I must admit that since I’ve started using Steam, I fell in love with it and I’m here to declare it to the world and to tell reasons you should love it too. Today is a celebrating day because Steam is now available for Mac. Even though I don’t use a Mac (save your bad names for later), it’s still great news since more people will have a chance to use it. Hold on, you don’t know what Steam is? HOW?
First, if you’ve ever considered yourself a true gamer or hardcore gamer, you must know what Steam is and share your love for it. Steam is a tool developed by Valve (great guys) to work like an online game store where you can buy digital versions of your game pretty fast and for a reasonable price. I’d be unfair to call steam just an online store, it goes far beyond it. With Steam you can manage all games you bought on Steam (or even add shortcuts to it) so you could easily install and uninstall everything you want on a centralized place. So we could call it an online game store with game manager on it?
The answer is no, you can’t because once again, Steam surpasses this barrier. You can also have a list of Friends and join communities basically to make connections and play with them. You can also check people’s (and your, of course) game statistics and achievements. It’s possible to even know how long your friend spent on gaming preparing to beat you (or not). It’s really fun to know that one of your friends spent over ONE THOUSAND hours playing Team Fortress 2 and he still haven’t unlocked the achievement you just unlocked.
If that thing of Online Store with Game Management and know what everyone is playing and play with them tool, Steam also offers MANY deals, they have even a weekly based deal. If you are thinking that everyone makes deals so that is normal, I’ll tell you what’s NOT normal: I bought Team Fortress 2 for TWO DAMN DOLLARS and until May 24th, Portal is FREE!
If you are Brazilian or live in a not so developed place for buying games where you have to pay almost 3 times the real price of stuff, Steam gives the opportunity to take you to a new level. You can pay Steam using international credit card or paypal, so there are no excuses to buy games for a reasonable price. Deals + Paypal = Buy Addiction Sickness. It’s your chance to make the difference on the game industry and quit supporting piracy. Some time ago, I could “understand” (never support) piracy, but with Steam, I can’t! The only thing I’d advice you is to take care because it’s REALLY easy to spend a lot of money on games because they are cheap and you won’t be able even to play them.
One more little thing I want to add is that Steam is a wonderful place to find and also publish indie games. You can find most of the indie industry treasures like World of Goo, Braid but also games that are not that famous but much less known like Altitude or Osmos. My love for indies and also the fact that I’m inserted to the indie community somehow makes me love Steam even more. Needless to say, of course you will find huge projects like Call of Duty, Half-Life, Civilization and so on. Take a look at part of my list on Steam.
I just forgot to mention, Steam is user based (sort of like Xbox) and you will have to create an account and those games will be available for that account only. Either way, it works fine for me and I hope it will work fine for you. C’mon, now even if you are a Mac user, you can have Steam. Of course not games will be available at once for Mac, but they will make a progression on this side and I think it’ll be pretty quick. Linux users, I’ll support your cause too if you want a Steam.
To shorten my description of Steam as a “Online store with…” I could say it is simply AWESOME! Go ahead and check it out: http://store.steampowered.com/
