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Slimebeast on 23 January 2012
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Scoobes said:
Slimebeast said:
You can get very good games for dirty cheap on Steam sales.

I am still surprised that it's so successful. But very glad about it.

Anyway, what's the difference between Steam games and Steamworks games (as it says only 14.5 million Steamworks games were sold in 2011)? I thought it was the same thing.

Steamworks games have extra features like backing up your saved games, matchmaking services (provided through Steam), acheivements, in-game DLC, better community features/integration, microtransaction support (through Steam) and the possibility of cross-platform play (e.g. Portal 2 on PC and PS3 or a number of PC/Mac titles).

It's as much a developer tool as a positive for gamers as it means the devs already have a solid infrastructure to build upon rather than having to build all these features and implement them themselves. I believe it also gives them better stats on real-time player usage (including bugs) and has tools for beta testing.

Steam games on the other hand are just games available to download that don't neccessarily use Steam's in built infrastucture (e.g. Fallout 3 which uses GFWL or Dragon Age Origins which uses EAs services).

So you can buy Fallout 3 off of Steam but not do anything more than launch the game from your Steam game list?

On the other hand Skyrim then, does it count as a Steamworks game?