2K Partners with Steam

[Sub]

Stardock is a great company too. I've only bought one game from them, Galactic Civilizations II, but they've had a ton of patches with a lot of new features included. That was nice.

 

[NHJ BV]

I've used Steam for about a year now, for several smaller games and a few Half-Life 2 mods, and never had any problems with it whatsoever. I don't really understand where all the hate is coming from.

 

[Aneurism]

I think this is fantastic news, in the future whenever I reformat my computer, I will just need to install steam to get almost all of my favourite games up and running CIV, HL2, CS. Very Easy. I hope steam picks up more games, it would be nice to do a rebuild, install steam, signon, just leave my computer for a few hours and have all my games ready

 

[2K_jason]

When I purchased Half-Life 2 I didn't have the option of not installing Steam, and as soon as I lunched the game (which I already entered the serial key for, so I shouldn't have to unlock it in any case) it started updating it. If I didn't have internet connection it wouldn't let me lunch because it wasn't updated. This, to me, means that I cannot play single player HL2 game w/o having an internet connection - that's just twisted.

That may be true, but Civ IV is not HL2.

HL2 was created to run on Steam. You can't run HL2 without Steam. If you don't want to use Steam, don't buy Civ IV on Steam and you'll never see it.

However if you *do* buy Civ IV on Steam, once you've unlocked it, you never have to be online again, because Civ IV doesn't *require* steam to run. It's just using it as a digital distribution platform, not a server browser or cd-key authenticator, etc.

I agree that Stardock's method is great for their games. That doesn't change anything with us being available on Steam/D2D/GameStop/etc.

 

[darkedone02]

I just hope they don't do anything with the mods so that we don't have any problems what so ever.

 

[Sub]

Food for thought: Valve is working on a way to have all of your saved games linked to your Steam account. Essentially, you'd have all of your saved games with you for every game no matter where you are or what computer you're on.

 

[GoodGame]

I've had some problems with Stardock losing my reg numbers when they switch to their 'pay for credits' system earlier this year but when it was $100 unlimited deal awhile before it did work great for me (and was a great deal too).

Direct2Drive still works great for me---I can download the games I bought still without hassle. It's true you almost always need to log on the internet to re-register to use your software if you ever re-install though. Probably that will always be the same for any service.

I think for software as wonderful as Civ, I'll always want my hardcopy in hand though.

(And I'm not affilitated with any of the above or similar distributors.)

 

[Brucicus]

I just bought BtS through Steam and now I can't figure out how to get Blue Marble to work with it. Up until now I've been playing Civ 4 with the cds, but I decided to try buying BtS with Steam. The error seems to be in that Blue Marble can't find Civilization4.exe because it appears to me that BtS isn't using a civilization4.exe file because it's running through Steam. Is there any way I can get it to work? I've really enjoyed playing the game with blue marble and I'd like to continue doing so.

Thanks!
Bruce