Full "Steam" ahead

The Steam storefront (photo courtesy Eli Rapp)

By Eli Rapp, Chronicle staff

CLAYTON--Steam is best described as a simpler way of distributing games. A Steam account lets you have an unlimited number of games, although there isn't an unlimited number available. When Valve Software released it on September 13, 2003, it didn't have very many games available at first. Slowly, great publishers such as Activision, id software, and Ubisoft let a catalog of their games on Steam. Now, there are over 1,100 games available. Steam itself is free, along with its community, and constantly delivers news, media, tools, updates, and patches.

Products on Steam can be purchased with US dollars, Euros, or pounds sterling depending on the user's location. Before buying, you have the option of keeping it for yourself, or giving it to a friend. It is then permanently registered to the account of whoever receives it. Purchases through Steam are all digital, leaving no CD or product code for you to keep up with. This way, you can play it wherever, whenever.

In the September of 2007, Valve released the Steam Community. It added to Steam a whole social network for users, to the simple idea of friends, groups, and instant messaging. Each user can have a profile, accessible from both a web browser and the Steam client. In three years, 10 million of the 25 million users all over the world had signed up to it (Steam is available in 21 languages).

The Steam store gives deals and offers that cannot be found elsewhere – like the Valve Complete Pack. You can buy all 23 of Valve's games for $100, and save nearly $200. Occasionally, a game might be free to play for a limited amount of time. When Valve released Steam for Mac OS X, the game Portal was free to play for all users for two weeks.

Steam also has a gifting feature, and it allows you to send gifts and guest passes to friends. A gift can be a game or pack of games, and is permanent. A guest pass lets a user play a game for a few days, and normally gives them a discount for it during. They are normally given when buying a widely played multi player game, such as Counter-Strike: Source or Team Fortress 2.

A service called “Steam Cloud” is very useful, especially when it comes to single player games. It saves game data to your account, so that information such as preferences and saves are with you always. The data is saved to a server, which there are several per continent, and is downloaded on game startup. But not all games are supported by the Steam Cloud, although most of the newer ones are.

Usually, there are close to 10 million people logged on to Steam. If you are not one of them, you are missing out, especially if you are a gamer. You have seen the significant majority of what Steam is and does – who knows what other great ideas Valve will come up with.