All 3 FPS Gods under same roof (Epic joins Valve and Id on Steam)

[BenKenobi88]

cwbys21 said:
so say if you buy a game off of steam and it is 4 gig, do you have to download the 4 gig straight from the developer, do they compress it, use some kind of torrent thing to reduce their bandwidth? also if it is 4 gig of download, can you burn it onto a dvd so that you can uninstall it later and not have to redownload 4 gig? I assume that Valve gets a cut from this but it would also seem that more money would go to the developers off of this because they cut out the retail, just a cut to the publisher and valve and more to the devs, would that be correct?

You download from Valve's servers, which are generally reliable. On big releases, I WOULD advise you to pre-purchase a game. Pre-purchasing often gets you a 5% discount, you'll be able to play immediately when the game becomes unlocked (except for a few last minute updates sometimes), and the servers can get a little slower right at release time.

You can burn your game onto a DVD.

They cut out the retail and the developer does benefit more than they would from printing out DVDs and putting them in stores, the benefit is very significant I'm sure.  Valve gets enough dues I'm sure, the appropriate share to keep everything running and expanding Steam for the benefit of all the developers.