I like Steam. Sure, you’ve got all the people moaning about not being able to sell on their games afterwards, but I don’t care about that – maybe because I don’t buy that many games compared to some, and I tend to hold on to them regardless more often than not.
It’s the nearest thing to XBox Live on the PC and it does a pretty good job of it. Buying games and keeping them up to date is simple, and it’s indie-friendly with far less of the snooty attitide that seems to be increasing in the console online marketplaces now they’re established.
But one thing holds it back – prices. The simple fact is that it should be cheaper to buy a game online than to buy it in a physical box. To say otherwise is utter madness – after all the boxes have to be manufactured, shipped, placed on shelves and waved through a barcode scanner by a bored teenager on their Saturday job – each stage of which sucks a little more money out of the loop. Even Amazon has to handle physical boxes and add or pay for postage & packaging. The cost of some digital storage and bandwidth pales in comparison, so why can I buy most of the games on Steam for less on Amazon, and even in my local HMV? It’s insanity.
My feeling is that this bizarre situation is forced upon them by publishers, who are simultaneously being leaned on by the physical retailers. This is backed up by the fact that any game that is not by Valve, and is also available in stores, is more expensive on Steam than it is in the shops. I guess if Best Buy threatens not to put your game on the shelf if you let Steam sell it for less, you don’t have much choice but to comply, even if that actually perpetuates the reatiler’s control over the industry, to everyone elses detriment.
Anyway, we were playing Left 4 Dead’s Crash Course expansion (pleasantly free on PC, and a superior experience there anyway) and helpfully a Left 4 Dead 2 pre-order offer popped up after we finished the game. The hooks that were offered were early access to the game and demo, and an exclusive in-game baseball bat. The asking price: £26.99, discounted from the normal price of £29.99. My first reaction was ‘ok, but it’ll be cheaper on Amazon’: except that when I looked, it wasn’t. It was precisely the same price in fact (although in this case Amazon discounted it from £34.99).
So, we pre-ordered on Steam since I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. Still, I think it could be even cheaper given that Valve must get much less than that from Amazon’s sale of the game. Hopefully as digital distribution continues to mature, we’ll see the prices come down. Games are too expensive at retail by a large margin (particularly on consoles), it’s hampering mainstream adoption, driving the second-hand sales market and piracy, and making the hit-driven mentality of the industry worse. Games need to be cheaper at first purchase, and need to sell for longer outside the first month on sale. Movies make the majority of their money from DVDs, not the box office, but the ‘big’ games are still stuck in a chase for a box-office smash. Services like Steam provide a route to a more sustainable model – and by sustainable I don’t just mean the environmental benefits of not manufacturing more plastic and shuttling it around the world with fossil fuels, I mean that games could last longer there and provide a longer tail return for their developers, all while costing the public less.
Ah well – I guess parity is at least a start. We won’t make much more progress towards sanity until the hands of the big retailers can be slowly prised from the throat of the industry.
October 4th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Here in the USA amazon and steam both have left 4 dead at $45, which is only $5 off. I don’t consider that much of a discount. Also according to the current currency conversion rate you are paying ~$43 after the discount and $47.75 before hand. So you are also getting roughly $5 off.
October 4th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Yeah I know – It’s a discount of £3 (29.99 – 26.99).
My point wasn’t about the relative discount, it was that it’s the same price as Amazon, which has not been my previous experience with Steam. It should be cheaper than Amazon of course, but as I say, parity is still an improvement.
October 4th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I don’t like Steam. On the other hand, it seldom gives me any reason to hate it, either. But given what most companies inflict on me in terms of painful computerized inconveniences, my standards – like most people’s – are not very high.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:21 am
Steam turned me off when I bought the Orange Box at a store, brought it home with excitement to play, and was stopped in my tracks when I found out I had to install steam first. Yikes. Went ahead with steam install and it locked 3 times before completing install. I was ready to pull my hair out that day. Unfortunately, I never did play Portal or Team Fortress. Sits on my shelf to this day collecting dust.
October 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Bwhahaha, and you think prices are bad. Try living in Australia.
eg
Aus dollar = 87.2 US cents
Uncharted 2 PS3 = $59.99 at US EBGames
Uncharted 2 PS3 = $109.95 at AUS EBGames
Batman: Arkham Asylum PC = US $49.99 (Download AND boxed (?))
Batman: Arkham Asylum PC = AUS $89.95
Batman: Arkham Asylum PC Steam with PayPal = US $49.99 converted to AUS = $57.30 (I tested right up to the ‘confirm purchase’ button)
The question is *W*H*Y*. It can’t cost that much to ship them over.. If the steam prices are direct conversions at the exchange rate then it’s VERY worth it.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:52 am
@Frenetic: what ‘inconvenience’ are you talking about? The only one I can think of is not being able to sell on a game afterwards, but I can live with that – especially if in future I can get games cheaper & quicker.
@Dan: shame, you’re missing out (particularly Portal and HL2:EP2). Steam has always been fine for me, like I say it replicates the functionality of XBL which is very welcome (unified friends lists, achievements, automatic updates etc). I’ve bought other games like World Of Goo through it too. Steam is a plus point, not a negative in my book.
@Vectrex: Insanity. The US gets everything the cheapest but yeah, Oz prices put it into perspective. Definitely a case for cutting out the retailer if you can!
October 5th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Oh, the other reason I love Steam? You don’t need any disc in the drive, even if you bought it on physical media to begin with. Just pick your game & go – no need to go into shady realms looking for No-CD hacks, telling everyone who will listen that you’re not a pirate, you just hate faffing about with discs. I wish all games were like that.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I see nothing wrong with NO DVD Cracks, if u bought the game and supported developer, and the problem is updating the game, and it does not work for multiploayer games like L4D, but is great for GTA4 type games if u play Single Player and Solo. To point out GTA4 is great inconvenience with all the registration nonsense, and using the crack is far easier. I think if u paid the money u are not a pirate, and u have the right to enjoy the product to ur desires. Control sprouts rebellion and that has happened all over history and I donot see wrong with it. what is unacceptable, is that one is fully capable of buying games and he wants to play them and then he pirates the game. That is the greatest piracy and the real lost customer on the dark side.
But I do find No DVD cracks convinient and use them quite often for single player games.
To say I played portal with No DVD crack and it was great experience without any start wait. If not for piracy games would have been NO DVD from start already.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
My point is that Steam games don’t need any cracks to run disc-less. They prevent piracy by linking the game to your Steam account; I’m happy with that.
For example I bought L4D1 on disc but I’ve never used the disc since installing it, all via an ‘official’ channel. Not having to use a crack when you’re a legitimate customer is nicer.
October 5th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
As always they managed to screw us € customers.
German Amazon: 43,95€
British Amazon: 36.90€ including shipping costs!!!
Steam direct: 44,99€
I mean.. come on this is stupid when I order from amazon.co.uk they have to ship it to Germany which wastes gasoline and includes a package which I don’t need nor want. I would really like to buy from steam but they make it so incredible frustrating with their stupid pricing.
The next thing is why do they include stupid securom with a Steam download? For example Bioshock bought through Steam still had an activation limit of 3 when bought through steam… wtf?? The idea behind Steam is good but the execution is very bad.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:46 am
The execution is fine except when 3rd-party publishers insist on keeping their own protection too (like Bioshock) – that’s not really Steam’s fault. There’s no issue with Valve or indie games.
But yeah, your pricing seems odd, but it’s interesting to see that German Amazon is more expensive too! Odd. For a while after Steam switched to local pricing they were doing a $1 = £1 conversion which is just nonsense, that seems to have been resolved now, maybe it hasn’t been on the Euro version yet.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
But I find NO DVD crack more convenient then logging in steam everytime I want to play. Like say I want to play for 15 minutes bouts 4 times a day, If I am busy. Quick save is another feature that comes in handy for that by the way.
I completely agree that not forced to use NO DVD crack and have another option is nicer, but I still find it convinient.
Though I fully agree that in current scenario AAA titles are not going Stardock complete no annoyance no protection route like they did for sins of soalr empire or Demigod. both excellent games and sins of soalr empire has sold lot more than 1 million, more than crysis in fact.
Such a practice among all would have been nicer. Piracy has more become a question of moral sense and government control on pirate networks. Here pirate XBox, PS3, PC Discs are freely available in wholesale in India and China, and government just sleeps. Also I see sense of morality dying down(That is another problem altogether as it is happening a lot in developing countries in many spheres). Physical piracy is still rampant in many countries let alone the download variety. People here cannot download the pirated edition due to broad band , so teh get movies and games ready made from malaysia etc.
And Government is supposed to check what enters the country from outside. There is lot more to piracy then only being disc check, one click download, securom, steam, piratebay.
Sadly real customers like you and me are inconvinienced and annoyed by disc checks. Also please note that a 1:1 copy of majority of copy protected discs can be made by alcohol or daemon tools and then this disc image can be mounted from hard drive image and played without putting real CD in drive. The technology was measnt to make one back up for archival purposes(which is legal) to preserve your original discs, but it is purely misused by pirates.
We certainly overlook the human factor in piracy which are we ourselves. I think reasonable prices, strict government regulation and moral education is teh right way for this big problem. As you already see Pirates do give very logical arguments in favour of piracy, while it still it is morally wrong and legally wrong. Piracy just amounts to, like stole your chair from ur shop which u put for sale.(In all the passage you is a generalisation and is not specifically meant for Steve Streeting.)
October 6th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
You don’t have to log in every time you want to play, you can set Steam to ‘Offline Mode’ and play without a connection if you want. Personally, I’ve never needed to use it, but the option is there. You just have to have connected at least once with the game.
More reasonable prices and easier access to content would definitely help to make piracy less common – if you make something easy and convenient to buy, more people will buy it. However, large numbers of pirates use the ‘moral objection’ and price excuses to hide behind, when in fact they really just want to play games without paying for them. Pirates always will try to rationalise their decision to steal from a developer using all kinds of convoluted reasons, but generally it’s a crock. As far as I’m concerned if I can play a game I’ve bought the way I want (ie discless) without having to go to the same places these assholes go to, I’m happier.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:39 am
If you re-read my post, I wasn’t using that word in direct reference to Steam, I was talking about other shenanigans that companies pull, and how Steam is pretty benign in comparison.
But since you asked, I don’t care for games – or any other programs – that run other junk and stick their logo in my systray, nor do I appreciate any “phoning home”. There is no reason for Steam to record how many hours I played Portal for, but it does, and I don’t see any way to disable that. Steam also uses almost as much CPU time as my web browser (which is used heavily and usually has about 20 tabs open) and its memory usage is far from modest. I am not so much of a control freak or privacy nut that I refuse to put up with Steam, but I personally consider “tolerable” to be rather different from “preferable”.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:41 am
I interpreted your post at meaning Steam still inconvenienced you but at a lower level, which seems to be valid given your follow-up
It’s funny, I actually *like* the phone-home. I like that it collects stats about how I play – telling me what guns I use the most, what my average accuracy rating is, how often I get incapacitated, what achievements I’ve got etc. It’s pointless but rather fun too. I guess XBox Live has weaned me onto the notion that it’s fun when your gaming extends beyond your machine and into the web with all kinds of metadata about yourself and your friends, and Steam does that even better, with game-specific stats pages. (I have actually played L4D way more than that, but they only started collecting play time information on L4D fairly recently).
Closing the main Steam window seems to eliminate most of Steam’s overhead, apart from about 25Mb of RAM. But then I don’t have Steam starting all the time anyway, it’s generally only open when I want to download or play something.
October 8th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Offline Mode is really the right thing really evry close to the ideal scenario I want. And anyway one need to log in for updates so this feature is quite OK.
October 10th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I don’t like some things about Steam, but I am happy with it overall. That said, I only use it for weekend bargains (well, and Valve games, obv.), since it’s not really worth it to me when I can get a boxed copy for less money and without the Steam DRM. But those weekend bargains are usually really great, even compared to online stores.
The thing that annoys me most about it is waiting for it to load up, log in, and authorize me to play a game when it’s a tiny little indie game like Everyday Shooter that I just wanted to play for 5 minutes. The thought of waiting 30-45 seconds just for Steam is usually enough for me to decide on something else instead. If you compare the load time of a non-Steam version of some of these small games, Steam doesn’t just double it, it turns it from instant to equivalent to a TV commercial break. Offline mode adds an additional dialogue box before starting the game, and still has a noticeable authorization computation delay. Plus if I want to play L4D online, I’d have to start it up in online mode and remember to switch it to offline mode for next time, before I quit. I suppose the solution is to leave Steam (in online mode) running at all times, skipping the lengthy authentication everytime I load a game, but I just don’t want to leave it running.
The other annoying thing is the way they sell bundles. If you already own any of the games in the bundle, it still costs the same but you’re really only getting the games you didn’t already own. If it offered the ability to gift the second copies of the games you already own, that would be great.
When its an available game, I prefer to wait for an equivalent sale on Direct2Drive, but only if it’s one of their DRM-free titles. That’s pretty convenient to me, it’s basically an HTTP download of an installer which installs a nocd game, no online activation, no online authorization. It’s pretty much solely available on their indie titles, but a notable exception is World In Conlict Gold which I picked up as part of their $5 sale yesterday (US-only on WiC though, sorry). I downloaded the 6GB installer, installed it without having to insert a DVD or anything, downloaded the latest, standard retail patch, installed it, and now have a nocd, no-drm, copy of the game installed. It’s a little less convenient than Steam to install, but more convenient than a DVD copy and the final result is more convenient than Steam, just like a DVD copy.
But as far as just purchasing games, I prefer boxed copies plus a nocd patch (though I suppose the nocd patch would work just as well with a steam copy, the box copy is usually cheaper and I do occasionally lend out games I’ve finished to friends). It’s not like you have to scour the internet for the nocd patches, GCW has 99% of the cracks out there, and has seemed completely trustworthy for years and years (maybe a decade already?). And for the other 1% of cracks, GCW usually link to one other site that carries those, and it too has seemed trustworthy for years and years.
October 10th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
“The other annoying thing is the way they sell bundles. If you already own any of the games in the bundle, it still costs the same but you’re really only getting the games you didn’t already own. If it offered the ability to gift the second copies of the games you already own, that would be great.”
It does this for Valve games at least – for example I already owned HL2 when I bought the Orange Box and it let me give my extra copy of HL2 to someone else (which I did).
The Steam login time doesn’t really bother me. Try using a 360 or PS3, the login time is about the same and just as mandatory, that’s the price of a connected game environment which I’m very much in favour of.
And I like Steam because as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t have ‘DRM’ in a negative sense. It tackles piracy by doing something I’m happy to do anyway – connect to an online profile, at least once, although I like to do it all the time – and thus it doesn’t detract from my customer experience.
Games in an online environment is the way things are going to be going forward I think, and downloadable games are a natural player in that. If only the retailers would allow them to be sold cheaper than the boxed copies, the advantages would be even better. I’m strongly in favour of electronic delivery, both from my standpoint as a consumer (I don’t have to move my fat ass down to the shop, and I don’t have to rummage through disks to find the right one when I want to play), a member of the planet (no physical waste and haulage), and as a developer (infinite shelf space, theoretically no barriers to content if only platform owners wouldn’t unnecessarily erect them).
I know nocd cracks are easy to find, that’s not the point. I simply object to the very need to frequent sites that are clearly a pirate’s paradise.
October 15th, 2009 at 2:23 am
I think steam is great, I picked up L4D on the ‘free play’ weekend for 50% off (AU $23) and Portal only cost me AU $10.
Thesre are very different games in terms of value. Portal is finished in a couple of days whereas L4D can be played for many months. When you break that down into a per hour rate your looking a few cents.
Like many things in this world they are not charging you what it costs them, but what people are willing to pay. If you wait long enough you’ll get it cheaper, but you pay extra to have it when it’s brand new. Simple as that.