Octopus Overlords

I have Stardock's drengin.net (now totalgaming.net) service where I can download games they offer - and I now don't bother purchasing retail from Stardock games, since I just use their service.

However, I will not be using Steam. Even though I want as much of the money as possible to go to the developer, and would like to do the same for Valve - I just feel Half-llife2 is going to be too big, and would much rather have it on CD/DVD.

How do you all feel about this?

jpinard wrote:How do you all feel about this?

I'm all for it, although I think the pricing on the HL2 deals is ridiculous considering all but the Gold package is bits-only, with no physical box or manual.

I like the immediacy of the download, though my view could be tainted by my 3 Mbit connection.

Initially, I had huge problems buying a game in bit form only - since I'd never done it before. I love boxes, manuals and all that swag. They make me happy. However, recently I'm fining what makes me even happier is a move towards a more streamlined living. In the coming couple of weeks I will be declairing a war on clutter! I will break away and be free of it!

Buying Half-Life 2 Silver last week over steam was my first step. I'm sure I'll buy a cheap dvd burner and make a backup in order to reinstall if something happens in the near future.

I'm trying very hard to break away from my old conceptions of what commerce and property means to me and I find taking a leap on steam is a pretty safe way to test the "medialess" landscape.

is it possible to make a backup of the downloaded file?

You can burn the contents of your steam folder(s) to a dvd (or a number od CDs I guess.)

Should you change HD's or wipe it or something, all you have to do is redownload steam itself then dump the contents of your back-up dvd back into the steam directory.

Not graceful, but works.

I think you only need to backup the SteamApps files.

What steam needs is an "Archive to CD" that will auto burn all of the data you need to a series of cd's with whatever games you want on them and a nice installer.

Hell, it could even throw in your account name/password so you can install them on a computer with no internet and start playing right away.

If it had a feature like this then I wouldn't have one bit of a problem buying something over it.

Even without it I still got a HL2 Silver, but it was just such a good deal.

I wanna have the box and CD and such but if you have to register the damn thing on Steam even to play the single player, then the whole situation sorta blows.