For those of you that don't know, Steam is a PC platform for the digital distribution of games. You pay online and then download the game rather than owning a disk. For some major releases from certain companies I still like to own the physical disk but more and more I'm buying digital only copies of games these days. Steam has been around quite a long time now. There were a lot of issues in the early days but those days are gone now. Steam has become a solid system for downloading and playing games. Most of the games I own through the system are only single player games or ones I've only played the single player part of. It wasn't until today that I'd fully explored it's multiplayer options. I was amazed at how smoothly it all went. In the past being a game host always needed extra tech work to open router ports and things like that, which always fell to me. However none of that was necessary on Steam for Supreme Commander 2. I hosted the game, set it to only allow friends to enter and that was it. It all just worked. Having the same friends list available across multiple games and integrated chat in and out of game through all of them just makes things so much easier. If you're still holding out on Steam due to the problems that occurred way back when it was first released then now is probably the time to give it another go. There's even some games now that even though they're available on disk it basically just installs the Steam software. There's a link to my Steam profile on the right if you want to add me.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Steam Powered
For those of you that don't know, Steam is a PC platform for the digital distribution of games. You pay online and then download the game rather than owning a disk. For some major releases from certain companies I still like to own the physical disk but more and more I'm buying digital only copies of games these days. Steam has been around quite a long time now. There were a lot of issues in the early days but those days are gone now. Steam has become a solid system for downloading and playing games. Most of the games I own through the system are only single player games or ones I've only played the single player part of. It wasn't until today that I'd fully explored it's multiplayer options. I was amazed at how smoothly it all went. In the past being a game host always needed extra tech work to open router ports and things like that, which always fell to me. However none of that was necessary on Steam for Supreme Commander 2. I hosted the game, set it to only allow friends to enter and that was it. It all just worked. Having the same friends list available across multiple games and integrated chat in and out of game through all of them just makes things so much easier. If you're still holding out on Steam due to the problems that occurred way back when it was first released then now is probably the time to give it another go. There's even some games now that even though they're available on disk it basically just installs the Steam software. There's a link to my Steam profile on the right if you want to add me.
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I am one who did not know what this was - though I did guess it must be something of the kind, when you first mentioned it - but I'm glad to find out exactly what it does, and very pleased to hear that the multi-player option worked so smoothly. That's great!
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