What Is Steam?

[Starfighter]

I'm looking for Section 8 Prejudice for my son and this is download only. t appears I have to sign up for some type of download service and steam keeps cropping up. It appears to have followers on here but I have a few questions.

What is Steam?
What am I signing up for and what does it do to my machine?

[judas]

http://store.steampowered.com/about/

[Starfighter]

Thanks, Judas. That was open in another window when I posed the question!

It needs 1gb of HDD space and comes as a 1.5mb download so it must be doing something other than acting as a shop window.

[tank slapper]

It doesn't take anywhere near 1Gb of space. The steam application acts as a shop front, a library for the games you have bought, and a kind of social networking type thing for communicating with other gamers. It can do instant messaging and voice chat between people and can put an overlay (that includes a web browser and ability to capture screenshots) on the game.

Some games require it as they make use of Valves anti-cheating software, and use the friends system for getting people together in multiplayer games.

I've used it for a few years, and apart from annoying habit of having tempting sales that make me buy games I haven't had any problems with it. It does have the advantage that any games you have installed through it are automatically kept up to date with patches, and can be deleted and reinstalled if you want to. You can even have them installed on different machines, and just use them on the one you are logged into.

[jmb88]

Tank slapper's pretty much summed it up. I've used steam for years, nice and easy to manage your games; useful being able to buy games through paypal, no worries about being hacked like happened with PSN. Do love not having to wait for games to come in the post as well, just have to set a download away.

[EDLT]

Steam is great, apart from the sales that have the habit of emptying my wallet. Some PC games require steam to run these days.

[Starfighter]

I now have Styeam installed and running a download of Section 8 Prejudice. Download speed is horrible around 85-95kbs, I hvae a 10mbs internet connection and everything else appears fine. Is this normal?

[tank slapper]

It depends. I regularly get 2.4 Mb/s but it does depend on the load on their servers. The summer sale is on at the moment so I expect a lot of people are downloading stuff at once. Sometimes changing your location in the options can help.

[davethebunny]

A word of warning though. Don't use paypal with it

[Ston]

davethebunny said:

A word of warning though. Don't use paypal with it

why is that?

[Mr Sparkle]

davethebunny said:

A word of warning though. Don't use paypal with it

[davethebunny]

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[Salgar]

I think the moral of that story is, don't share paypal accounts with your wife.

[Starfighter]

Great - Finally got the download and it wont run as the video card required Shadow Make 3 support despite being over the x1900 listed in the min specs! Next stop Novatech for a new card....