3 Arena? Would you give up your Dreamcast then?

> The simple fact is your WRONG.

Actually... he's right... and you are not only wrong, but rather dumb to boot! It's a good thing you posted anonymously... otherwise that post could come back to haunt you for the utter stupidity you displayed.

>The PC world doesn't have vastly differing hardware and software at all.

So the underlying OS doesnâ(TM)t matter much? Or which version of pixel shaders or how much ram is in the box?
Perhaps you should get to know the Steam Hardware Survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Whole heck of a lot of DX 8 & 9 machines out there.

Obviously Steam hasnâ(TM)t gotten the memo that the PC world doesnâ(TM)t have vastly differing hardware... otherwise they wouldnâ(TM)t care much, now would they?

Moving on... let us just focus on the GPU side of things for a moment... shall we?

While it is true that various iterations of Direct X/OpenGL have various standards of supported features... it is not uncommon for game makers to take advantage of specific extensions/features that one GPU class or another exposes that is not fully DX/OGL compatible.

This is coupled with the fact that not all cards of the same GPU type and speed are created equal... after all, letâ(TM)s not forget that the amount of RAM in a given desktop can vary widely, coupled with the amount of ram on the video card is also variable between PCs... the developer needs to be very careful with their memory usage depending on how low end of a machine they want the game to run on.

The advantage of consoles is of course you have a known platform you can target and exploit without the need to worry about lesser systems... or allowing your game to grow with time or have additional features/effects/resolutions only be available with the next wave of video cards that wonâ(TM)t see most desktops for another year or two.
At the end of the day... DX and OGL are simply the lowest common denominators... and while they can do much... at times you can do even more if you target something specifically.

>The difference between the 360 and the PS3's CPU architecture is vastly different than the difference between PC's

Half true... though as most competent developers will tell you, with the proper designs up front, writing an application that is available on multiple platforms is extremely doable... it all comes down to the question of if it is worth the time and energy required.

>That being said the reason there is not a lot more cross platform gaming is that it is not in their respective financial interests to provide it.

You finally said something that was correct... although largely nonsensical.

Honestly though, that statistic presented by the grandparent, while interesting, isn't all that useful to the conversation at hand. If it had been "percentage of households who have broadband and play PC games" that might be a more useful statistic. I believe it stands to reason that most PC gamers will probably fall in the 60% of those who have broadband, of course this is just speculation though.

If the STEAM hardware survey for July 2009 is anything to go by 2.93% of respondents have dial-up speed connections, 76.85% have better than dial-up, and the remaining 20.22% being unspecified.

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

The details of the ban will not be provided
Steam Support will not disclose the cheats that were detected running on your system or the date and time the infraction took place. Any requests for this information will be ignored.

http://supportwiki.steampowered.com/wiki/I've_Been_Banned

Think of it this way:

If every single PC user of Team Fortress 2 was already part of an online 'e-tail' content delivery system with their credit cards hooked up to it, etc, then it would be much, much more likely that they try to release it only on that delivery method. As it is, that is really only found on consoles.

So, there you have it?

Sllow me introduce you to Steam, Valve's content delivery system that every Team Fortress 2 player has installed.

You do get a discounted price, in the form of added value. Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game. Check out the release notes for just Thursday's update. This isn't even a class update! Also you can leverage your

in this day and age of instantaneous distribution, I don't see why I should have to pay the same price

to download your games anywhere you want, as many times as you want, without carrying around a library of DVDs with you. You get further value added through community features too that you typically don't get from just buying a disk. Steam community lets you IM your Steam friends, see what game they're playing, join them on that server, join groups with similar interests, join group chat, see what your group-members are playing and join them, see gameplay stats for friends and groupmates.. and you can get screen-corner notifications if you want for a friend joining a game, or a group announcement, or a friend request.. and not only from the Steam application but also from the steam overlay app which can be brought up over any game.. these features cost money to maintain, and you get them for free.

Valve does so too. But at least they are sharing:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/
http://steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php

Valve does so too. But at least they are sharing:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/
http://steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php

Valve does this as well. It creates some pretty interesting data, like the maps of where people die the most. It's easy to see how it can help designers.

SLI/crossfire is bullshit

For a taster of the sort of games small teams (from one person up) are producing, including the aforementioned World of Goo and Blueberry Garden, Steam are offering a 10-pack of indie games on sale this weekend. World of Goo is absolute genius, more than worth the price of the whole pack itself in my opinion.

Besides the already mentioned inability to resell or give away a game when you finish it or no longer want it I have seen other issues that aren't discussed as much.

Patches
A couple issues here. Currently there are quite a few games on Steam that have retail patches available but have not been patched on Steam. Usually you can't use the retail patch on the Steam version. There is also the issue of community patches, like for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Since the community patch isn't an official patch it will not be offered on Steam, even though it fixes many issues with the retail patches after the developer stopped supporting it. There is a nine page topic on the Steam forums. Unpatched Games on Steam
Forced patches is another issue. There have been cases where they broke something and you are unable to back out. It can be a hassle having to download hundreds of megs before you can play a game. I have run into that several times, just having a few minutes to play a game and then having to download forced updates before I can start.

Bandwidth Caps
With many ISPs considering or already implementing bandwidth caps, having to download huge games, especially if we are talking PS3 Blu-Ray, will use up your allowance pretty fast.

According to the latest steam hardware survey data released (June 2007) 60% of all surveyed systems were using winXP still, even a year after win7's launch

First of all, the latest Steam hardware survey is June 2009, and Vista has a combined 34.76% (32 + 64) on the Steam Hardware Survey two years after coming out.

• Main site: http://www.audio-surf.com/
• On steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/12900/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiosurf

(I know it would have been pithier to just leave this post at "Audiosurf", and I admit I considered it, but I felt an actual description of the game would be more useful.)

You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account.

I think you need to read up on Steam. Personally I like it, though it does definitely have its pitfalls. However, the main point you argue about it (thinking you would lose access to it, is negated by the ability to burn ANY of the games you download to a CD/DVD and you also have access to the cd-keys that come with YOUR game). If you want references:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=892928/
Also, offline works great for some games. I have bought Fallout 3 through steam but I don't play it anymore. However, my roommate still hasn't beaten it, so he plays it on his computer through steam in offline mode while I play TF2 or any other game I've got at the same time. No hassle, no worries, and of course I've got the Fallout 3 and Orange Box DVD's sitting right here, burned directly from Steam, which work perfectly.

Too bad its mainly made for kids, there's not enough such toys for us adults :)

Actually there sort of is, it's called Garry's Mod.
If you link it up with a third party mod called "WireMod" you can do all kinds of crazy stuff in the game by wiring things together, besides what you can do outside the game with Lua scripting.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4000/

Except that this doesn't have anything to do with used game sales unless your "used" games fell off a truck somewhere. Once the disc's activated it's activated, and that's that.

Unless the activation is tied to your (mandatory) account, like Steam.

It must require an internet connection for activation anyway, otherwise how does this differ from an activation code included in the box?

Can't play it offline? Tough.

You can buy a copy of IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 on Steam and fly it on a more modern sim. Steam's got it for $10.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/15320/

As far as your 'average user' specs..

For what it is worth, the Steam Hardware Survey is great for getting a feel for what people who run steam-based games have, which in many ways reflects Windows Geekdom..

As of May, 2009..

512..999 MB : 7.32%
1 GB : 17.87%
2 GB : 36.04%
3 GB : 26.02%
4 GB : 8.09%
5+ GB : 3.34%
..with 1.31% sporting less than 512MB

Eclipsed in the fact that Valve keeps releasing updates for TF2 and not CS:S, but not eclipsed at all with player base size. CS:S still has the most players of any Steam game by far. If you add up the people playing CS:S and the original CS, it has more players than all the other Steam games combined. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

If this reaction is anything to go by...

There's hardly been any updates to the game other than bugfixes, and I even though I've played this game quite a bit if you compare it to all the attention TF2 has been getting I'm a bit disappointed.

Hardly any updates, that is bullshit, there has been more than a dozen updates in 6 months time. That does not even include Valve patching gameplay problems in the pre-release demo. Finally, pile on an extra two versus campaigns, and more than a dozen survival maps to the released updates.

It ain't TF2, stop comparing the two different games.

There are several "app stores" already for PCs, they've just concentrated on games in the past.

Steam is a really good example of this, including automatic updates.

No, seriously, who cares?

Independent application writers. They perk up a great deal any time a means of widespread distribution arises that can make what they do easier.

That includes all the G1 developers who have a new and deeper understanding of Java and might be looking for a wider market to apply it to... the GUI frameworks are not the same but lots of people stop at the language barriers.

This model is meaningful for Joe Sixpack audience, which does need that click-click-click-bought, installed & running approach. But how many Java apps for that market you know?

Probably no more than a few billion different apps. Of course, I'm probably underestimating. Look at the size of the iPhone app store. Not there but growing towards it.

It's all desktop ones, remember, and Swing still looks and feels horrible on any desktop, from Windows to X to Mac.

Thus, JavaFX. Or you can probably use Swing if you like, with some care it works fine. Look at the hideous VBA stuff people have bought in the past for lots of money when it met a need.

We're in double digits for the total usable app count, at best...

Prediction for "shutdown" locked in at "a few dozen". That's going to be amusing in a year.

Oh, great. So it's another Sun product with "Java" in name which has nothing whatsoever to do with Java, except that your next Java update will run an installer with "Install Java App Store client" checkbox set by default. Sounds familiar?

Why Yes. Yes it does.

billions of ... mobile devices, and smartcards, millions of enterprise servers, set top boxes, Blu-Ray DVD players" - all of which, of course, having no relevance to the subject being discussed.

Please tell me you are joking and not truly that dense. Every blu-ray player for example has a perfectly fine Java engine that could connect to and run items from this store...

Not to mention Microsoft, if it decides to jump on the bandwagon...

But since they are far from platform neutral in anything they do, what could they do? Steam is beating the pants off them, if they can't fight of Steam, well then.

The day to do anything but laugh loudly when the thought of Microsoft competing against a well thought out plan are long since gone. Microsoft is simply too monolithic to react in timely ways despite however many smart people they set to working at cross purposes. I suppose they might corner the online app store market for Surface, how big is THAT?

The reason it can work is the reason the App Store worked, lots of small specialized potentially well written apps that can gain enough of a hold that people come there for more apps. Who would go to a physical store for software if they could buy something more specialized for less that did what they wanted? And app writers get the boon of not caring if people are switching to the Mac or not.

With Steam infesting every game that comes out nowadays forcing you to tie a game to an account and forcing you to activate online for the sole purpose of killing the second hand market...

Yeah because the $50 Half-Life PC game CDs I bought when it was new has such a high resale value...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/70/

You can always try to get the non-Steam version too if Valve isn't the original publisher. I always check the title-specific forums on steampowered.com and look for people complaining about bad patches or poor 3rd party + Valve support. Some games don't work well Steam, easiest to just stay away from those.

With PC games, the prices fall too fast with many titles after 3-4 months. I think most of my RPGs/strategy games were 40% off when I got them after waiting a bit after release while still being *brand new* in box.

But you are right that this is a great idea for console games. Their prices stay inflated far, far longer compared to PC games.

Which of those maps is used in competitive play.

Beats me. I'm part of the core group of gamers... the people who play just to have fun.

You never mentioned anything about competitive play earlier, you say the "core gamers..." which I took to mean the main player-base, which are non-competitive gamers.

What, you want proof? The proof is in which classes are used in competitive play. As I recall, the normal 6-man competitive team consists of two Scouts, two Soldiers, a Medic, and a Demoman. Which class is the most played in the game? Engineer, according to Valve's stats.

Payload maps are popular, but its 5 pt CP maps that make this game, keep the core group of gamers playing and people coming back.

It's funny that you say that. The official stats disagree with you. Right now, the top 5 most played maps are (in order):
ctf_2fort
cp_dustbowl
pl_goldrush
pl_badwater
cp_badlands

That's a CTF map, a CP assault map, both payload maps, and then a CP symmetric (AKA 5 pt) map.

P.S. The numbers at the bottom of my previous post were not counting the user contributed maps, so I'm not sure where your junction rant came from. Incidentally, Valve has also reworked both Fastlane and Egypt since their releases, although I rarely if ever see them actually played on a server.

Is this some reference to Plants vs. Zombies? I can't tell o.o

Yes, and more to the point, there are certain mods on Steam that you need a Source game to use. Garry's Mod is a good example of this, and it's not even a free mod!

Source-engine mods usually need one of these games.

Yes, and more to the point, there are certain mods on Steam that you need a Source game to use. Garry's Mod is a good example of this, and it's not even a free mod!

Source-engine mods usually need one of these games.

Yes. A "total flop" as you put it, with 36% of players on Steam using it. I guess 36% of players enjoy games with more crashes, less performance, more blue screens... am I missing anything here? You're probably better at this than I am. Give me some more baseless claims I can throw out there for good effect.

I've actually bought last night the Orange Box from Valve, because they have a promotion this weekend: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/

So far, I've installed Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Team Fortress 2 and these two games downloaded from Steam servers 8024 MB, because some resources are shared between these games in the package.

The estimated bandwidth usage required for the rest is:
  860 MB Half-Life 2
2160 MB Half-Life 2: Episode One
6132 MB Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2606 MB Portal

So we're looking at 19GB that I could burn through in a single day with my 20mbps connection.

Keeping in mind that most games are 6-8GB nowadays and some come up at promotional prices like 5-10$ from time to time, I don't believe using 25-50GB in abusing the internet connection you've paid for.

On the contrary, the ISP is abusing the poor people that don't require fast connections making money from plans those people don't use.

As I said in other discussions, I personally am opposed to usage caps but I'm not opposed to pay per bandwidth used provided the transition from unmetered to pay per traffic is done fairly for the consumer.

What I'm trying to say is that, if a consumer currently has a 10mbps plan and pays $50 for it, the customer expects that he should be able to use at least half of that anytime he wants during a month. It's not something unreasonable.

So if a company decided to switch to billing him for bandwidth, the plan should cost a small fee for the equipment and for certain speed steps, like $10-15, and then the payment per GB should not be much higher than the previous plan, because it's not fair to pay for less.

So: 8 mbps unmetered gives you around 2.8TB of traffic if used to the max all month, and you pay for this $50.
Let's assume a reasonable usage of this connection would be half of that, so we're looking at 1.4TB (1400 GB) for 50$.

This means an equivalent pay per traffic plan could be:

$10 - base subscription
$0 - capped at 5mbps
  +$5 - raise cap to 10mbps
  +$10 - raise cap to 20mbps
  [...]
  +$40 - raise cap to 50mbps
$0 - 10 GB of traffic included in the plan (more if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.03 - 1 GB of data transferred from Internet to computer (cheaper if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.05 - 1 GB of data transferred from computer to Internet

The $0.03 is determined from 50$ / 1400 GB. Upload bandwidth costs more because it often costs the companies more and I want to be fair with them.

With this plan, mom and dad will pay $10 bucks.
A very heavy user with a 10mbps connection using it to the max will pay 10$ + $5 for 10mbps cap + $99 (0.03 x 3300GB) = $120

In theory, ISP companies will compete and bring prices down but in US as long as there are monopolies I doubt it will happen even with a change like this.

you can't judge anything by a wiki page.

There we go, fixed that up for you.

It really is a great game, just onto world 3 (the second one) and am really starting to get hooked, worth the cash for it at any rate.

Steam clicky

Except they raised their game back up to $50 after that experiment. If it was so successful, why did they do it?