Digital Stores Question (Steam, Impulse, Gamersgate)

Impulse also has a better return policy, I remember reading somewhere. If they were to increase their collection of games, they could give Steam more competition, although it will be difficult to change their loyalty.

EDIT - Impulse has a valid resale option, although I am not sure how good it is.

 

I like Direct to Drive but they don't take my debit card

 

Steam for Valve games, obviously, but I prefer Impulse and GOG for older and third-party (non-Valve, in Steam's case) games, although I did buy some third party games on Steam, I regret most of those purchases due to patching issues, since the developers or publishers of such games need to create specific and Steam-compatible files and then send them to Valve and then Valve needs to rely on just one or two guys to patch the damn things up, and so I waited a month for Sacred 2's patch 2.40 to be applied to Steam and finally get to play it on-line.

With Impulse the retail patches we download on any given web-sites like FileFront or FileShack or FilePlanet and so on can easily be applied to the games without any compatibility issues to worry about, in other words the Impulse-bought games aren't "fused" to any software interface and you can apply patches as soon as they are released. There's a good number of third-party games on Steam which were never patched at all (some none at all, others not having their latest patch applied), in some cases a year was necessary for the "latest" patch to be applied, which is absolutely pathetic at best.

So, yeah, for Valve games, I choose Steam, of course, not like I have a choice anyway, I don't see Half-Life 2 on D2D or Impulse unless I missed them? I just don't think Valve sell their own games on other digital-games delivery platforms than their own. But for the rest, from now on, I will buy from Impulse, or GOG.

 

I forgot about the patching thing. That is another negative against Steam. Hmm...I am beginning to like Impulse more and more. I guess I should at least buy GalCiv 2 Ultimate to try it as GalCiv2 is a great game.

 

Other than Sacred 2 can you list some other games that haven't received their patches @ the time of release. I'm interested to see which games those are. As far as I can tell by version numbers/patch notes on steam all my games receive the patches the day of release.

 

The patch issues are mainly because of sloppy game devs that don't submit their patches to Steam staff in time.

 

I have EUIII Complete and EU: Rome on Steam, and there was a significant delay in the patch for EUIII complete. Also, the Steam version of EU Rome has some pretty annoying bugs, some of which make playing multiplayer via the metaserver impossible. Also, there is a whole thread on the Steam forums about unpatched games, so there are many of them, even though the number is quite small if you consider the number of titles that they have.

That may be the case, but it is still a negative point for Steam as compared to Impulse/GamersGate.

 

True, but it's not really against steam, as it's the developers/publishers fault, i will say that is a plus for Impulse/GamersGate, but it's not steams fault

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=838858

That post shows which games on steam are not patched, and if there is a way to get around them, or if they are even needed

 

Awesome thanks for the link dude. Nothing major. The one game I have on that list (World of Goo) can be manually patched so its all good. There must be an issue with the developers for them not to be patching the games through steam.

 

I have made my mind up - for games that are available on Impulse or GamersGate at a reasonable price, I will use them instead of Steam. I still like Steam, but as there are situations where I won't have net access for several days or even weeks on end, I think I will be safer with the other two.

Plus, I don't want to be stuck in a situation like this:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10818339

I know that it is uncommon, but it still happens to some. I can't take this kind of treatment. And I didn't make up my mind by reading just one post.

Of course, I will still be using Steam for games that come with sweet deals