What's the Best Video Game Download Service?

ThinSkin writes "Who needs a brick-and-mortar game shop when you have the world wide web of video game download services? Joel Durham Jr. over at ExtremeTech examines some game download services to decide once and for all which virtual storefront has the best deal for gamers. Among the services reviewed are: Steam, Impulse, Direct2Drive, Good Old Games, and WildTangent Orb. The most popular site in the roundup, Steam, was also the most favored because of its wide selection of popular titles, while Direct2Drive also scored top marks because it has 'just about every title in the universe.'" Which service(s) do you like the most, and what have your experiences with them been?

Comments

Re:Bah,.

[nog_lorp]

For 99% of games available on Steam, if the game will work on your setup so will Steam.

Steam also doesn't limit your ability to have the game installed on any number of computers. It also provides a myriad of features that many people like.

The motivation behind it may be DRM, but it provides a better experience than any other platform, with essentially none of the negative effects of DRM.

Re:Bah,.

[cgenman]

It's important to explicitly call out the properties of DRM that make it bad. DRM is out there to prevent the player from willy-nilly installing on everyone's PC's, which can be bad as it prevents you from switching computers or backing up your own games. Steam actually facilitates transferrence, as you can download any purchased games on any computer you log into. You don't need a CD to play, you don't need a CD to install on another computer, you can play your games on all the computers you have available.

Steam only runs with your games, doesn't take up a lot of CPU time, and has been stable for several years now. The one outstanding question is "what happens if Valve shuts down," but they have promised to unlock everything in such a case.

If we shout that DRM in all forms is terrible, none of the companies will or can listen. If we work towards removing the problematic portions of the system, we might get a compromise setup that is better than we started with.

All consoles since the NES have had DRM. But because they were actually sane DRM, nobody but pirates and developers ever encountered it. Let's work towards that again.