Recently, Edge-Online had an article featured called “The Age of Steam ”. It takes a thorough look at the Steam platform, from beginning stages to its current form.
“What started as a way of administering updates has become a delivery platform so powerful that it has threatened to render even the big publishers’ alternatives obsolete, an online community so well-supported that it sets standards even for those found on consoles, and a no-fiddling environment that allows your games, settings and saves to follow you from one PC to the next every time you log in.”
Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, which is behind the digital distribution platform, Impulse , gives his view on the subject.
“We're at the very beginning of digital distribution. Steam may indeed become the Facebook of digital distribution but there's just as much chance it could become the next Friendster. When one of these services has 20 million active users per day, then I think we can say that they have reached a critical threshold. Right now, however, by Valve's own statistics, about half of Steam users use it for just Counterstrike -- not including all of Valve's other games.”
Read the full article at Edge-Online .
It's not a Steam vs. Impulse discussion.
The issue is whether it makes sense for the media to proclaim an age of anything when all of these services combined are getting less than a million people actually using them to play games per day.
To those of us who have already seen the light of digital distribution, these services are great. But for the other 90% who have not yet seen the light, the leaders are going to be determined by them.
99%?
As long as somebody forces me to do anything (connected to the internet to play) I will refuse to use it.
When it comes to be connnected top the internet to buy and download that's normal you are using a digital download service after all.
The minute I am far from an internet connection I can no longer play for something I have paid for. I cannot accept such a thing. And I refuse to accept such a thing. To the point of not buying said product.
I do like competition however so the more out there the better. However I will still only use the ones that will affect me the least.
So I do hope Impulse gets head to head versus Steam and I hope Steam will be forced to adapt to the competition.
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