My thoughts on Steam (the digital game distribution service, not the gaseous state of water)

Well I haven't been writing anything here in over a year so lets give this another go.

I will be rambling about my experience with the Steam service in the recent months but lets start with my first impression I made years ago.

When I first heard about Steam it was way back when Half Life² was going to be released and while today I'm not too thrilled by the game, back in the day I really wanted to get my hands on it for the flashy new engine with its elaborate physics.
Now I didn't have access to the Internet back then and I had heard that even if I bought the game off of the shelf I would need an Internet connection to play the singleplayer experience. :\ This was frustrating to say the least and really had me off to a bad start with the Steam service.

Some time later, I can't remember if it was while I already had Internet or not, I installed the Steam client to try out how it is and I made yet another frustrating experience with it: It really bogged down the performance of my older PC just by running the client. Something I really didn't need on my weak hardware. So overall I wasn't happy with the existence of Steam only knowing it as a way to not let me play a game I was interested in.



But... about half a year ago now I've had another go at it because I needed a way to easily purchase games for my collection that I had tried out and liked and maybe couldn't find in a retail store here anymore or only to awfully high prices still. As it turns out Steam pleasantly surprised me this time around.

I had heard something of games going on sale on Steam before while not being announced ahead, but I had no idea that this would happen like almost every week(end), sometimes a different one going on sale every day! This was perfect for me since I don't really have a lot of money to spend and sometimes I play games to distract myself from dealing with my chronic illness and getting something new for a change is great of course.

The Steam client is also not feeling like it drains away system performance anymore. The web content can take a bit longer to show up than in a proper browser but overall it's responsive and doesn't impact on my modern system that I could notice it.

Then there is something I really really like: the overlay.
While playing a game through Steam I can hit Shift+Tab by default to open an overlay that fades over the game screen, show some info, links, lets you use the browser ...and offers the ability to chat with friends.
Now this is great because I'm usually constantly chatting with one of my friends while we play and with this overlay there was no need anymore to try to get games running windowed mode if they even support it properly or hope that they won't crash from tabbing between the game and instant messenger from within fullscreen mode. So that's one of the best features to me really and my friend who wasn't keen on Steam before as well got a much better experience from it now also.

Having all the games in a neat list and being able to (un)install without discs sure is nice as well (although I belong to the people who regretted that games stopped being sold in proper boxes and instead only DVD cases anymore). While I would prefer to physically own the games, the benefit of being able to get most games without relying on a retailer to stock them for a good price and having to drag my ill weak body downtown just to check outweighs that concern for me. (And I do hope that if Steam ever is going to be shut down in the future, that there will be some way of being compensated or at least I would download them all to run them in Steam's offline mode then, but I do think they'll be around for a good while as a success digital distributor.)

So Steam for me has gone from "Oh come on, I just want to play HL² offline!" to a convenient and functional service of easily providing me with a good selection of different games on a budget and I've been enjoying it, making great deals to add to my collection.
...Oh and when there was a problem with my Steam wallet once, the customer service got back to me within the next 1-2 day with very friendly messages and fixed the problem. Thumbs up, Steam team of Valve.