question on steam

[kingstuart444]

help out an old guy please

steam has unity of command the whole thing trilogy bundle for 4.49. yeah that price is what is talking to me.

had my eye on the game and ill prob buy it. but...
what are the advantages and disadvantages of going with steam instead of matrix on this aside the price (base game 19.99 + 9.99 + 9.99)

never did steam and don't know too much about it. whats next, email on my phone? a walkman with no moving parts? what's next? i cant keep up argh!

thanks

[budd]

the advantages are you can install and play your games on any computer by signing in to steam [have to have the steam client installed] steam keeps your games up to date [not really a big plus with unity of command, its not getting updated any more.] the biggest advantage is probably the sale prices and having all your games in one place. It is a kind of DRM that some people are opposed to, feeling like if steam goes belly up your games will be gone. I've been with steam since it started and have never had a problem with it [knocks on wood].

[milkweg]

The downside is you have to have the Steam client open to run the game and by default it connects to the internet. You can set it to go into offline mode so you don't need to be connected to the internet to run the game but the Steam client still needs to run first before the game will run. There are a few games that will run without the Steam client running but very few.

There is a security option called Steam Guard (enabled by default) that ties your computer to the client or you can turn it off and use just password for security (less secure). If you turn off Steam Guard now and again Steam will ask you to confirm your email address and sometimes ask you to login with password again too, which I find annoying.

Matrixgames has none of those annoyances and you just enter the serial code when installing or updating with patches.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: kingstuart

help out an old guy please

steam has unity of command the whole thing trilogy bundle for 4.49. yeah that price is what is talking to me.

had my eye on the game and ill prob buy it. but...
what are the advantages and disadvantages of going with steam instead of matrix on this aside the price (base game 19.99 + 9.99 + 9.99)

never did steam and don't know too much about it. whats next, email on my phone? a walkman with no moving parts? what's next? i cant keep up argh!

thanks

Three things with Steam that can be a problem basically. Them going out of business and all the games you bought you might lose. The 2nd is the control they have over you and your games and now even the developers. If a developer gets it in for you because you spouted negatives about his game then in the multiplayer portion of the game he can now ban you without Steam intervention. This doesn't bode well with giving ones opinion about a game in the negative manner. Steam also controls your "account" and if they find reason they can ban you from their service online. It's still possible the games will run offline though.

Just something to think about. I only buy cheap games on steam and maybe one or two AAA titles like Total War and Crusader Kings II. But, if the game can be bought outside of Steam you can bet that is where I will buy it. I buy all my Matrixgames games here and use to buy Slitherines from them. Sad to hear they are no longer going to develop games. Some of them were truely good.

[marcpennington]

ORIGINAL: milkweg

The downside is you have to have the Steam client open to run the game and by default it connects to the internet. You can set it to go into offline mode so you don't need to be connected to the internet to run the game but the Steam client still needs to run first before the game will run. There are a few games that will run without the Steam client running but very few.

True in the sense you need Steam running to download the games initially. But after that as far as Matrix games go, you can just create a shortcut to the .exe file in the Steam common directory, and just click on it to play the game without ever logging into Steam again. Different publishers have different rules, but Matrix seems to be using Steam as just a very light-weight (as far as DRM goes), and convenient (as far as patching goes), framework.

There are issues with sub-publishers of Matrix not releasing Steam friendly patches of their games in a prompt time-frame (cough, Age-OD, cough.) But in general otherwise I'm a huge fan of Matrix moving towards Steam, while still allowing direct downloads from their site. I've bought a large number of Matrix games at big discounts, games which I probably wouldn't have purchased otherwise, but some I've become hooked on since (AJE most of all), that I would not have bought but for the discount as well as the Steam convenience. But do buy from the Matrix store when reasonable comparative prices are available, just to get the actual developers a bigger cut of the profits.

[milkweg]

I bought Pandora from Steam (matrixgames is the publisher) and just tested what you say. When I ran Pandora via a shortcut to the exe file it opened up Steam too.

Tested it with CC:Gateway to Caen and it also opened up Steam client when running from the game exe.

One more...

Tested Qvadriga and that did run without running the Steam client so guess some matrixgames games will run without Steam and some won't.

[kingstuart444]

thanks for the comments thus far

i saw that the game had some user made scenarios at the dev website, it is the norm that games can add such files with no problem?

[aaatoysandmore]

Just like other things not all mods outside of steam work. Made ones from the Workshop they use for modding now will work. It's sort of a trial an error thing as well.

[chemkid]

.

[Fred98]

I have only one Steam game - Arma 3.

I tested whether you have to be online to play. I turned off my modem then started the game. I was asked "Do you want to play offline?" I answered yes and continued.

1. I have found that Steam will automatically update a game.

2. Steam gives the option to save the game files to an external hard drive.


I always did both of those things with any Matrix game I bought by download.

So, Steam has no specific benefits. Arma 3 is not available by any other means!

.

[Alchenar]

ORIGINAL: Joe 98

I have only one Steam game - Arma 3.

I tested whether you have to be online to play. I turned off my modem then started the game. I was asked "Do you want to play offline?" I answered yes and continued.

1. I have found that Steam will automatically update a game.

2. Steam gives the option to save the game files to an external hard drive.


I always did both of those things with any Matrix game I bought by download.

So, Steam has no specific benefits. Arma 3 is not available by any other means!

Those sound like specific benefits given they happen automatically.

Also steam will sync your saves to a cloud account so if you install your game on any other system (or just uninstall it and delete the saves then re-install) you get to pick up where you left off.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: Joe 98

I have only one Steam game - Arma 3.

I tested whether you have to be online to play. I turned off my modem then started the game. I was asked "Do you want to play offline?" I answered yes and continued.

1. I have found that Steam will automatically update a game.

2. Steam gives the option to save the game files to an external hard drive.


I always did both of those things with any Matrix game I bought by download.

So, Steam has no specific benefits. Arma 3 is not available by any other means!

.

While that works that way. Try uninstalling the STEAM CLIENT and see if they still work. Only some games that aren't under Steams full control like Paradox games and the like will work without the Steam Client. It has to install something on your computer for many of them to work even in "offline" mode.

Something else I discovered is memory usage goes way up with Steam Client working and even after you shut Steam down there is still a memory usage going on. Who knows what that Steam clent is doing in the background. Only way I can get rid of it is to restart the computer it will go down then from 40 to 20 until I run Steam client again. Then memory creep right back up to 40.

[Lecivius]

Steam client is not the only file. They add in to the registry as well. DamnifIknow what or why, but they do. Also, running a game bought from Stream will cause a coded 32k upfile transmission. I don't know why, but I don't like sneaks.

My opinion, of course.

[demyansk]

I have a load of games on Steam and it works well and for that price- it's worth it. By the way, not many of us play games from 10 yrs ago, steam works well and enjoy

[marcpennington]

ORIGINAL: milkweg

I bought Pandora from Steam (matrixgames is the publisher) and just tested what you say. When I ran Pandora via a shortcut to the exe file it opened up Steam too.

Tested it with CC:Gateway to Caen and it also opened up Steam client when running from the game exe.

One more...

Tested Qvadriga and that did run without running the Steam client so guess some matrixgames games will run without Steam and some won't.

I didn't really that some of Matrix games behaved like that. I had only tested Command air/naval, Flashpoint Campaigns, and AJE, so just had assumed that all of them behaved like that. My bad.

[kingstuart444]

ORIGINAL: chemkid

@kingstuart - how about buying directly from the maker? for 7.49 can't make a mistake there, i guess!

http://unityofcommand.net/buy

also, you'll get both - the installer AND steam keys!

Note that the game is entirely DRM-free. You are not required to install Steam to play Unity of Command.

cheers!
chem!

thanks chem kid nice find

[gexmex]

Steam will run offline. Yes the client opens, but you are not required to connect to the internet to play most games. Only caveat is that it won't keep track of your play time logged whilst offline. Obviously that's not a huge deal for most folks.

[Eambar]

I have 51 games on Steam and around a dozen (including many Matrix titles of course) not through Steam.

The reason that I have the non-Steam games primarily is that I used to spend a lot of time off-line and even when you go off-line with Steam (you have to be on-line first to go off-line) after two weeks the game would go looking to go on-line again, in some cases locking the game until I went back on-line.

I like Steam for the ease of purchasing, patching (+ updating) and of course, the sales. I also like seeing how many hours I have spent playing the game.

As far as using mods on Steam games, I have over 200 mods for Skyrim which I downloaded through the Nexus Mod Manager, and the game works fine.

I don't get into the trading cards, achievements and all that stuff so can't comment on the usefulness of that aspect of having a Steam account.

Cheers,

[Gilmer]

Many games you buy at Matrix, they'll also give you a steam code, if you want to play it through STEAM. The best of both worlds!!

[pmelheck1]

only issue I've had with offline steam mode is you sometimes MUST connect to steam or it locks you out of offline mode. I also have updates to titles of only KB of data that seems to be some sort of security check. You can't run the game until you allow it to update the game. These updates are not patches as they occur with tiles that haven't been updated in years and in some cases where the company that made the title no longer exists. Only other issue I've had with steam is the client running in the background with some memory intensive steam games and sometimes had memory issues before a memory expansion.