I just want to clear up a few things about steam. First steam is IMHO the best thing for PC gaming. It is a great service for lazy people like me. I have over $500 worth of games purchased on steam. With steam it has a store page, community page, my games, my media, and a tools page.
The store page which looks like this
http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/reso...8/05/steam.jpg
You can purchase and download all the games your heart desires that are available on steam. Once purchased through either a retailed hard copy or a digital download it is installed in your my games section. You can also purchase games as gifts for friends or if you buy a game like Half-Life 2 and then buy a bundle like the orange box you can then gift the extra copy of the game to a friend. Also most games on steam are far cheaper then retail because with retail you have to make the cd and box plus maintain a store front and all that shipping. There are also a ton of bundles like the buy Valve Complete Pack where it costs $100 and you get every single game made by Valve and it is $239.81 if you were to buy everything in an individually. So you save $139.82! Or there is the Buy THQ Collector Pack which is $100 also and save $117.40. Or there is the Buy Rockstar Collection and is $60 and save $19.94. So as you can see there can be some GREAT deals made because of steam(hint hint CA).
The community page which looks like this
https://img227.imageshack.us/img227/686/steamiw0.jpg
is the page that helps make steam so awesome for me. It has a friends list much like any online social networking site like facebook. With this you can make friends, chat with them, see what they are playing, see all your achievements or friends achievements, see how many hours you spent playing you games, join steam community groups or make your own clan. All that fun stuff. Also if a friend is playing a game like counter strike source your can just click on your friend and it has the option to launch the game(if you have it) and join the server s/he is playing with just one click. Steam also has great voice chat and great built in voice communication for online games like ETW.
The my games page looks like this
https://img146.imageshack.us/img146/8128/steammf4.png
This is the next greatest thing for steam. Here you can easily play any game you have purchased and you don't need to find your cd you just double click on a game you want to run and it runs. Also if a game has more then one option like benchmarks when you double click it will open up with option to choose different things like for farcry 2 to run the benchmark program or for like M2TW kingdoms you get to choice the different expansions like the Americas/Britain. You can download each game an infinite number of times so if you choice to delete it or build a new computer or whatever you are worry free. Also you can move your account to a friends computer and download your games on each computer you own but can only have 1 account logged on at 1 time. Since I have 2 comps(one power full one and one for if a friend comes over for lan) I have 2 accounts. Also all mods get placed here so you can quick launch them too. Another great feature is it auto downloads the patches so you are always up to date. This also works for mods too.
Then there is the my media page for trailers and some other stuff I don't use. I hope steam releases music and movies that way I can get rid of itunes because in itunes if you delete something and have no back-up it is gone but if it was on steam you could download it a million times if ya wanted to.
Then there is the Tools page which has stuff like SDK's and stuff for setting up your own server which is very easy. Here you also get to use some editing tools for some games like for Half-Life 2 for map making and modeling and the like. I hope ETW will have something here.
Well that just is the basics of what steam is. Also to settle some questions. Steam uses less then 1% of cpu usage. In fact I idle at 0% cpu usage in Vista with steam open and a few small programs like evga precision in the background. Also steam has an offline mode, but you still need steam to be running at all time to be able to play a game. So here is how it works. You install steam and create an account. You pop in the disk or download the game and install it. Then if you loose internet steam goes into offline mode. So if you are on this forum you obviously have an internet connection so no worries. You do not need any credit card info to make a steam account. Steam does not store any financial info. If you don't have an internet connection then to bad. But seeing as 1 billion people now have a computer with internet then CA doesn't have a big impact wth sales lost. In fact going with steam will probably increase sales and make their name bigger as a lot of people don't know about Total War. I hope this helps clear up some question and if you have any more please ask them. Also I am sure I have forgot some things to add.
Please keep this civil.
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