I’ve been one that had trouble moving on from the old physical media metaphor. I bought CDs well past their prime. I felt sketchy at first about buying Virtual Console and Xbox Arcade games without a disc. Something needs to be transferred, physically, into my possession.
The first thing that caught my eye was Steam, though. Not iCloud. I was dumped into it, like most, with it being required when you bought the Orange Box, a super pack that included Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Eventually, I find myself re-buying old games like Quake and Unreal Tournament! I’m a gamer that always wants to revisit the classics, but you pull that old Unreal first release disc, then you have to find the update from the site that’s been sold to a new publisher three times over before it’s close to compatible with the current OS, if at all. Not to mention some games not fairing so well, like my sadly cracked Future Cop disc, or the long time missing Duke Nukem 3D (still have the case. Empty. Re-bought it on Xbox Live!) Having that access online, I can easily mark the games I want on a new system and have it in a relatively short time! I have a completely non-physical and complete library of the games I’ve bought, from a certain era on, wherever I log in.
This was something that worried me on my iPhone. I’ve loved the games, but the lucidness of the apps made me weary of buying anything more than a few bucks, even the 9.99 of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars took a good bit of consideration. When iCloud launched for purchases just months ago, I saw my entire library. No longer do I have to worry if something happens to my old iMac I sync to that holds all of my apps. They’re in the cloud. Even apps I’ve downloaded (or purchased) that have been pulled by the publisher for a different version(Orb), violation (iDOS) or copyright (Tris). Nice of Apple to bring this back. It takes the onus off of the consumers, who by and large are irresponsible with their software (how many people have lost their system discs to their computers. Honestly think they backup their music purchases?)
Of course, all of this depends on Steam and Apple keeping everything available to you, in perpetuity.
Do you feel safer buying a piece of “the cloud”?
So Steam is now part of iCloud?
No, just another service that sort of prepared me for what they’re doing now.
Steam was actually a requirement since Half-Life 2 for valve games. Some time between HL2 and Ep1 is when they opened store selling a few indie source engine games such as Darwinia, The Ship, Garry’s Mod and of course, Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source.