If video games are your thing and you love to spend hours hitting shots, visiting magical worlds, or driving rally cars: Steam is your platform. Today we show you how Steam works, the most used client in the world to play.
Steam is one of the best platforms to go to to play video games from a computer. It was born in September 2003 at the hands of Valve, as a digital distribution platform, and in it we find small titles as well as large studios.
To use it, all we need is to register on the official Steam website (free of charge), with which we will create a user account to associate all the video games we buy. You also have Epic Games, which adds user records.
As soon as we register on any other computer, we will have on it all the titles that we have previously acquired, being able to download them whenever we want, like any current client. Now we have the Steam Deck, the company’s biggest release in decades.
Currently, there are more than 3,000 games available on Steam and 75 million active user accounts.
On this platform we can find both free games and many others with succulent offers (and even the possibility of playing a promotional game for free for several days), and of course we will have an online multiplayer mode to achieve the most complete experience possible.
subscription model
In fact, When we buy a game through Steam, what we are doing is buying a subscription to said title. We will not receive a physical copy, but it will be associated with our account in a personal way (in a similar way as we do when we buy a mobile app, for example).
After downloading the software from Steam, compatible with Windows, OS X and Linuxand enter our user data, we can download the previously purchased games, without restrictions of any kind.
In addition, it is also possible to associate some games that we have acquired through other channels with Steam, after inserting your product code. Thus, it is easier to access all our video games centrally.
To buy games, we can do it in different ways: with a credit card, PayPal, PaySafe Card prepaid cards or by depositing money directly into our Steam accountfor example, and if we want we can record the downloaded titles on a disc so we don’t have to download them again if we want to reinstall them at another time.
For its part, every time a title has a new patch, it will be updated automatically, and we also have an achievement system to see our ranking in a given game, integration with the entire community of Steam users, online chat, anti-cheat system and save games in the cloud (Steam Cloud).
Steam OS and Steam Machines: new horizons
So far everything related to the classic Steam, and this 2014 is assuming the beginning of a revolution for the Valve platform.
A few months ago Steam OS arrived, a Linux-based operating system that integrates Steam to bring video games to the television and the living room, while Steam Machines are hybrids halfway between PC and console.
Steam OS is still in beta, and is available as a free download for users and as a free licensed operating system for manufacturers who choose to implement it on their machines.
For its part, while third-party manufacturers develop the first Steam Machines, Valve has designed a high-performance prototype optimized for the gaming from the living room. In early 2014 Valve announced the first 13 models that would arrive, with prices between 400 and 4,500 euros.
The revolution in the video game world is just around the corner, and traditional console manufacturers have reason to worry…
We leave you a video that explains how to install Steam OS with Gigabit Brix.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism