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Steam: My First Impression

So far, adding a friend seems to be a pain. I guessed a friend’s screenname and typed it in manually. It turns out that it was a complete stranger. However, when I do a search for my friend’s screenname using the Steam Community feature, I found my friend. Same screenname, yet somehow a different ID? When I typed Anthony Salter’s ID to manually add him as a friend, it said it couldn’t find him, but when I did a search in the community feature, there he was.

WTF? As far as I’m concerned, I was doing the same thing. I was adding a friend’s screenname to my friend’s list. So why would manually typing a name give me one result while searching for a SteamID gives me the same name but a different person? Why set it up so that the same friends list allows two different people to have the same screenname? I must be missing something obvious here.

I like that I can add all of my games to my games list and have a central place to launch them. Of course, if this exists, why would Vista have a games-specific folder? Are Vista users supposed to feel good about the redundancy? Just a thought.

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Posted by GBGames on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 2:00 am.

2 Responses to “Steam: My First Impression”

Do you have an ATI card? Now that you’ve installed it, Valve give to ATI owners the HL2:Deatmatch and an extra HL2 scenario: Lost Coast, for free, through Steam.

Btw, can you write something about the digital rights enforcement you mention before about Steam?

Left by Novack on December 5th, 2007

I don’t have an ATI card on my machine, but I’ve written a bit about how much I loathe digital rights management in the past.

As for Steam specifically, so far, anything done in the name of DRM has been fairly painless. I like the idea that I can install the games on a different machine since it is tied to me/my account and not my machine (if I’m understanding Steam’s methods correctly). If I own the game, I get the right to install it where I want, and it isn’t tied to one specific collection of hardware that I call my current computer.

Of course, I’m not doing anything more than playing the game as is, and I’ll need to understand what’s going on more before I can really comment on it. I’ll write more about my impressions, specifically about playing the games I won from Anthony Salter’s contest.

Left by GBGames on December 5th, 2007

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