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

Bah,.

[Kalriath]

Great. Another pointless "top X" list spread across twelve ad-ridden pages. Who accepts this crap? Editors? Hello?

Anyways, I disagree with their final decisions too. Their top two are Steam (bloated DRM-ware) and Direct2Drive (also bloated DRM-ware) while giving Impulse (no DRM inherent) third place. In fact, they don't even list DRM as a con of Steam or Direct2Drive (or "no DRM" as a pro of Impulse).

Give me Impulse over Steam or D2D any day.

Re:Bah,.

[Kalriath]

Bollocks. I don't mind paying for a game, provided the game doesn't cause more hassle than I can get enjoyment out of it. I'm happy to buy a game if I can install it and play it, without having to worry about whether this game or that's arcane copy protection prevents me playing it on my {insert setup here}.

If noone ever buys the game, they'll stop making them. Duh.

Re:Bah,.

[calmofthestorm]

I'm happy to buy games, I refuse to rent them. Especially if it's misadvertised as buying.

Re:Bah,.

[calmofthestorm]

I dont' think pirates care about DRM; it doesn't affect them.

Re:Bah,.

[NoobixCube]

On the contrary, I'm a pirate and I love DRM. Gives me further moral justification for my stance of downloading a game before I buy it. A practice which has probably saved me thousands in "I wish I hadn't bought that"s over the years.

Re:Bah,.

[Goldberg's Pants]

I love Steam. It's actually easier than piracy. (FINALLY!) Find a game, purchase, download, done. Never have to worry about disks. Can install on multiple machines. Honestly, with the system issues I've had the last year with reinstalling the OS on several machines, Steam made life SO much easier with just setting it downloading and leaving it. No finding disks. No disk swapping. No trying to find the misplaced manual with the serial number on it. Nada.

Stardock's Impulse service may prove in the end to be better than Steam due to lack of DRM, but the fact is Impulse is a diabolical piece of software currently.

Re:Bah,.

[Goldberg's Pants]

I've never had cause to deal with Steam's support. I did deal with Direct2Drive's recently. I don't have anything through them, but was curious how the Spore DRM would work and had a few other questions, so I sent an email asking about four questions. I received a response which answer one of them. So I figured I'd escalate to one of their managers. It tells you how in their information, so I did everything it said.

And that was a month ago and I've heard nothing.

Only issue I've had with Steam was with GTR-Evolution recently. According to friends it works just fine in offline mode. My internet has been crappy lately so I've been unable to use Steam online, and GTR-Evo flat out refused to start without the internet. Ironically this has forced me to download the cracked version so I can actually play if my crappy internet goes out.

Re:Bah,.

[Pyrion]

Except you can only be logged into your Steam account on one computer at a time.

Impulse doesn't care.

Re:Bah,.

[Gewalt]

Selection :) You don't offer 90% of all games ever made.

Re:Bah,.

[harl]

Steam has the worst possible DRM. If you went into a brick and mortar store and they said they reserved the right to take your "purchase" back at any time would you still buy it?

From http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

2. In the case of a one-time purchase of a product license (e.g., purchase of a single game) from Valve, Valve may choose to terminate or cancel your Subscription in its entirety or may terminate or cancel only a portion of the Subscription (e.g., access to the software via Steam) and Valve may, but is not obligated to, provide access (for a limited period of time) to the download of a stand-alone version of the software and content associated with such one-time purchase.

Re:Bah,.

[Spinalcold]

I like the convenience of Steam, it's just so slow! No one else has really complained about this, so it could, for some strange reason, just be my setup, but even after a fresh install it takes forever to after booting Steam to verify each game is updated and download the updates. Then, the games take a long time to boot, the only think I can think of is that Steam is slowing the booting process down. Eg. Starcraft boots in a few seconds, Halflife takes a minute for Steam to boot and verify updates and another 30 seconds to launch the game. It's not that much time, but for new games it is, TF2 takes way too long to boot.

Re:Bah,.

[neoform]

Downside of steam:

You need to be logged in to the internet to use any of your games. Even if they're single player games. There have been a number of times where I had lost my internet connection for a day or two and was unable to play those games, that was annoying.

Re:Bah,.

[Don_dumb]

Downside of steam:

You need to be logged in to the internet to use any of your games. Even if they're single player games. There have been a number of times where I had lost my internet connection for a day or two and was unable to play those games, that was annoying.

This keeps coming up but you don't need to always be online. There is an option (I'm not at home right now) that prevents you needing to be online to access your Steam client. Has this changed in the last few months?

Re:Bah,.

[lowlymarine]

I guess it also means that in ten years when valve shuts down and the person that buys their platform, decides that out of maliciousness they don't want to continue offering the service, and also that at that stage I am too poor to afford 3D Virtual Lesbian Extravaganza on my VR rig, then I might be saying "Well, damn, I can't play TF2 against the other three people that are still trying to play it". But thats fairly unlikely.

Because no one still plays online shooters from 10 years ago anymore, right?

Re:Bah,.

[harl]

Please document this claim as it exists no where in the contract you sign when renting a game from Steam.

Re:Bah,.

[Fweeky]

Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.

Uh huh. Did you miss the 5GB of .gcf's it keeps hanging around, basically duplicating every file in every game you purchase off it? That, and the app itself takes a good 30 seconds to start, when it's not forcing yet another mandatory update on you.

Steam's overhead here is on the order of 25GB, not 100MB, and it doesn't even put that overhead to good use by providing me the capacity of move installed games to other drives or roll back patches.

On the other hand my entire Impulse install is 19MB, the games I've bought from it are on two other drives, I can archive them, reinstall them, roll back patches, or choose not to install patches without losing a notification that there is in fact a patch, and I don't need to wait for Impulse to start to run any of the games I've bought; they're pretty much just unmodified retail copies without DRM.

GamersGate similarly ships at least *some* unmodified, DRM free games. I'm not sure how far that extends, but Sword of the Stars' publishers gave them a limited exclusive for their latest expansion because they were so fast at distributing new patches, and the users seem to love them.

Re:Bah,.

[p0tat03]

I'm not sure about the slowness of Steam - I've experienced it myself on other machines before. On my current machine though, things boot in a matter of seconds, and downloading from the Steam servers is up to 2MB/s for me, so I'm still a happy customer.

The only thing that pisses me off is that no effort is made to update old titles to run on new machines. How can you justify selling, for example, Deus Ex 2, when the game clearly will BSOD any dual-core machine? They didn't warn of it either.

Maybe this says something...

[Thrull]

I use Steam and I actually sometimes look at the store tab with the intent to buy something, because it's easy. Lots of good independent games, and allows me to install on other computers with no major fuss (cept for Bioshock, curse you EA). The games are almost always cheaper too.

I used the older version of Impulse (Stardock Central) and it seemed to work well enough, although the selection of games is low quality compared to Steam.

And I know they rated Direct2Drive pretty high, but even they note:

"You can't patch D2D games with downloadable patches; they require their own special patch procedure."

If Direct2Drive has to rework every patch for every game they've ever offered to work with their locked down version, you have to wonder if some patches might get "delayed" or games wholly abandoned eventually... I seem to remember this coming up in one of my decisions to get a D2D or boxed version of a popular game in the past.

Re:New Service

[Anonymous Coward]

3 games eh?

Re:*tosses article out the window*.. 3 letters

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us prefer not to steal games, thanks.

Re:*tosses article out the window*.. 3 letters

[cliffski]

Explain to me why you would take a game without paying it from there rather than buy it direct from a developer that uses no DRM?

unless of course you don't give a fuck about anyone except yourself, want to save a few dollars, and wish to encourage even more developers to abandon PC gaming entirely?
In which case, good work! things seem to be going according to your plan!

Re:*tosses article out the window*.. 3 letters

[Haeleth]

Yes, I suppose TPB is a convenient place for children and the morally immature to violate copyright law. Some of us, however, are adults, and have grasped that if something costs money then either you pay for it or you do without. For us, services like Steam are quite useful.

Re:*tosses article out the window*.. 3 letters

[Spatial]

Or we avoid all limitations, and buy the game AND download it from TPB. Best method if you ask me.

Re:*tosses article out the window*.. 3 letters

[Dogtanian]

Yes, I suppose TPB is a convenient place for children and the morally immature to violate copyright law. Some of us, however, are adults, and have grasped that if something costs money then either you pay for it or you do without.

I'm selling a roughly 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture (with traces of other chemicals) for $1,000 per litre. If you don't want to pay for it, you'd better do without, otherwise you're morally immature. Don't even think about just taking it for free from the atmosphere!

Regardless of whether you agree with the GP's opinion, your analogy is obviously flawed. Air exists already and is necessary for life. A given game wouldn't exist without the effort of the developer, and isn't necessary for life.