150
rate

How to fix Steam

January 06, 2010 in Blog comments 5

Steam is the digital distribution outfit of choice (well, depending how you define choice) for most PC gamers, but Ars Technica has a few ideas (some better than others) on how to vastly improve the service. Read on.

Over the holidays, Steam gave gamers quite the present: an ongoing series of sales with big-name games running as low as $2.50. It was hard to resist many of the deals, and many of us snapped up a large variety of games across a series of platforms. Bioshock for $5? Killing Floor for $5? Burnout Paradise for under $10? Who could say no?

With all those games flooding into all those computers though, the flaws of Steam have never been more apparent; Valve may be the leader in digital distribution for PC games, but things are far from perfect. We have some thoughts on how to make a good thing great, and we hope someone, somewhere is listening.
chautemoc via arstechnica.com »
Favourite this article Add source
| More
Report!

Comments

Register as a member to subscribe comments.
  • 0
    Storm* Jan 6, 10
    Some nice ideas, but I'd prefer them to address other issues first, such as their bugs and glitches here and there. Their service is amazing, I love it and use it daily, and the deals just keep on coming, heh.

    The Steam multiplayer idea is likely due to that specific company's rules and regulations. Borderlands, for example, uses Gamespy, as mentioned. I'm sure Valve wanted it to be easier to access through their program, but Gearbox likely has a joint operation with Gamespy, so it's rather unavoidable.

    Selling games can be rather iffy. We can buy them during a huge sale and then try to sell them back for profit. It's not like it takes up any space, you can have it uninstalled and come back to the games later if need be. I actually find that to be quite convenient. The bandwidth issue can only go so far. Most companies face this issue at some point, the trafficking being too much to handle sometimes. But see, the beauty of buying from the Steam store doesn't force you to download the games as soon as they are purchased. Unless you're dying to play the game, have a little patience and download it when you're good and ready. And I'm pretty sure you can get the download started in offline mode, could go faster then.
    • 0
      ruledbysecrecy Jan 6, 10
      A simple workaround for the whole "buy on sale and sell at profit" is a limitation to not be able to sell it for anything more than what you paid at the time of purchase. Very easy.
      • 0
        Storm* Jan 7, 10
        Yeah, but I'm sure people can work around the system, some can say they got it for a higher price than what was offered when selling, or perhaps due to the gift setup, the can sell what they were gifted. There's quite a few kinks to work out and it seems worthless because the game isn't affecting you if you don't want it to. As said, it doesn't need to stay installed, the only difference is that it will stick with your account forever.
        • 0
          ruledbysecrecy Jan 7, 10
          There would be absolutely NO WAY around it if it was hardcoded into steam, it doesn't matter what anyone says since Steam has record of how much you bought it at. When you went to sell the item you wouldn't be able to sell it for anything above the price you purchased it at. I hope you're not thinking you could somehow sell the games to someone not on steam. It would have to be a through steam transaction. Clearly. Maybe you're talking about games that were bought not on Steam but then activated on Steam? Well those games simply wouldn't be allowed to be sold I'd say.

          Selling games really wouldn't be too big a problem.
        • 0
          Storm* Jan 7, 10
          Ah, yeah I was talking about the ones tied to Steam manually. Sorry, misinterpreted.

          Hm, I guess it could work, but at the same time, why is that such a demand? I could understand if you bought it, didn't like it, and wanted to return it, but that's on the consumer...there's reviews, videos, etc., all over the place for just about any game, and even a few demos. If you're not going to play it ever again, just uninstall it, it's not like the game is taking space.

This news story is archived and is closed to comments now.