Strategy First picking up Steam

My experiences with Steam have been universally positive--though I've yet to use the 'friends network'. Maybe you folks rural areas should be communicating with your congressional representatives and asking for broadband access.

Except for the first couple of weeks last year, I've only had good experiences with Steam. It's the easiest way to update games that I've ever dealt with, and I've been at this for 17 years....It's all good.

The only problem with Steam is the horrificly unusable freinds network. Otherwise, it's wonderful.

Steam works fine for me. It's nice to be able to download Half-Life 2 and CS: Source from any computer.

I dont trust Steam after what they did to CS

I tell ya it certainly doesn't help people like me with 56k. Connecting to the internet just to play the game after hours of patch downloads sucks. I can't wait to move closer to a city......

I've found that Steam has some definite upsides for the future. I rebooted my computer a while back, and wanted to reinstall and play HL2 but I realized I lost my Disk 1 somehow. But I installed Steam, connected, and the entire game downloaded and worked perfect! I think that it's great that I don't need to worry about losing disks with it. The only downside is that you need highspeed Internet to do anything with it really. And the fact that even single player has to be updated kinda sucks when you don't have Internet and there's an update you can't download.

Agreed, don't rag on Steam. Only complaint I have is the damn friends list is completely unusable, but I have Xfire anyways. Other than that, Steam never gave me problems.

Personally I've had only good experiences with Steam. And I suppose it helps that I got in on the very first wave of unlocking when HL2 was released at 2 AM Central. And everything with Steam I've ever done has gone WAY faster than a CD installation ever could, not to mention the long drive to a store.

.. I think, this is great news for smaller developers/publishers that don't have a strong reach into the traditional retail channel. These types of relationships, will offer more dist. options for everyone in the gaming industry.

Just because your internet is bad, doesn't mean steam sucks. Plus, let's say you get a brand new computer. Download steam and you'll never have to reinstall that game ever again, all you have to do is download the updates. Steam is a great program, it's just that people rag on it for being "slow."

what is gay about getting great games on steam, just because Marol54 and Buttloaves dont have comptuers that can run steam well, doesnt mean the rest of us that didnt cheap out on our rigs should not trust the steam.

Steam sucks... i had to wait 3 hours while the half life anthology i just bought , on disc, from the store, on thanksgiving, after waiting in line 2 hours, downloaded updates (over a modem cuz hurricane katrina knocked out my cable modem) before i could even begin to play it!... i will never buy a "steam enabled" game again. and if i do cuz it wasnt on the box in big letters, its going back to the store in little pieces.

I agree, this looks quite ambiguously gay.

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Bad Pun ahead... It looks like steam is steaming ahead with all these new devolpers jumping on.