Steam or GLive?

[gozpel]

Well for me every game on Steam so far hasn't caused any problems. Downloads are ok, but updating is a bit annoying, still it keeps my pants on.

So then we have the other one, GLive for windows. I have 2 games I need to certify, Bioshock 2 and Max Payne 3. Created an account after hours of fiddling through all of their rubbish.

And now I have an account with GLive and Microsoft and who else wanted me to sign up. Now I want to validate my games from my email:

Microsoft account:

"There's a temporary problem with the service. Please try again. If you continue to get this message, try again later."

So to me it seems Steam are more reliable then this GLive junk!

Got Dishonored for Xmas, said Games for windows on the cover, but it installed to Steam, and I can play it!

I want to play Bioshock 2! and Max Payne 3 too!!!

 

[say1988]

"Games for Windows" and "Games for Windows LIVE" are two very different things.

The first is irrelevant, just a marketing term. The second is the online service that should be avoided whenever possible. For whatever problems Steam has (and it does have plenty), Games for Windows LIVE is far, far worse. There is some speculation that Microsoft intentionally does that to push people towards consoles.

When I played Bioshock 2 (not realizing it was on LIVE before hand) it took me an hour to get it going.

 

[Ajidica]

Besides some annoying updates (that reset all the graphics options on my Bethesda games forcing me to spend an hour re-tweaking them) and the odd issue I haven't really had any problem with Steam.
Plus the sales are really nice. At $10 I wouldn't get The Witcher. At $2.50 it is fully within impulse purchase range.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Steam is generally very reliable for me, but I did have one problem a couple of months ago when Gods and Kings was new. After about a week steam downloaded a patch that 'updated' Civilization back to vanilla. I instaled it again, but every time steam insisted on patching the expansion away. I had to stay in offline mode in order to play Civ5 with the epansion. The problem went away after two weeks when my steam client was automatically updated.

Now I don't really have anything to compare it to. I had Origin on my PC as part of Mass Effect 3, but I uninstalled it when I was finished with the game.

 

[GenMarshall]

Ever since I've gotten the Orange Box years ago, Steam has became a workhorse for my gaming activities since a majority of games I have are on Steam (SRTT, Skyrim, New Vegas, CivV). I recall that the only non-steam game I have installed is Fallout 3 (at least it works without GFWL and even installed a mod to remove it).

The only problem with steam are the constant resuming of downloads whenever there is a major TF2/Source Engine update (which also has a small chance of breaking GMod 13), but that's largely the Steam Servers getting overloaded. The unannounced updates are a real pain in the GMod 12 era when Valve would release an unexpected update and inadvertently break GMod due to a major TF2 update relating to an engine update.