I don’t really follow the game scene that closely but I would occassionally pick up a game if it looked interesting.
However I usually buy them second-hand from Amazon but the second-hand prices don’t seem to come down much, Alien Isolation is still £30 on Amazon UK.
I don’t particularly like using other websites but does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks 
Steam is pretty much the standard one-stop solution these days. They have a very large and wide-ranging selection of games from every conceivable genre.
If you’re more into shopping around, isthereanydeal is a great tool.
Other sites I check regularly:
But the great majority of games I buy I buy via Steam.
OK, thank you, I rather miss physical copies of games, but such is progress!
Seconded. Steam is a fantastic service.
It’s as plug and play as you can get: buy your game and it’s always up to date, saves are on the cloud, you can re-download as many times as you want, you can back up to disc or more likely USB drive, there’s integrated mod support for a number of games, and there’s 3 yearly sales that are a big deal, in addition to pretty much daily sales on a lot of games.
Definitely check “is there any deal” before making purchases though, and the Steam summer sale is hitting the end of this month. Save your pennies, and you can likely build yourself a really nice gaming library from just that one event.
Also, don’t forget that you can return games on Steam (but you have to have purchased the game on Steam - if you buy a Steam key elsewhere, they can’t honor refunds) for any reason within 2 weeks of purchase and so long as you don’t play for longer than 2 hours. Steam and EA’s Origin are the only digital games marketplaces that do this, AFAIK.
Question: If Steam goes down for some reason(and don’t tell me it can’t happen-the largest of giants can fall), what happens to all these games that people “own”?
WAG one or some combination of the following:
A) Everyone would have until a certain deadline to download as many of their purchased games as they had storage space for, and all support would end.
B) Everything would be migrated to some other similar service.
C) Some things would be migrated to some other service, e.g. EA games you had purchased from Steam would be made available to you via Origin.
D) Everyone is simply shit outta luck.
I’d imagine C and/or D is probably the most likely.
Non DRM titles will continue to work. Hopefully you’d have a chance to download them first. Some DRM titles will likely be unlocked by Steam/developers/publishers. Some titles will migrate to any other services (like EA’s titles on Origin) that managed to survive the meteor that took out Valve HQ.
Some titles might indeed be lost. Is this seriously something people spend any amount of time thinking about?
I’ll make you a bet. We’ll both be dead looong before issues like these are a concern. $100, right now. And don’t think zombie me won’t be by to collect!
and if your looking for games cheap go to g2a.com… they let people sell game keys they don’t want or need… like on humble bundles they often have say ea month thell have 12 titles when you only want 2 or 3 … well now as long as you have the keys you can resell them to someone who wants them
and if you want indie and all those DOSand pre win 7 games from teenage hood go to gog.com
steam says it has back ups that aren’t online so that even if steam dies theres going to be places youll still get the games you bought
I’m happy with Steam as both a store and a platform.
However, I do like getting DRM-free games when possible, and for that there’s gog.com. Their games are totally DRM free, you just download the installer and you can do whatever you want with it. And I’m actually happy to pay a modest premium for DRM-free games: when I set sales alerts using a site like isthereanydeal.com, I’ll set the alerts a good 10%-20% higher for gog.com than for other sites.
The gog.com catalog of older and indie games is very extensive, though they don’t have a huge selection of new releases from the bigger publishers.
I came in here to recommend GOG, in fact. Lots and lots of “good old games”, and quite a few new ones these days.
With older games their support tends to be better than Steam’s. Games that don’t work right on modern machines or where you need to find some third party patch are more likely to *just work *on GOG.
GOG specifically get involved in making sure older titles work well on modern machines. Steam doesn’t get involved so it’s up to the publisher or developer to make sure that the game works. So yeah, older titles are best picked up on GOG, unless you know that the Steam version works well.
Coincidentally, gog.com just announced a new program called Gog Connect. If you link your Steam account to your Gog account, you can add DRM free versions of your Steam games to your Gog library. Once they are in your Gog library, they’re yours to keep. You can download the installers separately or use them through the Gog Galaxy client.
Not all Steam games are available at all times. Games will come and go on offer at the discretion of the game’s publisher. But once the title is in your library it will stay there. Here’s the announcement:
GOG, btb, is owned by CD Projekt, the guys who make the Witcher games. The name originally stood for Good Old Games but everyone just calls it gog now.
I hear the Witcher 3 isn’t included in the program!!
Hopefully they include it soon.