[B3D News]

Valve's online content delivery platform continues to steam ahead of its competitors. The latest publisher to jump aboard the Steam bandwagon is THQ. Publisher of Relic Entertainment games, amongst many others, the American company decided to bring some of its catalogue offering to Steam.

Read the full news item

[Rainbow Man]

Already bought the entire Dawn of War series - which as everybody knows is amongst the best stuff in THQ's arsenal.

Can I register the CD keys online and then re-download it all via Steam, or does that only owrk with Valve's own games?

Peace.

[willardjuice]

Can I register the CD keys online and then re-download it all via Steam, or does that only owrk with Valve's own games?

Actually it depends on the developer of the game. Some developers allow it, some don't. Not sure about THQ.

[Rainbow Man]

Well in that case (wjhen they dion't allow re-download) they should offer CD owners to re-buy the game at a minimal cost. Some titles are just obnoxiously large disc-wise - especially when counting expansions.

You almost get tennis elbow from swapping discs dammit..

Doom 3 and Painkiller are two of the worst offenders (and the already mentioned Dawn of War). Morrowind was pretty horrible too I recall. Especially if you owned the 2 expansions.
Peace.

[Chalnoth]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Man

Morrowind was pretty horrible too I recall. Especially if you owned the 2 expansions.
Peace.

Nah, Morrowind shipped on a single CD. If you had the two expansions that bumps it up to 3 CD's, but even that is short of most RPG's, for example:

Planescape: Torment: 4 CD's
Baldur's Gate: 5 CD's (6 with expansion)
Baldur's Gate 2: 4 CD's (5 with expansion)
Neverwinter Nights: 3 CD's (5 with expansion)
Final Fantasy VII: 4 CD's (3 play, 1 install)
Final Fantasy VIII: 5 CD's (4 play, 1 install)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: 4 CD's
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: 4 CD's

Yeah, being into RPG's, I am immensely glad that most game devs seem to be moving to DVD's. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before we have multi-DVD games...

As for me, Valve pissed me off at launch with their draconic copy protection on Steam with Half-life 2. So, I didn't buy the game, and have in general stayed away from Steam. I do, however, make use of Stardock Central for purchasing the Galactic Civilization games.

[Tim Murray]

I love Steam. It's the only way I'll just impulsively buy a game. I think that's the point, and it's not great for my credit card bill, but whatever. I still love it.

[Dresden]

The only thing I don't like about Steam, or any client that digital "vends" games, when I end up forking up the amount of money they cost nowadays, I want me a box. And a jewel case with a 14 page booklet! And for extra credit I want the vendor to give me a t-shirt I'll never wear with the name of a horrible video game plastered on it! Or a calendar!

[Skrying]

Originally Posted by Ink

The only thing I don't like about Steam, or any client that digital "vends" games, when I end up forking up the amount of money they cost nowadays, I want me a box. And a jewel case with a 14 page booklet! And for extra credit I want the vendor to give me a t-shirt I'll never wear with the name of a horrible video game plastered on it! Or a calendar!

You don't get that stuff with a game, most these days come with the discs in little paper "protectors" and that's IT, no manual, hell to lazy to even provide a catalog of nifty items that have the games logo on them... let alone a shirt that's way to small. It really pisses me off to be honest that they've become so cheap. The last game I recall having something inside I really liked was Warcraft 3 and that's because its manual is THICK with a ton of okay written back story that's kinda neat if you're into the Warcraft-verse. You don't even get jewel cases these days... that's sad.

[Dresden]

Originally Posted by Skrying

You don't get that stuff with a game, most these days come with the discs in little paper "protectors" and that's IT, no manual, hell to lazy to even provide a catalog of nifty items that have the games logo on them... let alone a shirt that's way to small. It really pisses me off to be honest that they've become so cheap. The last game I recall having something inside I really liked was Warcraft 3 and that's because its manual is THICK with a ton of okay written back story that's kinda neat if you're into the Warcraft-verse. You don't even get jewel cases these days... that's sad.

True. I've noticed a lot of games have resorted over to the dvd hard plastic boxes now, which holds the dvds with a peg in the center, but the nice thing about them is provided the game comes with a manual, it'll be a solid 4 inches larger than the one they used to slide into jewel protectors back in the day. I got a t shirt once. It was a shirt advertising something Resident Evil, I think it was a RE game released on a handheld or something equally atrocious. It was also XXL....



I'm a medium. That shirt served a nice career mopping up spills.

[hesido]

I live in Turkey, and downloading from steam is just very hard for me. E.g. I bought Flatout and Flatout2 from steam, and I couldn't download flatout2. Twice, there was an error in download, didn't pass validation, so a total of 6gb download vaporized. I pay by the bandwith of internet so I have to download from work. If I downloaded flatout2 at home, I'd pay about 15usd extra more just for the bandwith. Two games together cost 19

I am just tired of trying to download big stuff from Steam. It is good for Geometry wars and Zuma Deluxe (which I also own), but anything bigger than a couple of gigabytes is pain in the gluteus. Lucky people with 500kb per second internet connections would not feel the pain tho. (Tho I am reading that most cannot download full speed on Steam)

Now instead of flatout2 on my pc, I play motorstorm on my PS3, sony ironically doesn't allow me to download stuff from ps store in my country. :P