I Heart Downloading Games! What are your pros and cons?

Games
62

I don’t know if it’s really “love” so much as “sucks least”, but I like the automatic version management, ability to redownload at any time and install on multiple machines (even if everything I own burns down tomorrow, all I need is my login to get everything on it back), the increasing integration with community stuff, and they’ve had a lot of good deals on older games and collections. They’re not all unique to Steam, of course, but it’s a nice bundling of them. Stardock/Impulse has a lot of the same features and I use them as well.

And it has its flaws, too, I wouldn’t pretend that it’s perfect: it takes too long to start up, organization of the games list is weak when you start to get a lot of them or add your own, the single-drive thing, they’ve been getting a bit sloppy about manuals and other things that should be on the right-click context menu, mods don’t always work well, offline mode can be a bit quirky…

63

Steam:

  • Best patch management system
  • Best community features
  • Best version history management
  • Best game listing
  • Client forgets settings
  • Browsing store in client sucks hard
  • Allows games to break Steam’s offline feature
  • Should run as a service, not an application
  • Fails to understand Windows’s permissions

Impulse

  • Best looking and most responsive client
  • You can set install locations on a per-app basis
  • Client respects Windows’s permissions
  • No fully automatic patch management
  • No good way to run client in background
  • Client updates stop you updating apps, or even queuing updates
  • Should run as a service, not an application

Gamer’s Gate

  • Installs not tied to client
  • Nasty, sluggish client
  • Downloads done via pointless client
  • Doesn’t automatically re-establish transfers if connection breaks (which really makes you wonder as to the point of the client in the first place!) or client is closed and re-opened

GOG.com

  • Best store layout (by a fucking country mile)
  • You’re not tied to the store after downloading
  • No patch management, but they’re old games so this is irrelevant I suspect.
65

I don’t see any reason that should be so. These are not platforms, or shouldn’t be, they’re internet storefronts. You virtually never see exclusive games at retail, for good reason - it’s decidedly consumer-unfriendly.

66

Yeah, I mean the former. I like turn-based strategy games, wargames, that kind of thing. Apart from a couple of holdovers, these games basically exist now as a download-only niche.

I like some other genres, too, actually, but roguelikes and shmups my other favourites can usually be had for free and obviously are also downloaded rather than physically distributed. These days, going into a bricks-and-mortar game store is mostly a sad exercise in seeing how far the mainstream has moved on from where I am…

67

Most of the love came from the community features they added. You can see what all your friends are playing at any time, when they join a server or log on, you get (optionally) a small popup about it in the corner (even while you are in another server, or playing another game.) If you decide you want to play with them, you just hit shift tab, and a small community overlay pops up, where you can join any of your friends that happen to be playing on their server.

You can chat with them (a small popup will appear, also able to be turned off), and steam supports voice comms across games through the same community interface. It gets a lot of use even when you are not necessarily playing, as a way to look and see what your friends are doing… have conversations with them, which, by the way is also supported by voice comms seamlessly.

There are plenty of other ancilliary and nice things, each player has a default page, statistical and achievement tracking, for the various games. There are group functionalites, useful for clans: group pages, shared calendars for upcoming events or matches, chat rooms, your usual social bs. It has some support for games not created with steam in mind, yadda yadda ya.

Note that it also caters to the online gaming crowd, and so some other things are also a big deal: steam includes VAC as an effective anti-cheating and anti-harassment means – the threat of losing your steam account insures that most people are not posting offensive naked pictures on the sites or in-game spraypaints, and they are not risking cheating.

Also, patching takes place in the background, and happens simultaneously – you may not care particularly if single player is your thing, but all clients and servers need to be on the same version… so you’re assured that the next time you want to pop in for a quick 10 minute ctf session, you won’t instead spent 30 minutes finding that servers have a later version, then hunting down the appropriate patch, possibly waiting in a queue, finally finding out that one of your favorite servers has not updated yet, and so on.

The integrated vcom is good enough to settle issues with which ventrilo version, or teamspeak because ventrilo doesn’t run on linux and so on. In general, Steam largely solved the most persistent and annoying problems of the fps online community.

There is also a good deal of valve love rubbing off, given the support and quality of their own products. In general everything works very well, and while it does take a little time at startup, once its running it doesn’t impact performance.

68

Range doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change whether I buy the games they do have and buying from one store doesn’t preclude me buying from another.

For me the love for Steam comes from the fact that, of all the stores, they’re the one which best understands how this should work. I buy, it installs, it auto-patches and it runs quietly in the background. It’s the best end-to-end experience for me, but Steam falls down in so many other areas that I’d like to see the competition improve. Their 3rd party offerings in the past have been horribly broken (see Jagged Alliance 2 Gold), and support when this happens is pitiful.

69

I TOO AM A FAN OF DIGITAL ELECTRONIC COMPUTER DOWNLOADS.

70

DUMBASS - YOU CANT DOWNLOAD A COMPUTER!!!

71

I love electronic distribution for all the aforementioned reasons, but I’ll add another of my own. Sometimes we get games banned here for not adhering to the ministry of information’s censorship guidelines and the games end up being unavailable. In those situations, Steam or Impulse are fantastic substitutes.

For instance the Witcher wasn’t available here as a result of having boobies and Call of Duty 4 was banned for having enemies that mostly speak Arabic, and Impulse now has the Witcher and Steam always had Call of Duty 4 so yay.

72

Holy cow, I’m not alone…Maybe we need to form a support group??

Jorune

73

I think the ONLY thing I am concerned with, is WHAT type of copy protection SOME of these virtual store fronts use. I just contacted Gamers Gate about Colonization and am waiting for a response. Someone has mentioned that some copy protection measures include being able to download X-amount of times before your cut-off. Even at Gamers Gate it was mentioned (but that was in a 2-year old article, so I don’t know if things have changed). Of course GG also said that a quick email to them should resolve the issue (they would just reset the account or something).

As it is, I feel if their is NO mention of a copy protection on the same page I use to purchase the game, than I assume their isn’t any. If that’s not the case, I will be one PO’d customer. Anyone know the different copy protection schemes used at the various sites??

Jorune

74

I’m a fan of downloading games. It’s mostly pro for me, I lose disks, I lose activation codes, and I hate CD/DVD checks. The one con is something I have yet to run into, which is unavailability.

I use or have used:
Steam - tons of purchases
Impulse/Stardock - most of the big games they have
GamersGate - a surprising number of titles that I found here
EA Store - Not a fan, but it’s my only choice for some games
Direct2Drive - Not a fan, again, it’s my only choice for some games

So far, most of these services have allowed multiple installs or activations and those have been about all I needed. The fact I don’t have to roam to an actual store and play the “do they have it” game is the icing on the cake.

75

Lack of a manual. I will use my purchase of The Witcher from Impulse as example of my only major problem with downloading games. Getting into the game would have been easier if I had a paper manual and did not have to alt-tab when I needed to look something up. It is only a con with certain games, I do not need a manual for Half-life or TF2.

76

I’ve yet to purchase anything via download, let alone games. And no, that doesn’t mean that I download them but don’t pay, I actually don’t do any downloading of anything unless it’s offered for free. Every program or game I buy I go to a retail store and pick it up there (or order it online from a company like Amazon).

It’s not so much that there are any cons (although I like having the media whenever I want it, and a manual to read before/while installing the game, among other collectors/limited edition trinkets) but that there are absolutely no pros for me with downloads. I’m not so impatient that I need something right away and that’s about the only pro that would impact on me.

77

I like the digital distribution model as well. Don’t use Steam, although my kid loves it. I have used Stardock Central and Impulse and liked them. So far the best in my mind is what Matrix games does. You download an exe file that contains the entire game and then they email you any cd key’s you may need. I can then install the game on as many computers that I want. I copy and past the cd key’s into a spreadsheet and store it on my server. I don’t like the sites that only allow you to install the game once or twice(cough, Stategy First, cough) because I can change computers or re-install the os enough times that I run out of installs real fast.

78

If something is only available for download through EA Store or Direct2Drive, I buy it in the retail box or I don’t buy it. There is no possible upside to dealing with their bullshit.