Blog FeedGetting in the Game
Valve recently announced their Steam offers the other day. In case you aren’t in the know, it’s 3 offers for purchasing Half-Life 2 online, each offer being priced according to how much extra junk is crammed into it. ATI “Get in the Game” voucher holders like myself are entitled to the lesser of the 3 offers (dubbed “Bronze”), which gives me HL2 and CS:Source as soon as they arrive.
I think it’s pretty cool that Valve has set up Steam to do this. I’d imagine that other companies will follow suit soon enough - though probably not to the extent of rendering stores like EB obsolete. Although, I’ve only ever bought something from EB once, and it was the keyboard I got a week ago.
So yeah - I won bronze. Does anyone else plan on winning something through Steam? I know if I didn’t have a voucher, I probably wouldn’t even think about it, as paying for things online doesn’t suit me very well, and I also prefer to have boxed copies rather than just downloads. Not that you can’t have it shipped to you… for a price.
8th October | Reply
I’ll probably get silver or gold tonight. Gold just for the posters, really.
8th October | Reply
Valve is taking a rather interesting approach to this. They are really pushing Steam as the delivery method since the Gold edition has more than you can ever get in a retail store. It even ships you a collectors box.
At first I was pretty sure to go the gold route but I am a rather minimalist in my home so I think all the extra stuff would just be thrown out eventually. Even the boxes to my favorite games only last a few weeks. Hats, T shirts and posters will probably never get any use.
Who knows, it will be fun to play the full version of CS:Source tonight though.
8th October | Reply
I agree with you about preferring real copies over downloads. I would never pay for something as immaterial as a download, and since I do not have a voucher I will be getting HL2 illegally :O
Basically all you pay for on Steam is a CD key, since the prices dont seem so much different from (web)stores where you get CDs/DVDs, whereas in a (web)store you get nifty CDs/DVDs, manual, etc. It kinda adds value to the thing, downloads just dont have any value to me.
8th October | Reply
So it took my approximately 20 minutes to buckle and purchase it via steam. Damn that engine is sexy.
8th October | Reply
JohnDoe - I know downloads aren’t all that Steam offers. With my voucher, I had the choice to have it shipped to me instead, and obviously the Gold pack comes with things that you can’t send over the internet. So it’s not the end all and be all of how it works.
I myself just don’t care about having a hard copy of HL2 because I’m not a big fan of it. If I was, I’d easily have paid the little extra for having a real copy shipped to me.
8th October | Reply
I’ve nothing against purchasing software online and receiving it as a download as long one of the following is true:
1. The download is small enough that it only takes maybe an hour or less to download.
2. The download is being followed by a disk or disks in the post so that should something go wrong (download fail, installation become corrupt, drive formatted, etc.) then I don’t have to wait the best part of a day again for another download.
Basically, it’s just the opportunity for something to go wrong and the lack of a physical disk safety net that bothers me. Getting stuff now is cool but even with broadband it still takes about an hour to download approximately 200MB while modern games are wromping in at gigabytes these days. My copy of Call of Duty arrived on DVD and takes up over a gigabyte, not including the files that it accesses from the disk itself. A 3 or 4 gigabyte download would take me the best part of 24-hours to download and so the delivery medium becomes the bottleneck since I could get my ass down the shops in 30-minutes or have a hard copy delivered for the next day via mail order if I really can’t be bothered to leave the house/too busy.
8th October | Reply
Yeah, my preloading in total took some 10 hours on my ADSL, but I couldn’t always get my ISP’s mirror, so sometimes it was downloading at a speed far from optimal.
My Windows partition really needs a format, and although my Steam/HL2 files aren’t on that partition, I’ll still need a steam reinstall. I just hope I don’t need to do too much mucking around to make sure all the games work. I don’t think I’ll have to download the whole thing again though.
This is when I would like a DVD burner.
9th October | Reply
Cyrris: just copy/paste all the .gcf files from your steam directory. I hear tell that works a treat.
As for me, I’m debating whether to get Bronze over steam or just wait to get a boxed copy. The loss of DoD is lamentable, but overall not worth the extra cash. I’ll probably end up getting a boxed copy, simply for the discs as I don’t like the idea of paying for stuff over Steam. I’m just paranoid that way.
10th October | Reply
Heh call me crazy but I feel safer having purchased through steam. I loose discs a lot and scratching happens as well. With a Steam purchase if my room suddenly exploded I could log onto a new PC and download all my old games I had without paying another cent.
Valve was smart in preloading, after my purchase it took about 3 minutes to get CS:Source up and going, impressive.
10th October | Reply
Hard drive failures have happened more often in my household than CD scratches, unfortunately. That’s why I feel more secure keeping optical copies of my more precious digital belongings. Granted, it’s only ever been IBM drives that have gone down on us, but having it happen twice means I just don’t trust hard drives at all anymore.