Download PC Games With Steam

What's Steam? It's essentially an online repository for games that allows PC Gamers to buy games and have them registered with a Steam account that will not only allow them to be downloaded onto one PC, but if you move, or your PC is stolen, or if you have one home in Milan and another in the mountains of Tibet, will allow you to play your games in both locations without breaking any DRM or copyright.It functions as a relatively small desktop client that manages your games for you, keeping them tidily in one place and removing the need for you to keep boxes with serial keys stacked in the wardrobe for years on end, 'just in case.'

Essentially, Steam is the gaming industry's answer to the madness that has become commonplace in the fight against piracy. How much of a problem is piracy? A major one, some estimates put piracy of major games at 90%, and some gaming industry pundits point to this as a cause for major gaming companies developing for consoles instead of the PC because, at present time, console game piracy is significantly lower than PC piracy. Even independent developers are hit by the rampant piracy rate, World of Goo, a popular independent game incidentally available on Steam has been pirated far and wide. Ron Carmel, designer for World of Goo was the man who first put the piracy rate at 90%, saying that he saw game torrents with 500 seeders and 300 leechers. Now Ron took a fairly laid back approach to the piracy, viewing it as an inevitable consequence of operating in the environment he operates in, but imagine the kick in the teeth it would be to have your prize project stolen over and over again. If Ron's next project is exclusive to the Wii, can we really blame him?

If we want PC games, we have to buy them. Piracy isn't a little bit of fun, it's now costing the industry millions of dollars a year. When I say the industry, I'm not just talking about the fatheads in the shiny leather chairs trying to nickle and dime their customers dry, (damn you EA execs, damn you to heck,) I am talking about the lowly developers, artists, programmers, writers and everyone else integral to creating the games we love. It's a pretty simple equation really, if we don't pay for the game, these people don't get paid either.

Steam is the perfect solution for gamers who are tired of paying too much for games and dealing with incessant copyright issues and backwards stepping controls designed to try and reduce piracy. Having to play a game with the disk in the disk drive just to make sure you actually own the disk is a travesty in 2009.

This doesn't happen on Steam. Once you buy the game on Steam, it is yours for life, registered with the main server. You can download it again at any time, no matter how long it has been since you first bought it. Steam also comes with other community features and pretty bells and whistles, but essentially it is a download center that registers your ownership of a game. It has a pretty nifty download manager which downloads games, restarts interrupted downloads, and otherwise ensures that things don't get messed up on their way to your PC. The range of games available on Steam is massive, from old favorites like Abe's Oddysee, and Unreal Tournament to the newest releases. Steam also quite often has sale weekends, allowing you to buy games for a fraction of their retail value.

If you love PC games, create a Steam account. It is entirely free and it opens up a world of entirely legal and incredibly convenient online gaming downloads.