Steam - a blessing or a curse?

[Old Duck]

It seems that some people love Steam and other people hate it. Someday I might actually have the privilege of having to chose whether to buy ED on Steam or directly from Frontier, so I'm weighing the pros and cons now. Here's what I have so far:
PROS:

• Ability to save lots of money through sales and free games
• Ease of installation
• Portability (Steam tracks my catalog, making the move to a new PC easier)
• Security (only one company has my credit card, rather than dozens)
• Easy way to run games on Linux

CONS

• Whatever DRM Steam uses
• Slight performance hit due to launcher running in background
• Spyware (at the very least, Steam tracks what you play and when)
• Potential target vector for hackers / malware

For me personally, the pros may outweigh the cons. On the other hand, if I were to get a laptop capable of running ED, odds are ED would be the primary game of just a small number of games I'd get. I'm still a console gamer at heart.

So, what does everyone think? IIRC, the latest version of ED sold on Steam requires the Steam client in order to play it, so the "just run ED directly instead of via Steam" advice no longer applies. It's either get ED directly from Frontier, or get it (and some other games) from Steam and play it using Steam. I'm just not sure which way to go.

 

[Sunyavadin]

CONS

• Whatever DRM Steam uses

Steam is the DRM

Which is kind of pointless for any multiplayer online game which requires an account login on the game's servers, since you can't play it without a registered account anyway.

 

[Old Duck]

Steam is the DRM

Can you be more specific? Does it require a "phone home" connection to verify my ownership of a game, and if so, does that mean I can't play an offline game unless I have an Internet connection to Steam for this verification? Also, how much bandwidth does Steam use for this and statistics reporting?

 

[dm06]

Put game name in search field, press buy, download, double click icon to start the game - no problems with these tasks detected so far in steam.

 

[Rob At Work]

Plus steam steam will continue to tell you the game you just purchased in the sale is now on sale again....Brilliant... I bet they make loads of sales from that

 

[Sunyavadin]

Can you be more specific? Does it require a "phone home" connection to verify my ownership of a game, and if so, does that mean I can't play an offline game unless I have an Internet connection to Steam for this verification? Also, how much bandwidth does Steam use for this and statistics reporting?

Basically Steam requires you to connect to steam to verify your "ownership" of the games purchased through it regularly. (When I first started using Steam, when it existed soley as the DRM for Half Life 2 and nothing else, it didn't even have its "offline mode", so with about a bazillion more people having bought HL2 than the Steam servers could cope with at the time, this was a very messy affair)
With Elite, of course, since that requires you to be connected to Frontier's servers 100% of the time you are playing, the steam requirement is not as much of a problem as in an offline game, where it's possible to be stuck somewhere with no internet for a prolonged period. However it does require that steam be running in the background providing this verification, for the game to run. And as I said, is redundant as DRM, since Frontier check this anyway by having you log into their servers to play the game no matter where you bought it.

 

[Vasea Azure]

I honestly like Steam, been using it for years and pretty much cant see any downsides so far (at least from my personal gaming experience). Despite obvious trolls and what not I do like to have fast access to games forum, see screenshots and reviews. Its very user friendly to have all this in one place. Also updating all my games is going through Steam in the background with out any hassle.

 

[Mole HD]

I like Steam..since I don't have an inbuilt allergy to DRM content. Some games work in offline mode with the majority that require an online handshake of some sort being Ubisoft or other major publisher titles bought via Steam. Updates are automatic, fast and painless and the client itself isn't a system resource hog when running in the background. I usually close it after launching the client leaving only the background stuff running in task manager for the online hand shaking...it uses less than a few Kb/s net connection.

From a personal standpoint, I'd offer that the pros far outweigh the cons...but I also like Origin Access from EA which almost makes me a social pariah in some circles

 

[Henkka77]

After 14 years of using it and 200+ games in my library, yes its good.

• Slight performance hit due to launcher running in background

I strongly doubt there is any kind of performance drop with Steam, and if there was, you wouldn't never notice it.

I find it odd that someone is even asking these things, Steam has been a thing for almost two decades, its not like its a new thing anymore.

 

[The Lawful]

AFAIK only the newer FD games require Steam, ED does not. I can start ED from the ED launcher even if it's a Steam version and the Steam client doesn't come up.

In ED, authorization is done via the Frontier account and not tied to Steam. Steam is basically just a wrapper around the game launcher and convenient for updates, but not required whatsoever. For other games, it can be different. The Steam client is relatively small and doesn't consume much bandwidth. You will hardly notice any difference between having it running in the background or not. On the spying issue, any process that runs locally and can open a network connection can send home about any data it likes.It's a matter of trust basically. Windows itself sends all kinds of telemetry home all the time, not to speak of things like Office and the like, and this cannot be switched off completely. You simply don't notice. And consoles track everything anyway.

Considering offline games, I never had troubles with these, but possibly that's because I'm usually online all the time anyway. Steam also has an offline option, but the last time I used that was for Half Life 2 many moons ago.

O7,

 

[askavir]

Steam pros far outweight the cons IMO. The only con is having a launcher to run the games. But at least that launcher/background service also gives me plenty of benefits in return for that annoyance (cloud saves, auto update, etc). Plus the download speeds are incredible. It also has the best store website, by a very long distance over all the competitors.

I also like GOG, for the simplicity of not having to install anything else but the game. Humble Bundle is a nice store too. I also tend to buy the games directly form the developers, when that possibility exists (like with ED for instance).

 

[marx]

Spyware? First, that would have to be sending data without your knowledge and consent for that. Compared to what little Steam collects, if you use Windows 10, Google, Facebook, Discord or many other services, they are collecting far more. (Although their EULAs are worded so that you basically consent to everything, so what remains is not knowing everything they collect.) You are paying for the "free" services with your data, after all. Valve at least makes their Steam revenue from their publisher's cut, not from advertisers and selling your collected data to others.

Not sure about the "potential target vector for hackers / malware" part either. By that token, nearly any software you install is that.

When discussion of the Valve tax comes up though, many forget that for that price, developers get a lot of support, up to and including the SteamWorks API. There's quite a lot of stuff there that developers don't have to come up with their own implementation then.
Of course, Epic offers the same, with cross-platform promises and whatnot - but if you take a look at their info site, well... besides user data collection, very little else is implemented. (Priorities, hm?)

At the end of the day though, I'd say that GOG is the best. No DRM beats even simple DRM. Plus if their new Galaxy 2.0 launcher works out, that'll be a big deal.

 

[Old Duck]

Does Steam handle things like Skyrim mods?

 

[Henkka77]

Of course.

 

[Old Duck]

Of course.

You reply to my Skyrim mods question?

I've got another question for the Steam fans. Can I make purchases on their website during a sale using my Linux-based browser, and then download those purchases at a later date once I own a Windows PC? Can I download those purchases to multiple PCs? I'm assuming the rule would be to only allow playing a game on one PC at a time, which is fine by me.

 

[Vasea Azure]

AFAIK only the newer FD games require Steam, ED does not. I can start ED from the ED launcher even if it's a Steam version and the Steam client doesn't come up.

Aye, you can start Steam ED copy from its folder with out even starting Steam client.

Does Steam handle things like Skyrim mods?

Yes, it has workshop support but you can use nexus mods as well.

 

[EUS]

Both.
The good; one stop shop, native linux support, or pushing dev's to go that way.
The bad; too much control over content. Example: Try to find the old version of skyrim, it requires a direct link.
The useless; community, trading, reviews, etc. I don't use any of it.

Is it expensive for companies? I don't care, they can still go direct sales, like Starsector does.

 

[Mole HD]

You reply to my Skyrim mods question?

I've got another question for the Steam fans. Can I make purchases on their website during a sale using my Linux-based browser, and then download those purchases at a later date once I own a Windows PC? Can I download those purchases to multiple PCs? I'm assuming the rule would be to only allow playing a game on one PC at a time, which is fine by me.

When I first came back to PC from the Xbox 3 or so years ago...I still had all the Steam purchased games in my library from over 10 years ago. Once a game license is purchased via Steam, it remains in your game library. From other PC's...simply download the game client, log in to your Steam account and all the game licenses purchased via Steam will be there....you'll have to download them again of course

 

[Old Duck]

When I first came back to PC from the Xbox 3 or so years ago...I still had all the Steam purchased games in my library from over 10 years ago. Once a game license is purchased via Steam, it remains in your game library. From other PC's...simply download the game client and log in to your Steam account and all the game licenses purchased via Steam will be there.

I bought Skyrim for PC on disc awhile back, and to my surprise the disc installed Steam, which apparently was needed to install Skyrim. So I already have a Steam Account (hopefully I still have the username and password as well) for Skyrim.

One of the things I like about console gaming is the ease of the Playstation Store. Steam appeals to me for the same reason. I started this thread because of the amount of negativity I read about Steam in another thread about downloading ED from Frontier. So far in this thread, it seems that there are more supporters of Steam than detractors.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Brick and mortar pulled most boxes from the shelves, so I turned to buy almost exclusively on Steam. Works way better than Lolrigin and any other major publisher attempt at digital distribution.