People often find it odd when I say I don’t play PC games, but it seems rather complicated (and also expensive) to me.
I mean, I enjoyed it back when I had friends with PS, but I never had to set up anything myself. Searching around it seems rather… overwhelming, and I don’t know if it’s actually the case.
- PC seems most versatile, and with the prices, I considered piracy, but I would need a separate computer for security. Hell, I wouldn’t even trust the device firmware on it afterwards.
- So I considered maybe paying the amounts, but I went to check some games and lo and behold, kernel-level anti-cheat. Great, so pirated games might even have less malware in the end.
- Since I’d need a separate device anyway, how about getting a PlayStation. With a disc drive, I want to be able to go future proof and fully offline. Well, about that… apparently it needs to verify the disc drive online. For what? It’s a BluRay drive, either it works or it doesn’t. And then I heard another shitty thing, “most games are released almost unplayable and need updates right away”. So they just release Alpha quality software on the most permanent medium???
So that just sounds like shitty experience no matter what. How is it actually? I’d expect consoles to be least buggy and fully future proof.
The only thing I ever had was a $4 NES bootleg console from AliExpress, Contra was glitched out and Battletank unplayable because they forgot the select button, but ok, $4.
Install Steam, install game, click play, play.
This is an oversimplification, but the gist of how it works. This also assumes you know how to use a PC generally.
That’s (more or less) my experience. I’ve installed a couple of other launchers, and it’s fine.
Although Steam is easy to use, I find it incredibly frustrating and I expect OP will too. It needs an internet connection, it constantly updates the Steam client, and it seems impossible to turn off updates for games. You should expect that at least once a week you will have to wait several minutes to over an hour to launch a game. This is especially true for games that you play rarely, because there will always be am update waiting next time you try to play. You may have better results if you have a faster Internet connection.
In addition, I found the lack of control to be very frustrating. I don’t want to have to fight a separate client whenever I want to play a game. I very much miss when you could just install the game from a CD and it worked. (although I don’t miss how often games used to crash tbf)
For casual gamers, Steam is very easy to use and it mostly just works. It’s also nice having so many games in one place. But it’s not the right thing for me
Yeah… I only have mobile data, so that would be a problem. I switch carriers depending on needs, the one with most data is cheap, but is also most overloaded. Depending on location during the day, it can get all the way down to around 0.3Mbps on download.
If you want to download once and then never have to deal with updates unless you want to, there’s always GOG.
(Also, yes, Steam is a lot more comfortable with a faster connection. I generally spend more time waiting for Vulkan shaders to be precompiled than for downloads to finish.)
Yeah, steam really sucks ass if you have a bad connection. Not only that, but because Valve is a relatively small company some bugs go unfixed for years, like there’s this one bug where some people, with certain linux systems, just can’t select items on a drop down menu. It’s really problematic because then you can’t uninstall games and a whole bunch of other things… this bug has it’s own thread somewhere on github that’s been active for almost three years, which is god awful.