The_Hess
Chieftain
While you are certainly right that Valve own series created the foundation of the steam user base, you certainly agree that Valve hasn´t released real TBS blockbuster games so far (at least i must have missed all of them). Also CoD (which seems to be much more successful on consoles) is more a game for a FPS player.
If you mean the Total War" series with TW, not sure if you can really add this game (only ETW is a steamworks games, or?) as "prove" for steams popularity. While the number of accounts certainly got a boost because of this (also because of DoW2 and the other steamworks strategy games), it´s hard to conlude a popularity boost for steam itself. Simply because none of us can deliver real figures how many gladly accepted the "require steam" step and how many only accepted the need to create a steam account to play the game and still dislike steam. Or how many still don´t care, which is perhaps the majority.
So while steam certainly had a big partition of the FPS players as user base and certainly not a low popularity there too, the "pure" TBS fans were still seldom compared to the FPS market (of course this is only a guess, not a proved fact - but as long no one can prove the opposite ...). So yes, for Valve a new sub-segment of the market is opened, the "pure" TBS players. And while ETW, DoW2 surely already covered a part of the TBS players (or more general the strategy game player), you will surely agree that the Civilization series is the queen under the TBS games.
Off course there are FPS players who also like TBS games. But in general both sub-segment should have enough unique players. Perhaps now someone would also add the cliché, that FPS player are more likely to pirat a game while TBS players are more likely to buy a game, and therefore the TBS player is an interesting sub-segment. But like said, it´s only a cliché (at least i don´t know real data supporting this cliché).,
Steam has far more appeal than simply the FPS gamer. Yes, with Valve producing mostly FPS games this is where the initial user base came from, but now Steam is basically a portal for all games. Like I stated earlier, FM2010 is a Steamworks game and that is possibly further from a FPS than even Civ. I also use Steam for racing games, such as GTR Evolution and Grid. Whilst I can understand caution with regards to a new system, as a user of Steam I will say that it is no hassle at all. It doesn't need to be running constantly, it uses very little in terms of system resources and the in game chat is better than msn when it comes to chatting to friends whilst playing a game (as messages pop up in the corner without directly affecting play) due to the fact that there is no need to alt-tab out of a game. The sales on Steam are pretty good as well.
Give it a go with something else (download a demo or something) and see how you get on. Then post back with a true judgement.
