Steam, I still love you, but we’re moving into an open relationship.

After replacing the misbehaving video card in my frankenstein-esque laptop (Replaced the keyboard 3 times, case fan twice, hard drive, batteries, and now the graphics card), I decided to celebrate with a purchase from the bargain bin (Evil Genius, which then proceeded to eat my weekend.  I’m a sucker for a short fat guy with a monocle).  Having firmly planted myself on the side of the people who make the things I love, I absolutely cannot stand going to GameStop/EB Games/The Den of Despair.  If I’m forced to due to exclusive packages, etc., I will always buy games new, even if they cost more, so as to support the publisher and developer.  Gamestop’s draconian policies around pre-ordering and the fact that their business model of making massive profits on the secondary market at the expense of the people who actually are responsible for the content they sell makes digital delivery all the more appealing.  Unfortunately these same retailers have a lot of power to essentially extort publishers by threatening not to stock their games, or to carry less copies when the publishers try to work around them via the digital route.  One gets the impression that there’s a lot of cloak and dagger going on between publishers and retailers.

At any rate, I’ve already purchased every game Steam offers I have any interest in with a metacritic rating above 70.  This has led me to Warcry.  The deal is similar to Steam, only instead of a client, you download the game installer manually (and unless you have a download manager, potentially multiple times, as browsers don’t like massive file downloads via http).  The good side of things is that once you install the game and validate your account with the installation, you’re done, the game acts just like the retail copy does, and no further DRM is in place.

In other news, Microsoft has announced that it’s going to add a new digital delivery service to compliment Xbox Live Arcade.  The service entitled “Xbox Originals” will allow players to download through Xbox Live games for the classic Xbox including Psychonauts, Crimson Skies, Fable, and the original Halo.  The service will kick off December 4th.  Looks like I’ll be buying my third copy of Psychonauts.  Tim Schaefer must be making matresses out of my money.