Direct2Drive, Steam, GOG, impulse?, and any other sites?

What do you guys think of Direct2Drive, Steam, GOG, impulse? and any other sites? What are your favorites and who shuld you stay away from?

I think ones called impulse...i forgot what's it called.

 

there's gamersgate, Amazon, gamestop, impulse, onlive, gamestreamer, games for windows live.

Steam is clearly the best atm.

 

It is indeed called impulse. My favourite is clearly steam

I never used D2D and GOG but I have used Impulse and they're quite okay

I got ninja'd by a bear

 

direct2drive is horrible, stay away.

 

do you have a reason for saying this? I would like to hear some story to back that up. My friend has used impulse and it seems alright and does have some good deals on and off. I just never got around to using it.

 

I like Gamer's Gate, they have a some good sales that can compete with Steam and a pretty wide collection of games. Oh, and I don't need a weird client or anything. But since I started with Steam, I've been buying more games on Steam as well.

 

can you tell me a bit more about gamer's gate?

 

their PayPal doesn't work. Didn't work a year ago when I put in a ticket and still does not work to this day.

Search Google for all the direct2drive server errors.

Also you automatically have to put your payment info on their server if you plan to buy a game.

 

kinda interesting that the first reseller of dital games blows ^^ I remember when it first started way back when and had a link to it from fileplanet. Didn't fileplanet start it?

 

it's with IGN, which also owns fileplanet

 

Check out our Game Download Service Buyer's Guide:
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I tried Onlive on a couple of computers. I see it as useful for running games when I am traveling with a low-end notebook like the one my work supplies, but it is painful to use on my G51, since I can get much better results running games locally (and sometimes I'd get horrible lag at bad times). I finally decided to give Steam a go with HTWingnut's giveaway. At the very least I like the ability to find demos in one location, even if I end up buying the games elsewhere.

 

thx charles and kimot for the info!

 

I use all of them to buy games and go with whatever gives me the best price. However I do prefer Steam due to all the extras like friends list integration, achievments, etc. Even if I buy a game from somewhere else I will add it to my steam games list so that I can just shift+tab to access friends list, search the internet, and voice chat.

 

if you buy it from impule how do you add it to steam?

 

Just go to add game on the bottom left corner of Steam, there will be an option to add non-steam game. At which point a list of all the programs on your comp should be listed. If you can't find it just choose browse and manually add it.

All this does is add a shortcut to steam to be able to run it through there which adds the steam overlay support. You don't get any Steamworks support for non-steam games but the Steam overlay comes in if you want to chat with friends or take a quick look at something on the web without alt tabbing.

 

Even then with OnLive you still need a 5Mbps connection, low ping, and its very bandwidth intensive. Not something you're likely allowed to use in a hotel or most business connections.

 

Oh i did that for my Half-Life GOTY edition. Steam has always d/led and installed that game for me....you sure it doesn't register that game to steam with that CD key because it did that for my batman arkham asylum too and i have never used the CD's since.

 

It lags on my 10Mbps wired connection at home. I have not tried a wireless connection yet.

 

works fine for me

 

For Direct2Drive, the only other digital distribution game site I use besides Steam I can confirm that PayPal has worked for me (+5 games bought in the last couple of years) and that their servers work fine for downloading.

 

I prefer direct2 drive over steam.
Never had problems with it.
Also stream never lets me play without internet...

 

Something wrong with your Steam then

 

It's almost always been like that...
Anyways, I sort of depise the overlay.

 

Then there has always been something wrong with your steam.

 

I guess so...
The nice thing about steam is the auto updates.

 

There's an offline mode.

 

I've used Steam, Direct2Drive, GoG, Impulse and Games for Windows Live...

The bulk of my digital games are from Steam. It's cheap if you wait for a sale, good bandwidth, only had a couple of small problems with games, have my Steam games available on both my laptops (which was very easy and painless), can play all my Steam games away from the internet, and the auto-updating.

I've bought several games from D2D and my only problem with the service is the patching. I can never tell what patch I'm supposed to use. I tried their Comrade software (IGN's attempt at Steam), and I think Comrade is a miserable failure. And then (it's not a problem with D2D per se), but DLC doesn't seem to be compatible across digital distribution services. And it's becoming more prevalent. Borderlands caused me fits so I finally bought the GOTY package from Steam.

I like GoG. But it's game selection probably won't appeal to younger gamers. And I'm not a big fan of their DosBox installations. I have a highly customized DosBox setup. You can choose not to install DosBox, but their installer program doesn't recognize my DosBox installation so I have to use a somewhat painful workaround. It's easy if you're not OCD like me. A couple of the Windows platform games (Fallout Tactics) had some issues (no sound) after installation, but GoG staff was very, very helpful in resolving them (unlike Steam).

I love Stardock, but the sales/game selection on Impulse aren't that great, in my opinion. I bought Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod from a brick and mortar store and Impulse is good for auto updating them.

I've only bought one game from GfWL (Age of Empires 3 Complete for 10 points), and it was ugly...I already had a GfWL account (needed to play Street Fighter 4, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dawn of War 2) and an XBox Live Account. But I had to upgrade the GfWL client and then download a Windows Live ID client (???), and then spent a miserable 5 to 6 hours trying to install the game. The GfWL client kept giving me errors unless I minimized it while downloading, and then I couldn't install and couldn't get to the Validation Key. All was resolved by a forum tip that XP SP3 users needed to install MS .NET framework 4.0. Why didn't the client installation do that for me? And now I have three new processes running in the background that I'm not sure if I need to play AoE 3. It was only 10 points and I was tempted to just uninstall, delete and quit, but it became a challenge so I finished it out...not very happy with Microsoft though.

 

Even that hardly works for me

 

I like ages of empire 3 though ^^ ship battles are fun Someone told me about GOG a few days ago. Looks good for classic games of my childhood. Also impulse seems decent...not as nice as steam but they on and off have good deals...been lazy on installing that one.

 

I have only used Direct2Drive for their pre-order deal for Civ 5, but even there, they just gave you a code to register it on Steam since it is a Steamworks game.

I buy Steamworks games on Steam with the above mentioned semi-exception.

I have a number of games on GamersGate - no client is great.

 

Heh, I'm thinking of going back to just buying boxed games now.

 

I would but i am broke so steam deals are for me lol. I bought 200 bucks on steam in the last 3 months....thats like 50 games lol. Now if i just bought them in boxes i might have gotten 10 if i was super lucky