How Steam Is the Best Platform

Gaming Union writes: "At the Montreal International Game Summit, Jason Holtman, the director of business development from Valve, spoke in a conference about how the online distribution service of Steam has worked over the last couple of years, and sent a warning to the rest of the industry of how change is required to suit an ever demanding public.

One of the main points that Holtman argued is that an open marketing strategy with a lot of experimentation is crucial to maintain sales. Holtman showed a number examples from Team Fortress 2 and how Valve has continued to maintain sales for more than two years."

[Gary Glitter]

Steam is not the best platform, at the end of the day i would rather be able to bring my games anywhere in their case than have it as a file saved on steam and i dont know anyone with steam so i couldnt actually play my games anywhere except my own pc.

[evrfighter]

Steam is the only place where you'll find games like

TF2 for $2.99,
Mass Effect and Assassins Creed $5.00,
Frontlines, $8

This was all in the last month I might add. Please don't tell me you think Live or PSN can top that.

[Pandamobile]

Steam is <10 MB in size. It's not hard to download and install it on other computers.

And once you've downloaded games to your main computer, you can burn back-up disks and quickly install them on other PC's without wasting a huge amount of bandwidth.

[Perjoss]

I love steam, but there is some things about it that are not quite right, for example:

Modern Warfare 2
steam = £39.99
amazon = £29.70 (free delivery)

Borderlands
steam = £29.99
amazon = £24.99 (free delivery)

I dont understand how an unboxed game can cost more than a boxed version. I know that they dont set the prices themselves, and if you look at Valve games they are CHEAP, but still...

[Pandamobile]

Valve doesn't dictate the EU pricing, which is why everything is all weirded out.

[somekyle]

Yeah, I heard it has 70% market share or something

[mephman]

Quite a few people really like Steam, but I've never really been bothered with it myself.

[somekyle]

I'd try it, but I don't have windows on my Mac yet, sadly. I got one that could run a ton of games too, but then I couldn't afford windows xD. At least W7 is out now.

[Paradise Lost]

steam is an awesome platform, i like it much better than xbox live or Psn because of it's dirt cheap deals they have.

[ThePostalDudeX]

Steam is the only way to go for PC gamers! i love it!

[Pandamobile]

Steam is paving the entire way for digital distribution. It's amazing how far its come in just 5 years.

[FordGTGuy]

Is the Steam client I've been using it since it launched and all Steam does good is allow you to buy, download and sort your games for launch. However 9 times out of 10 when you have a problem with the game its usually the Steam clients fault. I don't know how many times I have seen the message 'Steam failed to launch game' and sighed.........

Its a resource hog and a annoyance even while playing games now. Steam needs a make over and better stability.

[JonnyBigBoss]

Steam is a great application. I'm glad to see it has succeeded so much. I hated the EA Download application... glad that isn't the standard.

[Godmars290]

Okay, so Steam is a self proven great platform for digital distribution, but who else even comes close? Games for Windows?

Honestly, what's the point of making a "We're head and shoulders above the competition" statement when there is no competition?

[QQcrybaby]

Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamersGate. Not saying that they are better, just that there is competition.

[moe84]

Steam is no where near the best platform. Neither is the PSN or XBLA. Any system that (at some point) caters to one group of people is NOT the best out there.

There are still people without internet, so downloading games isn't possible making these services useless. There are others who have access just not as often as the rest of us, again, making these services useless.

Playing "offline" is fine and all but that doesn't help people who can't connect to begin with. Living in the states, where a large.. very large portion of the country is still with out broadband internet, or any internet at all makes digital distribution useless to most. Countries like Japan, France, China, Australia etc who have the majority of their population with broadband, are the ones who make steam worth a damn. The rest of the population (over half) can't use it efficiently.

But in the end, at least for me I'd much rather have the discs that I can install and uninstall when I want, w/o having to worry about Steam.

[ShawnCollier]

I personally haven't used it, so I wouldn't know how it fares to the others.

[rmedtx888]

I'm sorry to say this but I think Steam is not as good as they say it is. I was using it for a month and I was not impressed. I uninstalled it from my computer last week.

[Pandamobile]

What didn't you like about it?

[TABSF]

I have purchased 65 games in less than 2 years.

Love Valve and Steam, Gabe what a God