Gaming Software Review: Steam

Website: Steampowered.com

Steam is a game download client where you can buy games to download to play. You can buy games, download them and play them after they have been installed. Steam itself has a large community and a lot of people play online multiplayer.

What makes Steam so popular is the fact that Valve, the company that created steam regularly puts digital games on sale. You can get games up to 75% off the retail price if you keep and eye on a game you’re interested in, it might go on sale. There are specials and sales all the time and you can get really good deals on games.

Steam also automatically updates itself when you have an internet connection. Sometimes it can be annoying, especially if you wanted to go play a game and have to wait for it to update.

While Steam is free to download, you must purchase most games unless they are free-to-play.

As I mentioned earlier Steam puts a lot of games on sale throughout the year. There are publisher sales where all the games from a company will be put on sale for a limited time.

Throughout the year there are big sale days to look forward to, the Spring sale, the Summer sale, the Fall sale, and the Winter sale. This is when games on Steam are heavily discounted and you can buy a lot of popular games at enormous discounts.

These seasonal sales are what makes Steam so popular and I love purchasing games or DLC during the sale because of the massive discounts.

Since you can have your game added to the Steam store after paying a certain amount of money, this has given rise to a lot of bad indie developers using asset flips, where someone buys assets from the Unity Store or some other sites and reuploads it as “their” game. This has gotten so bad there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to reviewing these bad “games” and their shady “Developers”.

This became so bad that an “indie developer” Digital Homicide sued Jim Sterling a videogame critic, over his review and harsh criticism of their “game” The Slaughtering Grounds, and after having their games pulled from Steam after trying to file a lawsuit against Steam users for negative reviews they were banned from Steam and had all their games pulled, although they have tried to come back as “Loot Toot” games, people caught on and they’ve been blasted again by the gaming community.

There have also been instances of people leaving fake positive reviews on Steam, which will also get you banned because positively reviewing your own game so you can boost sales is morally wrong and very shady.

Fortunately, with the never-ending plague of bad developers and trash games there has been a steady rise of YouTube channels dedicated to exposing these bad games, but if the game looks bad, it probably is, so be very careful when purchasing indie games on Steam.

Steam also has an offline mode so if you can’t connect to the internet, but you still want to play games, you can switch to offline mode and as long as you have the game downloaded you can play the game offline.

Another thing that people may not like about Steam is that you can’t resell your game if you don’t like it, but recently, they have made it so users can trade games with their friends, but you can’t get any money for it.

Other than the obvious flaw of not being able to resell your own games, I highly recommend using Steam because of the great deals you can get when it comes to buying PC games, but you always have to make sure your computer meets the minimum requirements for the game or your Steam purchase won’t run on your computer.

IF you want a great discount on games, then you’ll probably be using Steam, however, if you dislike DRM, digital rights management, you’ll have to buy games from GOG.com or another site, because Steam is DRM and some gamers don’t like DRM and having their games tied to Steam.

Steam is great if you’re looking for a great game deal. It isn’t really worth if if you just buy the games a launch, unless you have to have the latest game right now. You can find discounts through other sites but you won’t be able to request a refund for the game if you’ve played it under two hours and don’t like it.

You can find great deals throughout the year if you really keep an eye on when the sales happen, but there is DRM and if you don’t mind that you’ll definitely be buying a lot of games at steep discounts.

While you can get a lot games at very good discounts, there’s always the problem of bad developers trying to rip off gamers by selling asset-flips or terrible games in general.

You always have to worry when buying indie games unless you know it has good reviews, and not just the ones you see on Steam.

If you’re looking to buy popular games, you shouldn’t have any problems purchasing them. But keep in mind; you do have to have played under two hours in order to get a refund.

I do love Steam a lot, but its not a perfect platform, and quality control when it comes to indie games isn’t great at all. But as long as you know what you’re buying, you should be fine purchasing games, just make sure you are 100% sure you want to pay the price for them, because if you play too long you can’t get a refund if you don’t like the game.

If you’re looking for an alternative because you don’t like DRM, you should check out, GOG.com instead, but Steam is still a popular platform, just be careful what you buy.