Steam account - many problems normal ?

[Cov(enant)]

Hello people

Sorry, I have not much experience with these things.

With PC games, I used to install and play them, either as single player only, or with multiplayer.

Have bought quite a few games via ebay and noticed that the installation process of some games are different.

You need to be online in order to install the games.

With half life 2 and Lost planet, part of the procedure was a big download which took a long time to finish.

1) I wonder if I have to do that everytime after I made a clean installation of my operating system ? I'm afraid yes.

2) I have purchased the game "Sin" a while ago and after installation, the icon just sits on my desktop and I cannot launch the game.

Neither when I log into my steam account, (Sin is listed though) but when I right click on it, it only gives me the option to purchase the game.

Have contacted Steam Support but they are not helpful and in fact ignore what I say ... very strange.

What should I do ?

Should I avoid buying anything which requires a steam account in the future ?

Should I be persistant and find a way to make it work ?

If yes, is that worth the hussle just to play a PC game I wonder ?

I really miss the old way, just to install a game and off you go.

 

[deathwish]

Hi You can make a backup of your downloaded content by right clicking on the game you want to backup and selecting backup game files

Sin

you can download content before your payment clears though if the payment dosnt clear it will do as described check that the payment went through correctly

Steam is a great program and usualy works well, though some updates have had bugs in the past and i have always purchaced games through it, you can install games at freinds and stuff without carting arround disk's

 

[Cov(enant)]

Thanks deathwish for your reply.

I understand the conveniance to a certain point.

If the system allows to make sure that it can't be abused, then it's only a good thing.

But it looks like that we users are being forced into something. I don't want to go through a lengthy process.

I just wanna put my original DVD in the drive, install the game and play.

All this logging in and waiting for additional downloads and checks and this and that ..., that's too much headache.

Going through "pushing offers" to buy stuff before I can just use what I'm looking for. Sorry if I miss something, but this is not what I want.

If we at least had the choice between one or the other, but we haven't.

 

[Pat123]

select play in offline mode..

The reason steam does its checking and updating is because it needs to update like everthing else.. Steams a great program and for me it was as simple as putting in the disk and playing. Once its done its major update.. about an hour tops.. its fine.

 

[FarFarAway]

Also if you just copy the steam folder onto a spare drive and keep it there, every time you re-install it keeps the data like game data etc. Run steam on the new install and your game is in the last updated state. That's how I do it and never require to re-update the whole game, just sign into Steam and it finds the correct game files