Civilization Comes to Steam

Gamespot reports that yet another publisher has joined the ever-growing stable of Steam fans. 2K games is working to bring some of their games to the service, with Civilization III and IV coming to Steam this week, and other titles to follow. From the article: "Also included will be the high-seas adventure Sid Meier's Pirates! and the alternate-history real-time strategy game Shattered Union ... According to a statement released today by Valve, Steam currently has some 10 million customers for both its 'core' products--which include advanced shooters such as Half-Life 2--and casual games, such as PopCap Games' Bejeweled and Zuma. "

Comments

High prices

[LotsOfPhil]

Civ 4 is $50 and Civ 3 is $30.
The latter seems quite high for a 5 year old game.

Civilization comes to Steam?

[meringuoid]

... right, so after Steam get Railroad, then Industrialization. Then build factories, factories, factories, and start churning out the cavalry and artillery units 50% faster than your neighbours. The rest writes itself...

Old PC Games

[Jesterboy]

This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop. It seems like an ideal situation for Valve; small download sizes, minimal work, and I would think a high demand. As for the gamers, we could get games like the original System Shock running no hassle under WinXP, with possibly some minor graphical improvements (i.e., unlocking higher res video modes in this example).

I know games such as these are widely available on abandonware sites, but I would gladly pay for true support. Referring to System Shock again, I managed to get it to run fine on my old laptop with Windows XP, but my current system is unable to play it reliably, despite trying to use Dos Box, VDM Sound, etc. I would gladly pay for these games if I could easily run them, and would like to support the developers who made them. We could have Lucasarts Adventures, classic DOS games, and older FPSes at our fingertips without delving into a legal quagmire such as abandonware. Is this just a pipe dream?

Re:Old PC Games

[Bluesman]

There's no such thing as giving Civ III a "whirl."

You can start a game in the afternoon. You'll be "just finishing up this turn" when the sun comes up the next morning, and you haven't slept at all. You've been warned.