One of my previously stated reasons for getting a new PC was to play games on it.
However, upon trying to decide on what game I wanted to play, I remembered just why I was deeply unhappy with the state of PC gaming.
See, these are the things I have to investigate before purchasing a PC game …
I first have to take into consideration the type of copy-protection used. Will it be compatible with my system? Will it interfere with other programs? Will it surreptitiously place some low-level driver that might cause problems? Will those drivers remain after I uninstall the game? Will it cause a hit to the game’s performance?
(There are cracks that circumvent obnoxious copy-protection schemes but that route is fraught with peril as well.)
Then I have to find out whether the game has been updated. If so, is the latest update incremental? Do I need an older update before updating to the latest one? Where is the update located? The publisher’s web site? The developer’s? Do I have to put my trust in some third-party web site?
Finally, I have to determine if the game is actually available for purchase. (This is the downside of waiting until a patch or two has been released.) Local retailers tend to have limited stocks of titles and popular titles are often sold out. I could get games from overseas through eBay or retailers like Play-Asia but this might incur extra cost and would definitely take at least a week to arrive at my doorstep.
Doing all that homework seems just way too much exhausting prep work for play.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
Straight to my drive
It soon became evident to me what I was looking for was digital distribution. There are a couple of choices for this and even one local provider.
I went with Steam mainly because of the product choice. A lot of the games on my to-play list were on it and Steam has at least one classic game I’d love to replay.
Now, I had my concerns about Steam. As a matter of fact, I once mentally associated Steam with “shoddy piece of software that would cause intense frustration” after reading post after post about Steam-related problems on gaming message boards.
The content delivery service has apparently come of age and gamers now tend to praise it. The beauty of Steam is that the games don’t go out of stock, your games are automatically updated and games are stripped of the more draconian forms of copy-protection since there aren’t any CDs or DVDs.
Valve has made the service all the more appealing by allowing you to play in offline mode. There’s no longer any need to go online to have your account verified every time you launch a game and there’s no need to stay online to play an offline game. You can now even back up your games. This is great since I would hate to spend several hours downloading a game I’ve uninstalled.
There are a couple of downsides.
Some games aren’t available outside North America, downloading a multi-gigabyte game on a 1 Mbps connection can take quite a while, Steam is incompatible with some programs and there are phishing attempts to be wary of.
Still, all things considered, this is pretty much as good as it gets right now. I joined Steam on Monday, picked Painkiller Gold, paid for it with PayPal and finished downloading it (complete with the latest update) on Tuesday.
