What is steam?

joxley1990

Golden Master
Messages
7,846
On most of the screenshots I have seen of peoples desktop, they all have "Steam"

What is it?
What does it do?
What is the link lol

Thanks
James
 
Steam is a program that manages all of your games that you have purchased from them.

The most common games on steam are Half Life (1 and 2) and Counter Strike (Source and 1.6). All of your games (and mods of the half life and source engines) will be stored in this simple program. Steam also lauches, updates and (somewhat) prevents hackers in games.

Steam's Website

You can download steam for free from the link, however you must purchase games from a store or off of steam to play.
 
Ya bascially its a bunch of games that use the "vavle" graphic engines, and since there are so many for online play, they made a program to mange them all :D
 
It is a very good idea, prevents piracy, hacking, automatically updates all your games...but the program is poorly designed.

It is very slow when updating and for Half-Life 2 you need an internet connection just to install it, then it needs to download all the updates and if you havce a slow internet connection (coupled with Steam's slow updating system) it's gonna be a while before you play.

I hate it yet love it.
 
It is the most ridiculous excuse for a piece of software I've ever seen. I despise it. There is nothing good about it except that it will manage the games, but, unfortunately, long before Steam we had (and still have) something called icons, which worked much better. It used to start when my computer started but that lengthened my startup time by about two, so I decided to turn it off. Now, whenever I want to play Half-Life 2, it takes a good 2 minutes to load everything.

Sorry for the rant, but I've always wanted to rant about Steam. :(
 
On my computer its ok, btu when i try to run it on my friend slaptop,omg, it takes 3minutes + to load ERRGGGG
 
When I said load everything, I meant from clicking on the icon for Half-Life 2 to the point where it loads the main menu. That's about 3 loading screens. :(
 
Steam is the program that the company valve uses to sell games. Its their game client. Valve sells games through steam and hosts other 3rd party games that valve agree to put on steam and sell. Steam also lets all the games, cs, cs sourse, half life, dof, everything go under 1 folder, the valve steam folder w/e and 1 client. So yeah, i no many people hate it, but i think its a lot easier than having 8 game icons from steam where u can just get it from a simple window. I dont no about steam taking 2 minutes to load, takes like 30 seconds for me. Mayb u comp. is effed up and slow. I dk, but i like steam. Its a good way to organize the games and mod em. Steam is the big chunk of the money valve gets, so dont go off naggin about it. Hope this explains it well.
 
Back
Top Bottom