Retail releases instead of Steam-types for same titles. Stronger ownership?

Ray_Rogers2109 · Jul 4, 2011

AsRock said:
Cheaper maybe but they do keep servers up 24\7 so you can download it at any time which cannot be cheap for any company like steam.

I'm sure they must have some sort of revenue or agreements with companies to cover the costs of the download servers.

EDIT: Perhaps the profits garnered from the selling of games. Even then the account holder still needs to download said game. But might not if a retail release is tied into being able to be listed on Steam per the list for it.

qubit · Jul 4, 2011

AsRock said:
Cheaper maybe but they do keep servers up 24\7 so you can download it at any time which cannot be cheap for any company like steam.

Of course they're up 24/7, lol Steam services a worldwide community.

And trust me, because they so much bandwidth, they'll have some very sweet deals with their hosting providers, so that it doesn't cost them very much at all. In fact, I'd hazard that they likely have an all you can eat deal, so downloading off them over and over costs them nothing extra.

_JP_ · Jul 5, 2011

I love the smell of a new freshly opened CD-case in the morning. You know, one time I had to wait in a line, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I got the game. I couldn't play it at that moment, not one stinkin' console around. The smell, you know that plastic smell, the whole case. Smelled like...ownership. Someday this ritual's gonna end...

Ray_Rogers2109 · Jul 5, 2011

_JP_ said:
I love the smell of a new freshly opened CD-case in the morning. You know, one time I had to wait in a line, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I got the game. I couldn't play it at that moment, not one stinkin' console around. The smell, you know that plastic smell, the whole case. Smelled like...ownership. Someday this ritual's gonna end...

Nice rewording of Major Kilgores monologue from Apocalypse Now.

EDIT: It's Colonel I think.

FordGT90Concept · Jul 5, 2011

yogurt_21 said:
1. dunno what you're using, but no you don't trash the installer by ding it, by evidence of my 100+ games on my server that I've done this with that work without issue. And hwat do you mean? the discs are in their cases? Why, where the f do you keep yours? Save hdd space? for what? look at my specs, game are on a 3tb raid, then I have a 2 tb usb drive as a backup and a 2tb raid 1 on my NAS. Formats? my games aren't on my windows drive, take one from the server realm, never install primary data on the os drive. Believe me you'll never go back after you try it.

When I receive a new game, I install it from the original disk then place the disk in one of my 200+ disk binders in alphabetical order. I then search the internet for any patches, DLCs, and related content, install them, and if they work, move them to my server for permanent storage. Months or years later, when I want to play the game, I take the CD out of the binder and install it, meanwhile, I check if the content on my server is still current, if it is, I use it. If not, I update it. This system has worked flawlessly for at least 6 years and, as I said, it consumes less than 50 GiB. I can name about 8 games that would take that much capacity easily (starting with Alpha Protocol and GTAIV both taking over 15 GiB of capacity). The way I do things, the original disks keep my hard drives clean for the important stuff (like family photos and videos) and the extent of games being stored on there is only for content that frequently changes as well as important user saves.

yogurt_21 said:
2. the games that don't need patches are rare exceptions, not the one game you mentioned. lol

I already named two, want me to name more? 25 to Life, A Bee Movie, Army Men: Sarge's War, A-Train 8, Black & White: Creature Isle, The Club, Prototype, and I could go on.

yogurt_21 said:
Take that "superior" care of your discs all you want they will eventually die. I don't have to explain why, you and ray and wiki that.

Not one disk has had read/install errors yet.

yogurt_21 said:
4. brilliant, from 25$ new, 9$ like new, and .01 used. So in order to get the same deal as I did with steam, which was 7.50$ for the entire dark forces series, I have to buy a used copy of the 5 games and still end up paying more than steam...for used.

Because you're actually buying a tangible, physical product with value, not 25 alphanumeric characters.

yogurt_21 said:
5. links?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_e...-brandtextbin=SOLD-OUT SOFTWARE&tag=tec06d-20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sold-Out_Software

xenocide · Jul 5, 2011

So from what I've gathered, if you have OCD, a great connection, and your own personal file server, physical media is definitely the way to go.

Steevo · Jul 5, 2011

FordGT90Concept said:
Steam has nothing to do with emulators. Steam does not emulate games--all games it has were designed to work on Windows or Mac OS X.

All the older sega titles use emulation. As do other games, and the older ones that that use dosbox.

A game you already own? All my games are installed that I own and play, so you start your install of GTA4 and I start playing and I win? Or you start your install of a game, and I have to download something that I already have downloaded? Or I could cheat and pull it from my steam backup on my spare/backup drive and still win.

I'm not sure what you are getting at other than if you had to drive and buy a game, install and patch it, register it, install steam anyway and then play I could download it at least as fast with a 20Mbps connection.

FordGT90Concept · Jul 5, 2011

Steevo said:
All the older sega titles use emulation. As do other games, and the older ones that that use dosbox.

Link me.

Steevo said:
A game you already own? All my games are installed that I own and play, so you start your install of GTA4 and I start playing and I win? Or you start your install of a game, and I have to download something that I already have downloaded? Or I could cheat and pull it from my steam backup on my spare/backup drive and still win.

You must not be a very serious gamer. I got so many games, I can't back them all up nor install them because it would probably take at least 10 TB of capacity to do so.

Steevo said:
I'm not sure what you are getting at other than if you had to drive and buy a game, install and patch it, register it, install steam anyway and then play I could download it at least as fast with a 20Mbps connection.

UPS/FedEx/USPS does the driving. Install is quick, as is patching. All my games are registered on the first install, not thereafter. Only two games I ever bought required Steam and that was Saints Row II and Terraria. If I'm not playing those two, good chance Steam isn't on my computer.

DVD's read at 22 MBps @ 16x. My drives are 22x.

LAN_deRf_HA · Jul 5, 2011

I back up every game disc and all the materials, patches, mods, and what not. Takes up about 500gbs. Not that much by modern standards honestly. I find this to be a necessary convenience. I don't do steam because on many occasions the file structure is so fucked mods don't work. When they make the files identical to retail then I'll switch. Honestly there's no real justification for what they do with the file structures. Just give us the iso. A game's built in DRM (which steam versions moronically never remove) will do the rest.

Ray_Rogers2109 · Jul 5, 2011

LAN_deRf_HA said:
I back up every game disc and all the materials, patches, mods, and what not. Takes up about 500gbs. Not that much by modern standards honestly. I find this to be a necessary convenience. I don't do steam because on many occasions the file structure is so fucked mods don't work. When they make the files identical to retail then I'll switch. Honestly there's no real justification for what they do with the file structures. Just give us the iso. A game's built in DRM (which steam versions moronically never remove) will do the rest.

This. Main reason why I'd rather use mods with game discs compared to getting the Steam version. Although I own several games to where it's going to be over a dozen which I can't play on this POS pre-built Compaq.
Yeah Steam demo for BATMAN: Arkham Asylum, Magicka and some other titles don't even run worth a shit on this tower. But they run fine on my XBOX 360.
All the Star Wars games I've been wanting to sell have zero resell value because of Steam. Not even listing them on CraigsList worked after posting them on eBay. Doubt I'd have any luck posting them on this forum.

VERY off topic now but I'm really resisting the urge to smash the shit, think the Hulk, out of this Compaq tower after I get Atomic Monkey completed. I could get $250 from it towards the GPU and even the monitor. Oh well. I'll figure out something.

digibucc · Jul 6, 2011

LAN_deRf_HA said:
I don't do steam because on a few occasions the file structure is so fucked mods don't work.

fixed

brandonwh64 · Jul 6, 2011

The best way is to steam and save your steamapps folder often. This helps when formatting and reinstall of games

1Kurgan1 · Jul 6, 2011

I don't understand the issue with reselling games. If you want to resell them, then buy the boxed copy. Me personally, I buy almost all of my games when they are on sale for $5 or less, which I couldn't buy any of these games for that price boxed. But if I could and I did want to sell them later on, lets say ebay. It would cost me about $1.50 to ship them out, probably another $1 to ebay, sorry, but selling a game for a $2 - $3 profit just isn't worth my time. Would rather just have it sit in my library forever. I've bought old games off Steam that I played before, and I don't plan to play again, just to know I have that amazing title in my library.

FordGT90Concept said:
You must not be a very serious gamer. I got so many games, I can't back them all up nor install them because it would probably take at least 10 TB of capacity to do so.

10TB? Thats surprising, I have 201 games installed from Steam, plus a few others without Steam, and a crap load of very large mods. And my complete Games folder is 733GB. And keeping in mind modern games are much larger than games of old, to have a 10TB install with decently modern games you would have to have well over 2000 titles. Heck Steam only has 1,250 titles, sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.

FordGT90Concept · Jul 6, 2011

You're forgetting that some games weigh in over 15 GiBs these days (Alpha Protocol and GTA4 come to mind). Most new (major publishers) titles weigh in over 10 GiB.

1Kurgan1 · Jul 6, 2011

I didn't forget that at all (I mentioned modern games), but you can't even have 1000 or even 200 games that compare in size to that. So to fill 10TB with many older titles, that would swell that 2000 title number probably much higher. Heck my Wow folder is 26g. I own most of the new titles on the market and my 201 library still isn't 1tb.

digibucc · Jul 6, 2011

well just say they are 10gb a piece, if i installed all 223 steam games and then 20 or so
d2d i own at once that would be closer to 2.5 terabytes, not 10... correct?

are you (ford) really saying you have 600 or more 10gb games?
or is it in the thousands but smaller?

i use about 750gb at once, and i think that's overkill. i don't see why anyone would need
200+ games installed at once. like kurgan i buy almost all new games, and just remove
older ones as i need space.

and if you have a cable connection which most people do, at most it's a few hours to
re-download an old release.

FordGT90Concept · Jul 6, 2011

I'm not about to try to find out. All I know is it doesn't take long for me to fill a 500 GB partition with games. I never uninstall, I format.

I have a 3 Mbps/256 Kbps ADSL connection (~9.62 hours to download only Alpha Protocol vs less than a minute to find and pop a disk in). That's the best available without moving.

1Kurgan1 · Jul 6, 2011

Were not saying you don't have a lot of games, but 10TB seems extremely large, I feel I have a lot of games, yet I'm not at 1TB. Think digi's the only Steam friend I got with more titles than me.

Also not saying downloading works best for everyone. If I had your connection, I would probably stick to games on a disc as well. But that doesn't mean Steams a bad choice for us with a faster connection, my DL is 20MB/s, so downloading titles for me isn't really an issue. It just seems those that don't use Steam have this opinion that, because it's not good for them, that it isn't good for anyone else. When it's more like different strokes for different folks, no 1 thing is going to work well for everyone.

Kreij · Jul 6, 2011

Let's see. Ford's in Iowa, Kurgan is in MN, and I'm in WI.
Let's meet up and you guys can have a duel (chainsaws at 10 paces) and I'll referee. Cool? :laugh:

Personally, I like Steam and have not bought a boxed game in some time.
I'm not against doing so, I just find it easier to purchase and download from Steam at work (good internet) and take them home on a portable HDD.

brandonwh64 · Jul 6, 2011

I love steam BUT this new steam guard had me tearing my hair out yesterday but then they responded to my steam ticket and fixed it. now i have steam guard disabled on ALL accounts

digibucc · Jul 6, 2011

see i had no hassle.

only 1 account, 3 computers. registered each and haven't looked since.
I just checked the value of my account too and, anything they can do (within
reason) to help me keep it secure i am appreciating.

I have heard of a few people other than you with issues though, so i don't
doubt it is problematic for some.

brandonwh64 · Jul 6, 2011

It would have been good if they would have sent me the damn code to activate on my laptop but hell I waited for 4 hours and still no code.

FordGT90Concept · Jul 6, 2011

Even if I had a 100 MB/s connection, I would still prefer disks. Disks work without an internet connection (except some newer titles that require an "always on" internet connection, doesn't matter how you got it), without nagging you to update (Platform Update, anyone?), and without running in the background.

I would also avoid Steam and use services like Amazon Game Downloads where they basically give you an image of the disk which, of course, I'd burn so the install files don't take up space on my HDDs--only the game does. Steam wastes lots of space by including PhysX, MS VC++ 6, 2005, and 2008, DirectX, XNA, .NET Framework, etc. with each game instead of leaving it separate and deleting the temp files once it is installed.

Steam is my last choice for downloading games as well because other services like Gamer's Gate and Impulse don't require their products to be installed nor running for the game to operate. Of all the distribution services (excluding the likes of Origin and uPlay) Steam has the most DRM features. I avoid DRM like the plague.

1Kurgan1 · Jul 6, 2011

Steam won't nag about updating if you turn off the updates (think 2 clicks to get to it and 1 more to turn it off). I personally have a Games folder for all of my games (Steam and Non-Steam) and when I format, I just move that folder to my new OS. Haven't ever had to redownload my library, so after that first download I could just go offline mode and enjoy the non-online games.

Kreij said:
Let's see. Ford's in Iowa, Kurgan is in MN, and I'm in WI.
Let's meet up and you guys can have a duel (chainsaws at 10 paces) and I'll referee. Cool?

I reign from the land of Paul Bunyan, I was born with an Axe in one hand and a Chainsaw in the other.

Frick · Jul 6, 2011

I like my thick papery manuals and shiny cases.

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Retail releases instead of Steam-types for same titles. Stronger ownership?

Overclocked quantum bit

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

Addicted to Bacon and StarCrunches!!!

The Knife in your Back

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The Knife in your Back

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The Knife in your Back

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Addicted to Bacon and StarCrunches!!!

Addicted to Bacon and StarCrunches!!!

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