GoNzOTW
Chieftain
Accept it: Steam isn't going away no matter how much you whine about it.
Please stop posting about it.
Steam - The 'somewhat explain it all guide'
- Thread starter scrlk
- Start date
Accept it: Steam isn't going away no matter how much you whine about it.
Please stop posting about it.
I have every right to complain about something I don't like, and voice my objections. If you don't like it, too bad. It's called Free Speech.
Chalks
The blue pieces
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2010
- Messages
- 1,097
Free speech does not exist in a private context. You are simply not in violation of the rules.
Let us know when you buy Civ 5 anyway, k?
StittsvilleJame
Warlord
Steam, no Steam, meh, whatever...
How sad for you that you think people can't stick to their principles, you must lead a very bleak existance indeed. I pity you. I might have reconsidered my postion if people like you hadn't hardened my resolve. Good job of convincing me.
You know what? I've just thought of an approximate metric for Steam sales of Civ. Check this out.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Click on the "View top 100" tab and Ctrl-F through for Civilization. You can see some numbers for simultaneous online logins, around about 4200 total peak logins across all games and expansions. Are these high or low? I'm not sure, lets compare them against Steam compulsory games.
6000 for the single player of Modern Warfare 2, which I think was the biggest selling mainstream game of last year. Another 6000ish for Dawn of War 2 and expansion, 9000 for Empire: Total War.
We don't have information on how many people were playing any of these games in offline mode, so theres still some mystery. However we can clearly see by comparing Civilization, a 7 year old game with an expansion pack 3 years ago, against modern Steam compulsory high sellers, that the Steam demographic of Civilization players is big.
Sorry to be allbut we're the demographic thats going to get catered to.
Civilization 4 is a little under five years old, not seven. It was released in late 2005.
As always, context is important when considering the numbers. COD4:MW2 Multiplayer has a peak today of 91k. CS:S has 85k, CS has 67k. Football Manager 2010 has 22k. The measly 2k of Civ4:BTS pales in comparison, and even if you include the thousand or so people playing vanilla Civ4, the numbers barely make a dent.
Besides, I'd say the numbers for Civ4 are currently inflated, thanks to the recent sale and the release of the Mac client; I'd be willing to bet those numbers will die down after people finish playing the game they just bought. Look at the numbers for Portal as an example: 19k players at peak, but most of that would be players taking advantage of the free Portal deal.
Overall, I'd say Civ4 is doing about where I would expect for a game that has two large enticement factors recently (how many Mac users do you think just bought the game because it was cheap and supported Mac right after installing Steam?). Of course, if you consider that Steam is supposed to have 25 million active users, all those numbers seem a rather low - it doesn't even add up to one million, let alone twenty-five.
For a more conclusive answer, I would like data going at least a year or two back, plus total sales (both retail and on Steam) during and preferably before that time period. There are just too many variables you have to ignore otherwise.
One odd thing I noticed was that Civ4 Vanilla and Civ4 BTS were each listed twice in the Top 100, while Warlords was listed once. Not sure what exactly is going on there.
Senethro
Overlord
Yes, you're right. I'm not sure why I thought late 2003.
Multiplayer games and singleplayer games, especially the behemoth of Counterstrike, cannot be compared. What I can see is that Civ4 compares well against other steam compulsory single player games that sold well.
It doesn't show inflation at all, it shows the ability of Steam to sell even old games.
Remember the number doesn't show how many people played civ today, it shows the highest number that were playing simultaneously today. The total player numbers will be much higher.
The two different versions of civ listed might be Windows and Mac?
Shurdus
Am I Napoleon?
oh noes! now civ5 might make one less sale! the remorse we as a community feel!!!!!111 we have failed!How sad for you that you think people can't stick to their principles, you must lead a very bleak existance indeed. I pity you. I might have reconsidered my postion if people like you hadn't hardened my resolve. Good job of convincing me.
In all earnest though, if you do not want to play the game over somehting so petty as the game requiring steam then that is perfectly fine, you just do not have to make such a scene about it as if the game requires you to steal money from your mother.
I would disagree with the idea that you cannot compare the multiplayer and singleplayer games in this context, but that's a whole discussion by itself so I won't argue. Look at the numbers for Half-Life 2 though - older than Civ4, arguably even less replayable, no recent sale, and yet has numbers that are quite comparable.
That it doesn't show inflation is exactly my point. You're looking at a single day's worth of data, out of context of all other recent events. If you put a game on sale, you will guarantee a spike in people playing it, and Civ4 had precisely such a sale. That is why I would prefer at least a year's worth of data, preferably more.
Yes, I understand that, but you basically need orders of magnitude more people playing to even begin to approach 25 million, and I don't think that the sum of all Civ players in a day is a hundred times the peak. If you try and spread them out throughout the week you can get away with less, but it's still somewhat out of place.
Again, this is something where there simply isn't enough data. If there was a weekly view so we could see the average players per day across the entire week so weekend fluctuations could be taken into account, and a more fine-grained view of the number of players in a day (perhaps every hour), we might be able to draw more conclusive results.
Possibly, though I didn't notice Football Manager 2010 or Torchlight appearing twice and they both have more players than Civ4 in the list. Another option might be non-Steam installations being launched through Steam, but I don't think Valve tracks non-Steam games for this kind of data.
OK, I guess that last comment was a bit over the top. I apologize. The guy just pisses me off and I feel the need to get in the last word. And in no way have I put Steam down, in fact I've mentioned on numerous occasions that it probably provides a good service for some people. But for those of us who gain no benefit from it, there's no valid reason for forcing us to use it.
eireksten
Protective/Organized
The "valid reason" is that Steamworks, a framework providing different online functionality, is based on Steam. Therefore, any game using Steamworks will require Steam. So basically, if they weren't forcing you to use it, they'd have have to remove it from the game altogether. Meaning that the rest of us wouldn't get that functionality either. And yes, guys, Steamworks (Steamworks Web Site) is more than the Steam client. Civ4 on Steam is NOT a Steamworks game.
You could complain to Valve about not being allowed to run the game without any online functionality, to avoid having to use the client. But I guess that requirement is there for DRM purposes.
No they wouldn't, just the mandatory part. They could still leave all the Steam stuff in and only have it activate it if the player chooses that option. If 2K really insists on having an online activation they could have two options, one to do it through Steam, another to do it through their own servers. Select Steam and you get all the extra options, but with the other method you won't. All you'll get is the activation for the game, nothing else.
Moderator Action: Please keep the discussion civil(ized) - telling people to stop posting, does not fit that description, accusing people of hypocrisy doesn't fit that description, attacking people personally doesn'T fit that description, ...
eireksten
Protective/Organized
Sadly, that's not true for Steamworks games. Even if it was, I don't think they'd gain much by running a similar DRM scheme themselves.
eris
King
Well, after reading this discussion, I have been able to make up my mind about Steam, even having never used it before. Given the overall tone and lack of concrete techncial points other than personal preference about what seem to me to be petty details, I will gladly go out and get a Steam account and play Civ 5 to my heart's content. I had been skeptical about getting another online account, etc, etc, but you people have convinced me that these are nonsense objections in the current gaming world and environment. Thank you to both sides for your participation, especially the Steam haters who provided the negative example I did not want to follow. I have gone and made my account and downloaded my free copy of Portal. I am ahead of the game already!! Again, thanks.
Senethro
Overlord
Cheers mate, enjoy.
And for anyone else wanting free Portal, the URL is
http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/
I don't know why but Steam has pretty terrible estimates of download times.
I'm getting an update for TF2 at approx 15KB/s.
It's at 164/556 MB
It reports: 34mins 50secs remaining
That's 401408KB to go.
At 15KB/s that's about 26761 secs or 7hrs 26 mins.
I'm not complaining about the fact there's an update, but why is the estimate so badly wrong all the time? It's off by more than an order of magnitude.
I'm getting an update for TF2 at approx 15KB/s.
It's at 164/556 MB
It reports: 34mins 50secs remaining
That's 401408KB to go.
At 15KB/s that's about 26761 secs or 7hrs 26 mins.
I'm not complaining about the fact there's an update, but why is the estimate so badly wrong all the time? It's off by more than an order of magnitude.
In the settings of Steam you can change your download location, changing that may help. I've never had such abysmal speeds of 15KB/s, they're always 3MB/s+ with me.
I'd say customer support is a pretty important thing to gain. As it is, they're alienating alot of players with this move. As for not being able to bypass the Steam features, it's just computer code. Anything is possible.
Note I'm not a US customer. Still, I have tried a couple of servers and right now I'm using the one that is physically closest to me (it would be within 200km I'm pretty sure).
I think 40KB/s is typical for the peak download rate on most of the things I've gotten. Only a couple downloads have reached a speed of 80KB/s or more.
Regardless of all that though, your reply completely ignores my point. Why is Steam so bad at estimating the download time? I even went into settings and specified I was using a 56k (modem) speed connection and those are the estimated times it still gives me.
It estimates ~30 mins when a realistic guess is around 7hr30. Even when the download rate speeds up, the estimated time is still wrong by the same proportion.Similar threads
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