Gamers find many different ways to play the video games they love. Some play on consoles like Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii in front of their wall-sized HD TV's while others play in front of a PC monitor with their keyboard and mouse in hand ready to raid another dungeon or kick some zombie hide.
The console gamers have their own platforms to play on, being the systems themselves, but what do PC gamers have? They have the famous and most used platform, Steam. Steam is an online video game platform that hosts video game downloads such as full games, demos, trailers, screenshots and a wide variety of information on the games it has available. Steam users create an online account, download the desktop program, and that is it, time to shop.
Speaking of shopping, buying a game on Steam is as simple as putting in a valid credit or debit card information, placing a game in your virtual "cart" and checking out. One can buy a game for them self or they have an alternate option to buy a game for someone as a gift and send it to them via email or through the Steam platform itself. Once the purchased game downloads, which can take from 20 to a couple of hours for a game to download depending on the size of the install, gamers can be on their way towards playing some fantastic games such as Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle Deluxe, Fallout 3, Borderlands, and Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Games run just as good or even better than they do if they were on an install disk. On a Lenovo Thinkpad model T400 laptop with 4 gigs of ram and 140 gig hard drive, games run fairly well. Certain games like Fallout 3 or Borderlands might need a better PC for them to run smoothly, but they worked very proficiently while smaller games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Peggle Deluxe ran extremely smooth with the occasional slow down, but those are few and far between.
There are other platforms such as Direct-2-Drive and Amazon, which is not really considered a platform but it still allows gamers to download online versions of a large variety of video games. Steam still tops them off however due to the great deals they release every weekend which can start from 10 percent off a game with bonus content to even 50 percent off a pack of video games. Black Friday gave gamers a glimpse at the best deals on Steam that included a pack of games that totaled almost $400 but it was cut by nearly 75 percent.
Some PC gamers don’t have the luxury of owning top notch rigs that allow them to play almost realistic games such as Fallout 3 or Crysis, but they do all have a steady and stable platform to play video games together as a growing and powerful community, and it is known as Steam.
