18.40 GBP....


Fuck off

Aw, come on now, be honest. Niggles told me that you two trade Steam cards at least once a week. I heard you have a turbo gamer rating on the forums over there for breaking the 10,000 achievement barrier, and won a signed portrait poster of Gabe. :P

Damn, the secret is out! ;D

What are "Steam cards" anyway? Are they a physical object? The last time I was of an age where I traded cards, I was also of the age where I would stick them in the spokes of my bike to make the clacking sound. :)

"Reinvigorated the PC market" is not exactly the same thing as "would have been completely dead" but you can bet your ass it wouldn't be the big industry darling and powerhouse it is again today without Steam.

Doesn't matter if you like Steam or not, it's a cold, hard fact.

Ha ha, the good old days of sticking cards in your spokes. :)

They're virtual cards. Speaking of sticking cards in your spokes, it appears to serve a similar purpose, except your making your profile look cool instead sound cool. I think that's all there is to it.

Ah, hubris. You are confusing cause with effect. Steam is not the origin of a modern resurgence of computer gaming, it is one of the platforms upon which this resurgence is taking place. It is the expansion of gaming as a hobby in the populace, which in turn fuels the profitability of gaming, plus the access to professional game-making tools by cottage game crafters, that are driving this renaissance. Crediting Steam with this is like saying Facebook made the web possible. The truth is the other way around.

Let me give a concrete example of why I find this kind of ahistorical arrogance objectionable. I'm an Amigan. I am part of the generation that truly reinvented computer gaming (and graphics, and sound), and brought it to the masses. Compared to that Steam is a trifle. It doesn't bring anything nearly as significant to the table, and nothing that any of its fans have told me about it leads me to believe it won't be anything more than another protracted flash-in-the-pan when the next business model comes along and trumps it. Sure, it's a popular service bringing a lot people what they want. So was MySpace. So was AOL.

I'll just leave this here, then.

Ah, I understand. I can see where that would be compelling to some folks. A friend of mine was quite addicted to one site where you would accumulate stuff your avatar, with a brisk trade going on between members for the rarer items (and sometimes folks paying cold hard cash for them).

Still a bit disappointed I can't put a Shodan card in my spokes. ;)

Oh, ok. Getting free games is a plus. ;)

I think it has helped it grow. It has provided a stage for the small studios to gain recognition and selling games right away. It has provided better ROI for publishers because Valve handles all of the infrastructure, patches, DLC, etc., for free. That is free except for their cut of the sales of course.

That helps make the PC platform much more appealing for devs/publishers. We've seen them state it plenty of times, too. In fact I think the AOW3 devs said that recently when referring to their physical retail and other digital stores requiring Steam, except for GOG. Kudos to GOG for getting it here.
Edit: Here it is: http://ageofwonders.com/all-about-the-retail-special-editions/

Steam OS and shifting to Linux can be seen as helping to protect PC gaming in the face of MS getting tighter control and less open with Windows 8+. Yes, I know there's other reasons.

And to just be clear about something, I'm not much of a Steam user. I try to avoid it, actually. I've got kind of a love-hate relationship with it. I think it has helped PC gaming, but I personally don't like client requirements. I prefer my game installers DRM-free with no dependencies. ;)

Stream hasn't helped any with the DRM issue, I don't think. GOG have credit for that in this industry. Not to mention that it's GOG that worked with these publishers to dust off their old catalogs and start selling them digitally, and that has brought the classic games to other DDs too. We have GOG to thank for spearheading that.

I'm not denying the success of the platform. I'm merely taking issue with the conflation of success with significance. Certainly it is helping facilitate sales of games, and even helping some folks bring their product to market, in some ways similar to how Google helps developers out by providing toolkits and APIs and a platform. But people are viewing it as an inevitable and/or vital presence, and that to me is false reasoning.

It's a matter of ecology, ultimately - an ecosystem has room for a few apex predators, ideally where their biomes don't overlap. But when one of these species of apex predators dies out, it opens up room for another to move in. Steam and GOG are both apex predators after a fashion, being large players in their ecosystem. But they got there when vacancies appeared as the other top predators died out (Electronics Boutique, Babbages, etc). Presuming that gaming wouldn't exist without them is flawed reasoning - they exist because of gaming, and in their absence something similar would arise. None of them are indispensable to the success or survival of gaming, they are merely the best adapted to the field at the moment.

Believe me, I understand how the fickle passions of the consumer get attached to the flavour of the month, and how easy it is to believe that this time success will be permanent. But it really helps to view things in the larger and vastly more complex webwork of interactions that make up the system. No one part is indispensable in an emergent construct.

Coming back to my ecology analogy, I can sum it up this way: The forest does not exist because of the tiger; the tiger exists because of the forest.

I just hope multiplayer gets active, i used to play AoM/AoT online all the time when it came out

anyone else play mp back then? i was awful and never got over 1700

Tbh while bringing back multiplayer is fine, I would rather they overhauled the AI like they did with AoEII HD, so the single-player crowd can get more of a challenge.

Yeah I can agree with most of that. They're big players in the ecosystem that can influence it, but they aren't the ecosystem itself.

No offense but you're being an arrogant twit. This isn't about ego, this is about stating the obvious. You might not care about the things Steam has done for gaming but that doesn't mean it hasn't been extremely important, influential and invigorating to the PC marketplace. Any developer or publisher would tell you the same thing.

Auto-patching, a single library, digital delivery made easy, no backups, achievements on PC, DLC on PC, cloud saving, indies not needing a publisher to attract customers, sales, seasonal sales, Steam workshop making mods easy and soon SteamOS. And I am only naming what come to mind immediately, there are dozens more I am sure. It took the PC from a place where shitty console ports barely sold any discs to a place where a lot of those same types of games sell more on PC than the consoles they were built for, and where the PC is the talk of the town again. The indie resurgence wouldn't have even happened like it did without a strong, publisher-free platform for them to take over.

Your "forrest and tiger" talk misses the obvious: Steam was essential in getting the forrest we see today grown. The PC was not headed that way or growing that kind of ecosystem before Steam made it happen. You can ignore all this all you want and pretend Steam is not important, or a big factor in the PC's current popularity, but it's flat-out ridiculous horseshit, to be blunt. Disliking the platform (WHICH I DO) doesn't make this any less so.

Havent read anywhere that said hey touched anything except reskin the graphics on AoEII ?... i dont think they touched the gameplay or mechanics at all.