What are your feelings about Steam?

I’m just curious how you guys feel about Steam. Yesterday I had a healthy discussion about it with a friend of mine who claims Steam being the worst thing ever, mainly because of the store. He prefers to own a real box and dvd instead of a virtual copy which I can understand, in fact I own a hard copy of the Orange Box myself. One of the things he also hated was the DRM and how you ‘have to be online’ to use Steam and play games. Of course this is bullshit since it is not Steam which requires you to be online but the insane DRM of certain companies.

As for me I love Steam and find it one of the most useful programs I own, coming right after Firefox and Digsby. I love the (insane) sales there are on Steam (wtf, 75% off?!), how it keeps my games up-to-date without me doing a thing, how it allows me to modify the games without them going corrupt/VAC’ed and most importantly, how it keeps my games together in one easy to use list. I mean how can you hate a program like this? Sure Steam has his limitations when it comes to chatting but that’s okay with me. The Steam devs wanted to create a program which is as light as possible so it won’t affect gaming and if that means I can’t use my webcam then so be it, besides webcams are soooo 2001…

Anyway, how do you guys feel about Steam and most importantly, why do you feel that way?

Edit: I just realized that I have no pirated games installed atm o.o

Steam gives me discounted games, updates automatically, has a good support line, and allows me to chat in game and browse the web which is something you simply can't do on a console. People complain about steam because they're foolish.

STEAM IS REALLY FUCKING LAGGY.

But once again, that's my computer. Not steam.

I really love steam. Your friend is an idiot for wanting useless boxes that he will lose in his next house moving.

New GUI is complete shit on windows xp

hyce777 wrote:STEAM IS REALLY FUCKING LAGGY.

But once again, that's my computer. Not steam.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: make a extreme lightweight program lag by running it.

Nicobbq wrote:I really love steam. Your friend is an idiot for wanting useless boxes that he will lose in his next house moving.

Funniest part is that he still uses steam because Valve games require you have steam installed xD

Chuck wrote:New GUI is complete shit on windows xp

That's the same as telling me the website lags/hangs on IE6. It's outdated, stop thinking companies will support a 2001 OS forever. Sometimes you just have to upgrade...

WinXP is old school. Get 7.

IE6 is fucking trash. Get Firefox / Chrome

Give up pepper, I'm still troubleshooting IBM dos computers here at my job. One computer had those casette tapes as a driver.

XP is the best operating system to this very day, better than vista and seven and a lot of people still use it. Steam should know this and be smart about it but they are not

Steam <3<3<33<3<3<3<33<3<3<3 33<3<3<33<3<33<3

They have discounts on everything all the time and the best part of that is that they have discounts just to get people cheap games not just to clear out the storage (as Steam's storage is endless.)

I mean compare it to xbox live and microsofts digital game distribution where they never give you money off anything.

Too bad the quality of voice chat is terrible.

Siphex wrote:Too bad the quality of voice chat is terrible.

THIS

Steam is a damn fine program, but it's surprisingly heavy.
Right now it's doing absolutely nothing and it's still chomping on 18K of memory.

Chuck wrote:XP is the best operating system to this very day, better than vista and seven and a lot of people still use it. Steam should know this and be smart about it but they are not

Valve knows that a lot people still use XP, they haven't dropped support for it (yet). My guess however is that they will do so once they finish the followup for their Source engine which isn't the most efficient engine around.

As for the everlasting hatred on Vista, MS screwed up the release of it causing people to think it's bad. If they had postponed the release back by 6 months there would be enough hardware out there which could handle Vista. Fact is most people were stupid, used their old XP machines to test it out and so the shitstorm began. I know I am a rare kind, I actually find Vista a decent OS after using it for several months when I got my laptop (SP1 installed)... As for win7, god tier OS which beats XP imo. Support has improved drastically, it is loaded with new long wanted functions and in overall it is the future. As for gaming on win7, you might find this article quite interesting... http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/features/133761.20090901.Windows-7-Best-OS-for-gaming/

Anyway feel free to open a topic on XP vs win7, might bring some more life to the forums.

Lord Zurkov wrote:Steam is a damn fine program, but it's surprisingly heavy.
Right now it's doing absolutely nothing and it's still chomping on 18K of memory.

In my case:
4GB = 4194304KB
4194304KB - 18KB = 4194286KBI

In most people's case:
2GB = 2097152KB
2097152KB - 18KB = 2097134KB
MY PC LAGS FROM THIS! CAN SOMEONE HELP ME?!

Must I open a new topic to state my opinion on each OS out of experience I had with them for the pass 20 years of my life to prove which is better then which?
On a side note, XP uses 512 meg of ram and Win7 uses 1.5 Gig of ram because of the added pointless feature such as how you move the window around and when it minimizes and does that cool effect, takes up graphic resources and the computer memory as well.

I dislike how buggy steam for mac still is with it's mouse delay and lag on lowest settings while on my windows 7 bootcamp I play highest settings with no problem at all. Also, VOICE CHAT STILL BROKEN FOR MAC PISSES ME OFF i can only micspam

I like windows seven because it makes my computer pretty guise

I was on Vista, now on 7. I don't regret it a single second.
I dont regret XP either.

windows xp + custom skins = godmode

I had win7 installed but my older video card would not function properly on it and i tried EVERYTHING. So i rolled back to XP.

For some reason since the last major steam update came out i seem to have problems with my overlay. I got support from steam who had a workaround for me but since one of the latest client updates i got overlay problems again. I noticed it gets broken when you alt-tab out of the game as well.

Also Ninji told me that he sets his state to offline while in game because it gives him +10FPS.

Sgt Pepper wrote:

Lord Zurkov wrote:Steam is a damn fine program, but it's surprisingly heavy.
Right now it's doing absolutely nothing and it's still chomping on 18K of memory.

In my case:
4GB = 4194304KB
4194304KB - 18KB = 4194286KBI

In most people's case:
2GB = 2097152KB
2097152KB - 18KB = 2097134KB
MY PC LAGS FROM THIS! CAN SOMEONE HELP ME?!

-_-

You know what I meant. Even when doing nothing at all, it takes up a decent bit of memory (probably more than every other background program I run combined). It's still not a ton, but it's a lot more than it has any reason to use. When it's actually downloading/updating something in the background, it takes up more system resources than Firefox does (if I'm not mistaken).