STEAM vs Instore Purchase..

Just a quick Thread to see thoughts and opinions of buying games thru STEAM or just buying from a store(CD) and installing, since I am new to PC gaming. I bought Crysis 2 from gamestop(CD) and installed and works and looks great. I bought BFBC2 from STEAM and graphics Lag a little bit... I am thinking I should've bought in store. Any thoughts, advice, opinions will be appreciated......

 

There is no difference between the in-store and Steam version of games, except for some copy protection stuff. The problem you're running into is Crysis2 is a DX9, consoleized game and BFBC2 has much higher requirements being DX11 and not as straight of a console port.

 

Err, it makes no difference as far as game performance goes whether you buy from steam or instore. And to be more specific here, no way are you going to get more lag based on that difference!

 

steam is better in my opinion. there are many pros to buying from a store (physical media, box art, manual) but i think they are all trumped by steam.

steam wont make games lag fyi. bad company 2 i think is poorly optimized. my old computer also ran crysis 2 better than it ran bad company 2.

steam has very nice sales (picked up me1 + 2 for 15 bucks today, bought da ultimate for 20 the other day). the games can be downloaded as many times as you want. games dont need a disc to run. most of the time the games DRM is only steams built in DRM. you can never lose a game, or get your game destroyed by accidentally sitting on it while excited about eating pizza.

also, steam is probably the best overall PC gaming "community" it is for the pc what xbox live is for xbox. it needs to get better on the communication between gamers; the profile pages are pretty basic, not all games have achievements.

overall, if you arent worried about physical media, go for steam. its great.

EDIT: LOL it made DA : O into DA

 

instore games generally run 12 - 17% faster than STEAM games*










*not really. there's no difference. STEAM games are better because they're more convenient.

 

In the world where I am supreme ruler, any PC game available at retail will be required to activate on Steam. Then you can reinstall any time you want by either downloading or using the CD/DVD.

 

this is more of a internet connection based question i'm guessing, how long is it taking you guys to download a game of that size say crysis or bfbc2 of off STEAM?

 

Retail Pros:

• Get physical media, manual, artwork etc
• Each game is individually owned

Retail Cons:

• Usually cost more than steam (atleast more than steam sales)
• Have to pay tax
• Have to drive to get it and wait in line to pay

Steam Pros

• Cost
• Can easily download to your computer and play so if you forget the game media while away from home you can still get to your game
• Steam game interface (like telling you what friends have the game or are playing

Steam Cons

• Most games tied to your account so if something happens to your account you can lose all your games
• If you have slow internet or limited bandwidth use downloading games can be a pain/problem

 

Not always a con, though, because I've found it much easier to lose/scratch cds/cd keys than steam accounts.

 

Yeah, but you can backup your cd's that is the only reason I did not list it as a con.

If you think you may lose/scratch just make a copy of it right away and put away the original.

I am not just saying forget your password, what if your account is stolen, or if you get in trouble for hacking or something and get VAC banned.

When I say hacking I do not mean actually cheating, people I know have been banned for hacking just for having 3rd party programs running in the background or using a mod.

Id rather lose access to that one game than my entire collection of thousands of dollars of games.

 

I have got my steam account hijacked before But as long as you have the boxed copy of one game on your account your good to go!

Steam is almost 110% cheaper then the store... except with portal 2... best buy and amazon beat steam

 

I just really like steam because I get a new computer about once every year, so being able to just install steam and choose what I want to download is easier than sifting through 50 cds.

The only thing I dislike is how they keep switching my prices to Euros because I'm currently living in Germany. Takes about a week each time for them to switch it back after I complain.

 

to me steam is always preferrable and is definitely more convenient. the risk of course, like any other internet based system, is that it can potentially be hacked like what happened to psn.
hopefully it never happens as it would be a royal pain to sort things out with your cc.

 

Steam didn't used to store your CC info, but now they store your last CC used info. Hopefully it's well encrypted.

 

this isnt exactly an either/or situation... you can use both. Also you can install a game from CD and activate it on steam so you have an additional "backup" if your hard copy is destroyed.

The only way steam would be decreasing performance is from the 50 or so megs of ram it uses to run... and i mean cmon if your starved for 50 megs of ram you have other problems.

 

There, fixered yer post!

 

im sure they are. for some reason i just feel safe using the steam app. i think it has stronger security than my forex console.

 

another vote for steam, esp if you are multi platform and upgrade every so often. i am in my backyard on my laptop and will soon move inside to my desktop. my cd library is very dusty, and i find myself buying my favorite oldies games from steam when i see sales. it has been quite a while since i bought any game from a store. another steam plus is auto updates.

 

Steam to me seems like the future of (legal) digital media distribution. It's definitely my favorite go-to source for PC gaming. Their minimal-DRM policy is a major plus, although hopefully boxed copies will soon come to change as well. Learning to embrace Steam is just a matter of ignoring the horror stories of people losing access to their Steam accounts.

Ow, cool! I didn't even know you could download your physically-purchased games via steam.

 

Only if it's in the list with the product key format as listed...

 

Only buy retail now for collector's editions I want, like recently Dead Space 2, Duke Nukem Forever, possibly The Witcher 2. Other than that I have no use for disks and manuals, what a pain to store them all.

 

Only physical games I buy are not available on steam (Blizzard is the only one I can think of)

 

I buy new games in shops, because in this country they are usually 15-30% cheaper than the Steam version.
And most of the time, it doesn't even worth buying a game with a special deal, because the retail version gets cheaper too, so the 15-30% price difference still remains.

 

What a waste. 77MB/s download and no Steam.

 

Steam all the way except for collector's here too. I even went as far as getting a few older games (when they were on sale for less than $10) on steam again to save me the hassle of having to use the disc to play (probably could have tweaked that but i felt lazy). If you don't want to re-download everything when you switch computers, there's a backup feature.

The only non-steam games i have right now are Guild Wars, Sins of a Solar Empire and Starcraft 2. First one is an mmo so you can download the client any time and the latter two don't have a steam version. I like the irony of having a SC2 shortcut in steam and using the steam UI for everything that doesn't require battle.net.

EDIT: It's getting hard to find a good selection of retail PC games in stores these days, one more reason to get steam. While i like the attention console games receive since i own a console too, i find it sad to see the decline of PC games in stores over the last 5 years.

 

Discs are dying; EA already said they're moving towards a 100% digital download distribution method link. The days of discs are numbered, it's time to start getting used to the digital distribution method and so far Steam does it the best.

 

Even when games are more expensive on steam, i still will buy them there. I either wait until the price gets reasonable or suck it up.

 

Off topic:

OP i realized your laptop has 12 GB of ram. Are you working on theoretical algorithms for Moon landings.... working with NASA?

I dont get how ANYONE could use even HALF that amount of RAM.

 

What difference does it make? RAM is cheap!

I have 16GB, primarily because it is cheap, but also if you deal with virtual machines it's nice to have extra RAM to use 2GB RAM with each machine (or more).

 

Ah true. I forgot about virtual machines. I normally run them to 'try-out' new Linux distros. Maybe I should upgrade my desktop to 16GB...

 

Yeah. I'll run a server OS and a client machine or two. Sometimes I use it to download torrents or other "questionable" material so that it's contained in that OS and not my own.