Steam Offering Mod Downloads

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According to this news item, Steam will be offering mod downloads starting this week. The mods now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and will be free to owners of any Source game.

As a part of our continuing efforts to support the MOD community, we will begin hosting selected MODs directly on Steam starting next week. The first five MODs to ship on steam will be Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic. As always, owners of any Source game will be able to download and play all of these MODs for free.
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Steam is becoming a pretty nice platform, I like having everything rolled up into one.
 
Kahoona said:
And to think, back in 2004 people were screaming bloody murder about it.
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The big gripe was basically steam is DRM. However, consider all forms of DRM...I like it the best. You don't need to download the game to make "steam" work. They could still sell the game in a box and you just need to connect.

What percent of people who actually BUY the game do not have broadband internet connection (dial up or nothing)? My guess is if you compare to the amount they claim to lose to "piracy" it would be a sobering numbering. However, if the game is on steam and you can no longer pirate, wouldn't that force game makers to actually admit the reason their game sales suck is because the game sucks?

I'm really glad steam is the way it is now. It makes DRM fairly painless to the paying customer and a pain in the ass to the pirate. Don't know, sounds like a good idea to me.

As for the mods, that is awesome. It would be nice to get games like Oblivion and then slowly make certain "heavily desired" mods available. One stop shopping.
 
Kahoona said:
And to think, back in 2004 people were screaming bloody murder about it.
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Because it sucked in 2004. Fast forward to 2008, its a nice application. Stable, and with most of the major issues dealt with.
 
Monkey God said:
Because it sucked in 2004. Fast forward to 2008, its a nice application. Stable, and with most of the major issues dealt with.
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Yep. It used to not support LAN activities, making LAN parties impossible, it was very cumbersome and kept providing hundreds of problems for anyone wanting to LAN with a few friends.
 
Ockie said:
Yep. It used to not support LAN activities, making LAN parties impossible, it was very cumbersome and kept providing hundreds of problems for anyone wanting to LAN with a few friends.
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I remember *ALL* of those problems. Kept us from playing HL + CS and other mods at many a LAN party. Considering those were our most favorite games at the time, it pretty much helped kill our local lan parties altogether. :(
 
Steam has evolved into an incredible beast. I wonder how long till they turn evil though :(
 
rereading my post it seems it comes off wrong. I think steam is great. I think it is a wonderful case study on how to implement DRM right (add value to the customer!). Them turning evil is a parallel to Google who at some point stopped being awesome and came out with privacy intrusions and such. Not 100% evil, just not 100% liked.
 
FrozenLiquidity said:
I remember *ALL* of those problems. Kept us from playing HL + CS and other mods at many a LAN party. Considering those were our most favorite games at the time, it pretty much helped kill our local lan parties altogether. :(
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Yep, I believe personally that it did hurt the lan scene in general, especially when those were the games people played (at a time if felt like that was all people played), lol
 
Steam is the best. Even in 2004 when it was a nightmare, I knew Valve would eventually shake all the problems out of it. I want all my PC games bought on Steam (and most of them are at this point).
 
Steam keeps getting better as time goes on. The major feature I'm waiting for is the remote game save storage. Play anywhere & access your game saves anywhere. The only issue is that games will have to be updated to take advantage of this feature in full.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Steam keeps getting better as time goes on. The major feature I'm waiting for is the remote game save storage. Play anywhere & access your game saves anywhere. The only issue is that games will have to be updated to take advantage of this feature in full.
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Same here. Saving configs and save games would really be the ultimate. I've backed up all of my configs and save games to external hard drives for years (blank CDs and DVDs before that), and for there to be automated cloud backup for all that stuff, oof, awesome.
 
I jumped on the GTA: San Andreas for $9.99. It's a pretty good game. Hopefully Steamworks will support the larger, more complex San Andreas mods that don't work with Steam's version 3.00.
 
Serpico said:
Same here. Saving configs and save games would really be the ultimate. I've backed up all of my configs and save games to external hard drives for years (blank CDs and DVDs before that), and for there to be automated cloud backup for all that stuff, oof, awesome.
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not sure, but wasn't a while back it was mentioned somewhere they may be doing this, or working on it, like an online save feature / storage.
 
Yes, it's part of the Steamworks package that was given to devs. Steam has yet to release it as a feature set built into the client software though.
 
GJSNeptune said:
I jumped on the GTA: San Andreas for $9.99. It's a pretty good game. Hopefully Steamworks will support the larger, more complex San Andreas mods that don't work with Steam's version 3.00.
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I didn't even know steam had that game on there... heh, time to go pick er up :p
 
Ockie said:
I didn't even know steam had that game on there... heh, time to go pick er up :p
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Dude, over the weekend you could buy every Rockstar game for $35. There was a Max Payne 1 & 2 pack for only $7!
 
Ockie said:
I didn't even know steam had that game on there... heh, time to go pick er up :p
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Blah, the 50% Rockstar sale is over. The Rockstar pack is back up to $60 and GTA:SA is $20 again.

Just keep in mind that they have huge sales every weekend now.
 
Kahoona said:
And to think, back in 2004 people were screaming bloody murder about it.
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Steam is 2004 was absolutely horrible, I was in the beta so I know. No friends, no LAN support, and the servers constantly down. It is not the same program it was 4 years ago. Steam should not have been released until late 2006.
 
SixtyWattMan said:
Steam should not have been released until late 2006.
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The main problem in 2004 was dealing with massive loads during mass unlocks like HL2. Had it not released when it did, they wouldn't have actually had the experience of dealing with those issues. There's also the fact that Steam was just fine by early 2005.
 
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