Does Steam support indie games?

Tic Tac Tie — Sun, 09 May 2010 08:13:09 +0000

Due to my recent experiences, my answer is no. Yesterday I wanted to try an indie game, and tried to download its demo. But Steam servers were too busy to handle that request. I tried it three or four times with one hour intervals but the result was the same. After that I tried downloading a blockbuster game, and there was no problems. Sadly it’s not the first time happening, a few months ago I couldn’t download a game after purchasing it on Steam; because of the same reason again.

Because of Steam, I couldn’t play the game, therefore didn’t purchased it. And I think I was a patient user; most people will try it and upon failure, he/she will try another game or forget about it completely.

Steam displays recently released indie games on featured ones, have an indie subgenre and provide online services to them; which are all great. But without providing the most basic needs, they are all pointless.

What Games for Windows title needs more

Tic Tac Tie — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:43:39 +0000

It’s absolute that PC gaming is having hard days. Games for Windows and PC Gaming Alliance are trying to find a way out for PC gaming but it still seems that they are far away from a solution. There are lots of little big reasons for PC gaming’s current situation but some are really intolerable. According to my recent gaming experiences, even games under Games for Windows title are not compatible with a PC. Here are the three most annoying compatibility issues of the games:

Lack of alt-tab feature: While playing a game in fullscreen mode; if you return to Windows via alt-tab then you’re doomed. You cannot return back to your game no matter what. It prevents you to use any other program, which is a very outdated issue for a PC program.

Always %100 CPU consumption: Especially the ported games from consoles use all of the CPU while less than half will be enough for a smooth gameplay. Usage of all the CPU on a PC while it’s unnecessary is nothing but a mess.

CPU & GPU consumption while paused: It’s okay for games to use most of the resources but it has to stop using that much and go to sleep mode while it’s paused. Not all but single player games must provide this; since using unnecessary process power makes very hard to use other programs.

I think these issues shows that these games ignore that it’s a program running on a multitasking operating system. Is there a browser or a media player causing that much problem? Are games so special programs to have such excuses? Or could you image WoW with these issues, would it have that much users if it had such issues?
Games for Windows has widescreen and 64bit support as a standard which are great *. I think these three or more must be added as a not-have standard. So Games for Windows title will fit its name better and game quality on PC platform will increase.