So this is about digital content delivery services.

So we’ve got Steam from Valve.
Back in the beginning it wasn’t very good, but over time you can see they improved by leaps and bounds.
I can log on, I can buy games and now software, I can then install them, and then play them all through the same interface.
Basically you click buy, pay for it, then click install, more or less straight forward and simple.

Steam works.
My massive games collection that I will never even play more than maybe 5% of (seems about right when you shift in to the scale of hundreds of games) may bias me slightly here, but it works.

Games 4 Windows Live, well we might as well just discard that from the equation, now that Microsoft are dropping it.
It’s main purpose, it seems, was DLC management.
That’s all it really did other than mess with your gaming experience when you lost internet.
So it’s gone.

Of course I’m going to have to mention EA’s Origin.
Brought about as they wanted to claim all of the DLC money without giving any to anyone else, it turned in to the one and only source for EA based games.
Even if you had an older account you had to switch over to Origin.
I did spend some time reading though the End User License Agreement some time back, and quite simply I didn’t agree with it.
It’s trying to provide the same service as a superior product (Steam) while at the same time restricting it more or less to one publisher (EA) and it doesn’t have my massive catalogue of games to play.
So, while it’s required for EA games, I shall not be buying them, as I quite simply do not want or need it.

Stardock had their own rival some time back called Impulse, but now that’s owned by Gamestop.
It wasn’t bad, you could install your games, you could download updates, you could even back up specific versions of the games to be able to play.
It was nice and simple, and it worked.
But now that Gamestop have it, content like Demigod shifted over to Steam (I should really figure out where I go in relation to playing my physical copy.)

And now of course, the one I’m really starting to dislike is Uplay.

I first got introduced to Uplay (from Ubisoft) with Might And Magic Heroes VI (Because Heroes of Might and Magic VI was so 90s).
I bought the game through Steam, I created my Uplay account with the game, I could log in with the game, everything was fine.

My second Uplay title is Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist (because you need to make game names that long to be gritty and authentic).
I acquired this one with my brand new Gigabyte Geforce 760 OC 4gig as a promotional item.
Or rather I acquired a redemption code.
From there I went to the code redemption page on geforce.com and redeemed it (along with giving them my name and other such things) which gave me another completely different code.
From there I needed to go to the Uplay webstore, add the game to my cart, redeem the second code to drop the price to zero and buy it.
This attached it to my account.
I then needed to download the Uplay software.

I’m not finished yet, there’s still more to this which no doubt make Origin look unified.

Install the software, which isn’t small in size, and then log in.
Click the download button for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist (because I’m going to keep saying the entire name, and maybe even next time put in the trademark symbols just to make it longer) which leads me to something like a 17gig download.
You’d expect that would be all I’d need to do in order to play it after downloading it over two nights while sleeping, but no there’s still more.
So after downloading it, I need to install it, which acted like your typical software installation.
I think that it’s finally over and I click play.

Downloading new update, currently at this moment at 57% for not quite a gigabyte of data.

Suffice to say at this moment I really don’t like Uplay because there are too many stages involved in actually playing games (60%).

So I can quite happily say that I like Steam the best (61%).

Maybe I’ll read a book for awhile (63%), look at some funny cat pictures on the internet (64%) or troll some people for the lulz (65%).

Until next time.