Steam Expanding Beyond Games, Will Start Selling Software

[BLeeP]

Originally Posted by Orca

Probably never. I'd rather deal with the "hassle" of hitting ok on the "there's a new update, install?" dialog box than be 'subscribing' to productivity software through Steam. With their offline mode less than ideal, I'd rather not have to trust my work to it when there's a deadline on the way.

You can just right click on any software in Steam and turn off automatic updating. Been that way for as long as I can remember.

[Karak]

Originally Posted by BLeeP

You can just right click on any software in Steam and turn off automatic updating. Been that way for as long as I can remember.

Oh man...trusting Steam's autoupdating to NOT autoupdating is the very description of unprotected computer sex. That feature is fucked. Their forums are always overloaded with complaints about it and they have never successfully got it working.

[cppcrusader]

Originally Posted by Karak

Oh man...trusting Steam's autoupdating to NOT autoupdating is the very description of unprotected computer sex. That feature is fucked. Their forums are always overloaded with complaints about it and they have never successfully got it working.

No kidding, and I'm still just short of convinced that Valve has their own games outright ignore it. I've lost count of the number of times I've set TF2 to not autoupdate just find it ignoring it a couple days later.

[Felonous]

Please Please Please let there be a Adobe Creative Suite 75% off flash sale....

[J Arcane]

Originally Posted by cppcrusader

No kidding, and I'm still just short of convinced that Valve has their own games outright ignore it. I've lost count of the number of times I've set TF2 to not autoupdate just find it ignoring it a couple days later.

Part of the reason I haven't reinstalled TF2 since my Steam wipe is I'm on a bandwidth cap and the amount of pointless fucking updates that game pushes through when it is installed is insane.

And all so people can have more fucking hats, as far as I can tell.

[Ghostbear]

Never BLASPHEME AGAINST THE HATS! Hallowed be Gabe and Robin.

[Narradisall]

I can't say it is something I'll use. Even with how dickish standard software licensing can be I really don't want all my productive software linked to a platform like Valve. I can stand to lose my recreational time/money sink, but not being able to do work because of an issue outside of my control, no thanks.

[CES]

Not sure I can approve of this move since Steam isn't exactly the most robust client around. To rely on it for work seems chancy at best. An offline mode that actually works would be a nice start.

[Sl1pstream]

This explains their hatred for Windows 8. Why would people download Steam to download a piece of software if they can just get the piece of software and ignore Steam?

[crazyD]

Originally Posted by Sl1pstream

This explains their hatred for Windows 8. Why would people download Steam to download a piece of software if they can just get the piece of software and ignore Steam?

Why would people download Steam to download a game when they could just ignore Steam and download the game? There are tons of games out there with direct download possibilities that I would rather have the Steam version of. Because Steam is a good platform that does good things.

[Orca]

Originally Posted by BLeeP

You can just right click on any software in Steam and turn off automatic updating. Been that way for as long as I can remember.

The point is that I'd rather deal with having to OK an update or two the old way instead of having Valve own the licenses to the software I "bought"

[TKO]

Agreed with crazyD. Steam *is* a good platform. My only concern is going to be the robustness of the off-line mode. I swap and re-install machines enough that I'd *love* to be able to just put steam back on and have access to my Office and Adobe software. (I would re-purchase them if educational discounts are an option.)

I expect Office 2013 would work well with Steam (if Microsoft would ever go for it.) It sounds like digital delivery is the main thing 2013's been tuned for. ..Would be nice if there was a way to get 2003, 2007 and 2010 on it too, but they never really liked co-existing. *sigh* Have to stick with virtual machines there I guess.

Yes, I do do tech support. I don't like tinkering with old software, unless its retro-gaming.

[CES]

Originally Posted by crazyD

Why would people download Steam to download a game when they could just ignore Steam and download the game? There are tons of games out there with direct download possibilities that I would rather have the Steam version of. Because Steam is a good platform that does good things.

It's also very rapidly becoming a single point of failure. Right now I have 200GB of games tied into Steam and with their half-assed offline mode if the servers go down or I lose my internet I get locked out. If that was 200gb of vital work apps, I'd either be shitting myself or pissed at the lost work.

More variety never hurts.

[rein]

Let's be honest. Steam is a great platform mostly because of their sales/pricing. If they bring software apps in and can't offer lower prices it's not going to work. Why am I going to install steam to use Office yet pay the same price? It will also depend a lot on what software is available. Most companies and people that rely on software apps are not going to trust indie developers like gamers do. The only way I see software working on Steam is it they are smaller inexpensive tablet type apps. Of course, I could be wrong.

[crazyD]

Pricing is but one of the benefits of Steam. Those of us that don't live under the tyranny of bandwidth caps love frequent auto-updates, and installing as many times as I want on any system is pretty awesome. I don't see myself making a ton of app purchases through Steam, but I can see the benefit.

[TKO]

Originally Posted by Orca

The point is that I'd rather deal with having to OK an update or two the old way instead of having Valve own the licenses to the software I "bought"

{shrugs} Well, you can still get the software the old-fashioned way. I think, for the vast majority of people, auto-updates is a nice convenience. Don't have to worry about the version on individual PC's when playing over the network, etc.

At least Steam allows easy creation of local backups. I have a hard-drive with all my steam stuff archived. A great way to get snapshots of a game at a particular version. Just get steam running then restore from the archive with the machine off-line, then untick the auto-update thing. ..and you have an easy way to roll-back should an unwanted update happen. (or to re-install games without blowing through my broadband data-cap.)

I do a similar thing with my iOS updates. Has helped me avoid big updates or changes that ruin a game for me, and allow me to re-install stuff that's been pulled from the store.

[MagGnome]

Originally Posted by rein

Let's be honest. Steam is a great platform mostly because of their sales/pricing. If they bring software apps in and can't offer lower prices it's not going to work. Why am I going to install steam to use Office yet pay the same price? It will also depend a lot on what software is available. Most companies and people that rely on software apps are not going to trust indie developers like gamers do. The only way I see software working on Steam is it they are smaller inexpensive tablet type apps. Of course, I could be wrong.

There are plenty of applications, "indie" or otherwise, that I would gladly install through Steam so that they could be kept up to date. GIMP, for example.

There are so many pieces of software on my computer that prompt me to update all the time. Centralizing a lot of that would be quite convenient, as long as it works well. Then again I also don't want to see one distributor grab too much power, which is why MS' store in Windows 8 makes me nervous. I don't want to see Valve hit that level either.

[Savok]

Originally Posted by TKO

{shrugs} Well, you can still get the software the old-fashioned way. I think, for the vast majority of people, auto-updates is a nice convenience. Don't have to worry about the version on individual PC's when playing over the network, etc.

At least Steam allows easy creation of local backups. I have a hard-drive with all my steam stuff archived. A great way to get snapshots of a game at a particular version. Just get steam running then restore from the archive with the machine off-line, then untick the auto-update thing. ..and you have an easy way to roll-back should an unwanted update happen. (or to re-install games without blowing through my broadband data-cap.)

I do a similar thing with my iOS updates. Has helped me avoid big updates or changes that ruin a game for me, and allow me to re-install stuff that's been pulled from the store.

Oh shit son, what are you doing? Backups don't work and turning off auto-update really doesn't work.

Really the only way this works is if it's like MMOs on the service. Steam is purely a shop-front for a key, you don't need Steam to be running to do your job.

[TKO]

Originally Posted by Savok

Oh shit son, what are you doing? Backups don't work and turning off auto-update really doesn't work.

Haven't tried turning off the auto-updates, so I won't challenge you on that. But the backups have worked more often than not for me. If you have an idea of other game dependencies (for example, the ugly Games for Windows Live) that gets some of the others to work without pulling it all down through the wire again.

Has worked great for saving my friends' broadband allowance too. (We have quite low caps here in New Zealand.)

[muddi900]

I usually just copy over the whole steamapps folder to back up.