Dragonlord, on 24 July 2012 - 04:10 AM, said:
I avoid Steam if I can, I dont like the idea of a 3rd party application running in the background, hogging resources, while I play my games.
It will require resources that could be better spent improving my gameplay experience.
I have no idea if Steam will gather information from my computer against my will and I dont like that.
I honestly never understood the idea of having a 3rd party application to run your games from.
And dont bother trying to explain it to me, others have tried and I still dont see what good it does.
At this very moment Steam is using a grand total of 64 megs of RAM and approximately 0% of my CPU power. Assuming you meet the minimum system requirements, 64 megs is 1.5% of your total memory. If you meet the recommended specs it's 0.7% of your memory. For comparison, my browser is currently using 248 megs and between 0 and 1% of my CPU power. Skype, Teamspeak, and the various other apps used for voice communication in games have similar memory footprints. If having Steam in the background has any measurable effect on your performance either there is something desperately wrong or you need an upgrade very, very badly, which wouldn't be Steam's fault. Modern applications are designed to make use of the relatively cheap and plentiful memory available in machines built in the last few years, as well as doing some very intelligent caching. The days of killing non essential processes to increase performance are long gone.
Privacy is a very much a legitimate concern. Happily, it's entirely possible to keep track of what Steam sinks its hooks into, as well as what data it sends back home. In fact people have done so with all of the major online store client type applications, as evidenced by all the bad publicity EA has gotten for Origin (though there are lots of other reasons Origin gets bad press, too). It turns out all the information that Steam tracks is publicly available, mostly on player profiles (hours spent gaming, games owned, achievements achieved, etc) and the aggregated results of their (voluntary) hardware survey. If you're at all a normal internet user you've probably exposed far more than you fear Valve would collect via Steam. For that matter, if you don't trust Valve, why would you trust your OS vendor of choice?
If you just don't like Steam that's fine. If you don't care enough to do any research on how it works, or for that matter how modern operating systems manage memory, that's fine too. You're not obligated to care. However, if this is a matter of the drawbacks you stated outweighing benefits you might want to give it some more thought.
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you should go die in a fire for even suggesting steam i would rather this game die off than ever let valve make money off of its glorious name
Thanks for contributing.
As for my own opinion, I think it would be a very wise business move to distribute through steam. The userbase is so large that I suspect expenditures would be made back very quickly, especially considering Steam's ability to alert people to games they otherwise wouldn't know exist. It doesn't really make a huge difference to me as an end user whether it's available through steam or not, or if it is whether the game has a built in updater or updates through steam, as long as it doesn't somehow block me from launching the game through steam like I do with literally every major game I play, so I can talk with people and search the web for guides and stuff without minimizing.
Edited by Blue Footed Booby, 24 July 2012 - 03:33 PM.
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