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Steam: Savior or Slayer of PC Gaming?

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wraith808:
Parallel conversation on G+ brought up an interesting podcast link

http://castroller.com/Podcasts/ArmingTheDonkeys/1080668-The%20lowdown%20on%20music%20piracy%20Debu%20Purohit,%20Duke%20University

From what I understood of the study from the podcast, the researcher has concluded that DRM is removed, then (a) many pirates will buy rather than pirate, and (b) the price of the non-digital formats will reduce in price, and (c) the decline in the sale of non-digital formats will subsequently reverse, and they will sell more of the non-digital formats.

Daleus:
My experience with Steam has been mixed.

It started with Civ5.  I bought the media in a store and eagerly installed it only to find I had to connect to the 'tubes for some reason.

In my case, I live in a rural area and at the time had no internet options.  So I had to hump my computer into town, to a friends place, just so that I could validate the game or whatever the frack it is that made the online connection necessary.

Now that I have an internet connection, albeit I might as well not it's so crappy, it's less of an issue, but to be frank I play in "offline mode" because the game loads about 300-500% faster (I haven't really clocked this but usually I had time to take a piss and make a cup of tea before the game was ready to play.  The first time I went offline, I was getting up to go for the piss and the game was suddenly ready to play!)  Further, it will take me 6-10 hours to download today's average sized game.  Bite my ass - I could drive to another province to buy the game and come back, install and start playing in less friggin time.

On the plus side of the equation, I have been able to track down some older games I was never able to purchase when they were on the store shelf, and are now imposszible to find in a used bin.  There are also many many sales and if you missed it this time, if you're pateint you'll see it come around again in the rotation.

Overall though, I am not happy with the connect to the net requirement, just to validate a license which I just purchased and entered by hand into the damned game.  If that wasn't enough, why did you jerks make me enter the thing in the first place?

As for the wide variety of games available from Steam, well yeah there are many.  But frankly about half of them are the kind of bullshit you find on Facebook. Yuck! Quantity does not equal quality.

As for Steam as a "social media hub" it's slow, and incredibly badly designed.  Just try for the first time, to send an IM to a friend to invite them. Frustrating as hell to navigate the moronically unintuitive interface - more frustrating as I'm already bald and have no more fucking hair to pull out.

Apologies for the rant and language, maybe that's the ultimate review of Steam, all on it's own.

cranioscopical:
So, Steam experts...

Computer A has game C with 300 hours of game play.

Computer B has the same game C but with only 5 hours of game play.

Both machines use the same Steam account/user/login

Can I use the Steam interface to back up a game that is installed on computer A and then use the Steam interface to restore that same game to computer B?
The backup and restore would be to/from an external drive.

I want computer B to end up with game C and 300 hours of game play, the same as computer A.

If so, are there any pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks for your advice!

Lashiec:
Well, yes, you can, but the Steam backup function just copies game files, not any configuration files, savegame files or game modifications the game might have on computer A.

There are a few solutions to this. The fastest one would be replacing your savegame on computer B by the one on computer A, but this requires you to locate the savegame files, which it's not always an easy task. Another option would be replacing the game installation on computer B with the one on computer A. This is done by copying the game subfolder "steamapps\common\<name of game>" within Windows from computer A and dropping it on the Steam installation on computer B. This must be done when Steam is not running.

To make sure you get the game you are playing in computer A, it would be a good idea to move the game installation on computer B elsewhere on the filesystem outside the Steam main directory and delete it was once you have moved the game from one computer to another successfully. This way you ensure there's no unnecessary files lying around from the former installation, plus you have a backup copy to go back in case things go awry.

lanux128:
Computer A has game C with 300 hours of game play.

Computer B has the same game C but with only 5 hours of game play.
-cranioscopical (August 17, 2011, 06:39 PM)
--- End quote ---

is Computer B off-line when game C is played? in that case, you'd have to go online for the stats to 'catch up'. as Lashiec mentioned Steam backup function copies only the core game, the rest are to be copied manually (such as the save games). hopefully no registry entries are involved..

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