Defender's Quest coming up in less than one hour... finally!

Sure, but firstly I should say that it is important to realize that what some people consider to be a "benefit" of Steam, other people consider to be Satan's hellspawn. Having said that, I will define "benefit of Steam" very clearly to mean something that some number of people who use Steam find to be beneficial and prefer having the feature/function available.

Some of the features of Steam that many (probably the majority) of Steam customers find beneficial include:
- Having a standalone gaming client. (It is essentially a highly customized web browser)
- Ability to navigate the store and purchase games in-client.
- Ability to manage one's gaming library in client including viewing the library with different views, organizing the games into categories, installing/uninstalling the games, launching the games.
- Updating/patching games automatically by default (or disabling that per game if desired).
- Voice chat built into the platform for use with any game.
- Social networking features (friends, instant messaging, gaming profile your friends can see, status updates, comments, game reviews etc.)
- Friends can see what games you own and your wishlist.
- Tracks how long you have spent in each game and other statistics.
- Acheivement system tracking feats you have accomplished in games that support it.
- Trading cards which people collect for games and trade/sell or use to boost their aesthetic prestige on Steam.
- Cloud based storage of savegames, configuration and other game data for games that choose to use it. Some games offer it as an option while others use it mandatorily (which then makes it act like DRM, although it is nice when optional)
- Marketplace to buy/sell/trade games and in-game items, trading cards and other stuff.
- Workshop where people can create mods/maps/levels and other items for games and make them available to the community.
- Discussion forums integrated into the client.
- Groups (kind of like Facebook) integrated into the client.
- Ability to add non-Steam games to show up in your game list and launch them.
- Lets friends know which game you're playing and what game they are playing which is useful for organizing multiplayer matches.
- Lets you share your game library in a semi-limited fashion with authorized family members and friends on authorized computers (if the game allows) so long as you are not currently playing any Steam games yourself.

That's a good quick list of many features that Steam has in the Steam client which many people out there find beneficial and useful. Of course, some people may not like or want any of these things at all, might hate them, might want to burn kittens with the flames of 1000 suns that Valve dare to even make such features available to people, etc...

But, the bottom line is that Steam is the most popular gaming service out there and these features attract the unwashed masses and are widely desired by people at large even if there are people out there who couldn't care less about any of it. That's not going to go away any time soon either, and video game companies are integrating their games more and more tightly into many of these features that are really Steam specific for the most part - making those games less likely to even consider platforms like GOG or others that don't provide their gaming customers with a similar experience of features. For example "achievements" are highly popular with people at large it seems. I'm rather neutral about them myself but they're popular and it seems many game companies consider it a required feature for their game nowadays.

Mind you, the majority of the things I list above are just optional conveniences people can care about or just ignore and not care about. The things that people seem to hate the most about Steam are more the fact that Steam has their own DRM system available for games to optionally choose to use and most games do use Steam DRM as well as other forms of DRM. That's the most off putting feature of the whole Steam concept ultimately, but there are DRM-free games there also. The other big thing that seems to annoy people about Steam is that you HAVE to have the Steam client running in order to play most if not all Steam games (except perhaps the truly DRM-free ones).

Anyhow, that's a good synopsis of the "alleged benefits" of Steam so to speak. I personally consider some of those to be benefits to myself for sure, while others I am neutral about and don't really care either way, and some of the features I find annoying and not really beneficial to me personally - but I can see how all of the things I listed as benefits are seen as beneficial to at least /some/ Steam users even if they're not beneficial to me personally. :)

Personally I think a properly well written gaming client/launcher is a nice thing to have, and many of the features could theoretically be optional and not forced down people's throats per se. A company like GOG writing an /optional/ client to implement some of the same functionality, whom is much more consumer-friendly and conscious of providing a better gaming experience to their customers is going to most likely create an overall experience which has the potential to be much better than Steam's client IMHO however Steam has a many-year lead on GOG, and so I imagine we'll get some neat features and then enhancements over time rather than some Steam-killer all at once. :) I do think too though that just having a client will draw LOTS of Steam gamers to be interested in GOG who otherwise might have just ignored GOG because they love gaming clients and don't want to use a service that doesn't have one.

The beauty of GOG's approach IMHO, is that us gaming client fans can have our cake and eat it too, while anyone who chooses to do so can ignore it and continue doing things as they always have, even being completely blissfully unaware of the client and its offerings. :)

Anyhow, hope this helps!

I love it when my name is on the home page. :P

Okay that was kind of a troll post but I'm in a holding pattern with my current SC 4 game so I have some time to kill. XD

It might be because I'm running on caffeine but I don't get it. (Ittle Dew?)

Noooooo was waiting for that to get on a sale! Getting to hate that "release HD-ified on steam, remove from gog" thing a few publishers have going on...

Trading cards. The money they bring in helps me fuel my game-buying addiction. And bundles... which have games in them... with trading cards... Crap, my backlog will suffocate me one day :D

Yeah, that's another thing some Steam gamers love too. It's not my thing personally but I did experiment with it for a brief period just to understand what it was all about to be able to speak about it without pure bias. :)

http://www.an-ovel.com/pages/magog.php
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abe

Excellent explanation, thank you, and one that confirms what I thought...

...I am old-fashioned!

All of those features, while useful to some (or to those who think they are useful) are unnecessary for my gaming needs. The overwhelming feeling I get from Steam is that they want to control the gaming industry and that by getting more publishers on their side they are forcing people into adopting their god-awful (imo) system and their megalomaniacal (hyper-controlling) way of doing things. They want to be another corporate monster like Microsoft and bully the game playing public into going their way by offering an extensive library of attractive properties. This to me is absolutely wrong. When it all so blatantly comes down to control and profit the game players are ultimately the ones who are going to suffer, whether that be by enforced DRM or playing Steam's game and painting themselves into a corner by closing off other options that might make their game buying/playing fairer (by having choice) and more open ended (by not requiring Steam's insidious client). I like the simplicity and ethical correctness of buying a product and using it in the way I want to. Here its called Consumers' Rights and a lot of people feel very strongly about it. My experience of Steam has only ever left a feeling of unease, and if they offer games that I want to play but have no alternative access to, then I shall go without. Fortunately there's a lot out there to keep me happy...

The thing is though, that Valve has been innovative with online gaming, and continue to dominate because they offer the most feature rich product/service out there that none of their competitors have come close to matching pretty much. Their biggest competitors are probably EA's Origin, and Ubisoft's Uplay and both of those services are super bloated, slow, buggy, loaded with a zillion times the DRM annoyances on the games, and have only a fraction of Steam's features, and Steam has about 1000 times the number of games (numbers pulled out of my arse but probably accurate) :) So it's no surprise that the video game publishers choose Steam first and foremost for PC gaming. They have an attractive offering compared to the others and almost don't even need to /try/ to be evil or anything like that. Oddly, they're probably the most honest and gamer-friendly service of the bunch too. I'm not defending Valve or Steam though, just saying more or less that their main competition out there is far more evil and can't even make a dent in Steam with their best efforts to date. :)

Valve is doing some really good things for gaming too though IMHO such as SteamOS and their efforts with Linux which are having a lot of benefit to improving open source video drivers and other technologies. Valve is IMHO more like Google than like Microsoft in that they are big, want to be big, but they're not just pure evil - they're a mixture of good and evil. :)

Personally, most of the bad experiences I've had with Steam are not with Steam itself nor Valve, but are with individual games and the choices the game developers/publishers made for their game. Steam provides DRM services to game developers for example, but there is no requirement that games ever use any DRM within the service - it's just an option available. Most games of course do seem to implement DRM (whether it is Steamworks DRM or some other systems or multiple systems) but Valve doesn't require it. I'd rather direct my dislike of that towards the individual game companies than dump it all on Valve per se.

Another thing that Valve has done which has benefited all of us though is that many of the choices they've made and the things they've done for online gaming and digital distribution, have ultimately been responsible for causing video game prices to drop significantly and make more video games available online than any brick and mortar store could ever hope to hold, making availability and pricing better than ever. Sure, games still come out priced at $60, but the price drops like a potato thrown into an empty mine shaft not long after more often than not, with zillions of games sub-$5 regularly not just on Steam, but the effect has trickled across the industry. We all benefit from the network effects of what they've done even if one has never bought a game there.

So they're a bit of a double edged sword so to speak. :)

Bing the died in the wool cynic I am, Valve's efforts to do this, that or the other only feed my dislike of them - its not out of the goodness of their hearts, clearly. And yes, not only are they a double edged sword, they are also here to stay (rather like herpes). But fortunately there is still a lot of choice, and if GOG are told to drop any future titles I'm sure they will give us ample time to get our hands on the game before it goes over to 'The Other Side.'

I don't agree with anything on this list and while a lot of people do like some of the crap I don't think it's the majority. People put up with it because they want to play the latest games, aren't willing to miss out and don't want to pirate. There is nothing about DRM and imposed limitations that is in the interests of paying customers.

To me, Valve are absolute scum and I would happily see the 'service' blocked within the EU.

I've experienced more than once that I can't play my games that I paid for because there is a forced update of the client which I can't download because of bandwidth limitations. All the other bullshit like trading cards and achievements gets in the way. I don't want to be tracked or have statistics recorded. I don't want auto patches either, I want games that are finished and working 100% before they are sold.

Gabe Newell is a greedy fat **** (insert the strongest four letter word you can think of)

OK I'm done for this sale, flash rotations offer nothing new and Steam seal needs my money...come on GOG step up or go home