buying games through steam

I plan on buying some games such as cs source, half life, and compny of heroes through steam. I will pay using paypal. If I order through steam will I download the game file on to my computer? or will you send a cd? Will I only be able to install the game once?

 

Once you purchase a game from steam, that game will be on your steam account forever. Which means that if you format your computer, playing from a friends computer etc, as long as you login to steam with your own player account, you will be able to download that game or any games that you have bought with steam.

Its very handy for lanpartys when you forgot to bring your own computer for example

So overall, you will be able to install the game as many times as you want, as long as you use the steam account you used to buy the game your downloading.

 

wow great answer. thanks. Have you ever bought any games from steam?

 

Yeah you pretty much buy the download. Which you can download as many times as you want and install on as many computers as you want. But be warned you cannot play on these at the same time, just useful when ur using multiple computer.

I have bought several games on steam, ever since it came out years ago.

 

steam is great...got HL2, and EP1 off of it....really handy, no CDs WHOOOOHOOO

 

and cheaper (usually)

 

I have most of the valve games along with the call of duty and hitman series through steam. I also own the call of duty series on cd. Steam is waaaaay easier for me. For some reason the community beta cleared up an issue where the update screen would freeze steam

 

I've bought tons of games through Steam, with no problems. It's extremely convenient, and you don't have to worry about losing your CD's.

 

just dont cheat so you wont get banned

 

are the file sizes any different or are they the same as if you were to buy the CD version?

 

they should be the same. Half life + counterstrike i believe was around 800 mb? correct me if iam wrong, and hl2 was around 3 gigs? correct me if im wrong, i dont have all of these info in front of me

 

I was wondering how big the game file sizes are

 

It's hard to get an idea of how big the files are, because many of the games share some common Source Engine files, which are shared by all the games. For example, my SteamApps folder looks like this:

-"counter-strike source shared.gcf" - 1.7GB
-"Source materials.gcf" - 1GB
-"Source sounds.gcf" - 1GB
-"Half-Life 2 Content.gcf" - 860MB
-"Source Models.gcf" - 400MB
-"source engine.gcf" - 127MB

etc.

But I also have games like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, HL2: Episode 1, Day of Defeat Source, Half-Life: Source, etc. so it probably saves me a lot of hard drive space by having them all sharing the same resources. If you have a lot of source-engine games (like me), they'll probably use up around 10GB, total.