Online distribution....
As some of you may know I had been disenchanted with the iTunes music store because of the restrictions. Not only are you getting a lower quality file for practically the same price as the full CD\DVD if you bought a whole album, a season of a TV program or a movie but you also can only download it once....
This past month I have tried out Valve Software's "Steam" service for getting games online. My original Half-Life CD has been scratched up beyond recognition but I still have a legit reg code for Half-life and Valve lets you download the steam edition with your pre-existing reg code for free. That's almost as if iTunes would let you download an album if you already had bought the CD before and you just enter in a code from the CD to verify. Also Steam lets you redownload a game if it's not installed on your computer so if you have to reformat and you lose your game you don't have to worry.
They are also getting more and more games onto Steam which is pretty cool and for reasonable prices.. like under 20 bucks. They even put Psychonauts on there recently. I can definitely see myself getting into Steam in a big way once I got a new computer.
So overall so far I'm happy with Steam.. my only complaints are the interface is pretty ugly and it installs a systray icon which means it's running in the background after you quit a game and I don't like keeping processes open in the background that I don't want\have to all the time. So I always close the Steam systray icon after I finish playing the game.
One other thing I had thought of though is Half-Life is an old game and could use a facelift. Companies like iD Software and 3D Realms have released the source code for some of their games to the community so they can pick them up and convert them to newer and different systems and do improvements and or create their own open sourced games based on their engines and it would be nice if Valve would do the same with Half-Life because then versions for Linux and Mac and also upgrade packs could be made for it. There is a model pack converted from the dreamcast edition but that doesn't cover the worlds textures.
Speaking of that, I think Valve should port Steam and it's games to Linux and Mac. What would be cool is if you port steam the games are automatically ported too but I know that probably wouldn't be the case.
This past month I have tried out Valve Software's "Steam" service for getting games online. My original Half-Life CD has been scratched up beyond recognition but I still have a legit reg code for Half-life and Valve lets you download the steam edition with your pre-existing reg code for free. That's almost as if iTunes would let you download an album if you already had bought the CD before and you just enter in a code from the CD to verify. Also Steam lets you redownload a game if it's not installed on your computer so if you have to reformat and you lose your game you don't have to worry.
They are also getting more and more games onto Steam which is pretty cool and for reasonable prices.. like under 20 bucks. They even put Psychonauts on there recently. I can definitely see myself getting into Steam in a big way once I got a new computer.
So overall so far I'm happy with Steam.. my only complaints are the interface is pretty ugly and it installs a systray icon which means it's running in the background after you quit a game and I don't like keeping processes open in the background that I don't want\have to all the time. So I always close the Steam systray icon after I finish playing the game.
One other thing I had thought of though is Half-Life is an old game and could use a facelift. Companies like iD Software and 3D Realms have released the source code for some of their games to the community so they can pick them up and convert them to newer and different systems and do improvements and or create their own open sourced games based on their engines and it would be nice if Valve would do the same with Half-Life because then versions for Linux and Mac and also upgrade packs could be made for it. There is a model pack converted from the dreamcast edition but that doesn't cover the worlds textures.
Speaking of that, I think Valve should port Steam and it's games to Linux and Mac. What would be cool is if you port steam the games are automatically ported too but I know that probably wouldn't be the case.