whoa, really? (on the steam: C:\ requirement) That sort’ve sucks. . . I was hoping to use that service, but my C drive is extremely small; the D logical partition’s where all the goods’re at.
You can actually install it to any drive, but you can’t split up the individual games among drives; they’ll all be on that same one on which you installed the base client. At least not without some junction point voodoo I haven’t been brave enough to try yet…
You can change where Steam installs things. Mine goes to my E drive for example. I forget exactly how I did it, it was a while ago.
Just drag your steam folder to another drive, another computer, whatever. Delete the clientregistry.blob file and you’re good to go. I haven’t reinstalled a Steam game in years, the whole folder just keeps moving to progressively bigger hard drives.
Ending a sentence with a preposition in English is fine. English is not Latin.
…What do you mean, “I’m missing the point?”
There’s an odd divide between ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ grammar, word usage, and style that started in the 1700s and continues on to this day. So, why it’s not wrong, there are a large number of people who will argue to hell and back that it is.
Oh my god! Be careful, this thread is cocked and loaded.
I jolly well enjoy my digital downloads that I retrive through the internet, they are delivered through my DLS line that is hooked conveniently to my NIC card.
To contribute, I love steam, they have awesome deals, and the content is delivered very fast. Never had one problem with the service, I use their voice chat quite frequently as well.
DSL… or was that a trap?
Digital Subscriber Line line. :)
In an attempt to actually contribute to the thread instead of playing semantic games: I love purchasing games from download services. I’ve purchased from Steam, Atari, Direct2Drive, and Stardock. It is often easier and quicker for me to download than to figure out when and how to run to the store and purchase it (wife out for the evening and I’m at home with the kids asleep).
Atari sucks for not letting me re-download in the future.
Steam is great for making it trivial to re-download games, etc. On the downside, I really dislike Steam for adding minutes to the start-up time for my games.
I meant that you typed DLS.
She’s incorrect. You can install Steam wherever you want. The problem then becomes the fact that all the games you install with it are all in that folder, so the drive better be big if you download a lot of games.
I use Steam as a virtual bargain bin + buy games there that won’t work without the service anyways (TF2, DoD).
For full price games I stay with boxes for now.
I don’t like the idea of my games not working in some years due to some missing authentication servers somewhere.
If steam finally folded, if you still have you games downloaded, they have some manner of “offline” mode you can use.
Fine, but it’s essentially the same issue. Yes, when I have my brand spanking new Steam account, I can choose where to download. But I can’t change that choice ever again through their interface, which is stupid, and since I don’t have to support their implementation, I don’t. I have three HD’s right now, when I got Steam I had one. I got an additional HD just to install games on, but because I didn’t buy that drive before I got Steam, I’m now out of luck. Dumb me, but they lose my money because of it. There’s been lots of complaints about this issue on their forum but they have not addressed it.
I’m not going to screw around with moving files around when I can just download the game from Direct2Drive and be done with it. Noting that I don’t normally play games by Valve.
Don’t you mean “Oh, my God!”?
Oh, shit – can I put a question mark after a quoted exclamation point like that?
Jesus, now I’m afraid to touch the fucking keyboard.
I’m generally pro-download, but another con is that sometimes user-made mods will not play nicely with the download version of a game, especially if the mod only works properly with a certain patch/version of the game while the download automagically comes with, or updates to, the latest version.
My favorite part of downloads are less physical clutter on my shelves, playing without the disc in the drive, and no risk of physically-damaged media. The main thing I miss is a nicely-printed manual and (sometimes) full control over patching.
I’ve used Steam, Impulse, BigFish, and a few miscellaneous download/activation key systems.
You’re not out of luck. As has been said already, you can just copy the entire Steam directory to another drive. Yeah, it’s dumb that you can’t put games in places other than where Steam lives, but there are workarounds that aren’t a big deal.
Yeah, and what’s worse, it differs between download services. I bought Titan Quest and the expansion through Direct2Drive while my friend bought it through Steam. My version was apparently more or less a direct duplicate of the retail game and would accept any mods out there, while his Steam version would not.
I really only like one thing about digital distribution - it’s convenient. That’s it. Prices aren’t competitive, availability is weirdly balkanized, and a lot of DD services have annoying restrictions I’m not willing to deal with, such as download limits. It’s also a lot slower downloading a game than installing off disc, even if obtaining the disc to begin with might be slower still. I have concerns about the longevity of the DD services. I want to have my purchased games available to me forever. They’re increasingly impractical with increasing size of games, and they absolutely are increasing - you’d never have seen a 15 gig install four years ago, and now half the big name games want that kind of space. They don’t allow resale. I’m not going to resell, but I enjoy buying things that people have resold. It’s not only cheaper, but it’s fun finding rare games and bargains in a way that just doesn’t appear with DD.
And of course I just plain like having physical discs and ancillary goodies.
I recognize that shopping at today’s retail outlets is increasingly frustrating and limited, but that’s why I think sites like Amazon are an increasingly superior alternative to both physical stores and DD services.