You’ll also find occasional weirdness and lag in the interface, but that rarely transfers across to games. In all Steam works very well, but when you’ve amassed a certain number of games, it can be hard to easily navigate your library and it’s always a bit of a pain to navigate the Store. If you like to game alone (or there are children playing games on it) you can completely bypass this social aspect. There’s a chat feature, so you can set up matches, and more general social features, where fans can upload fan art, etc. The social aspect is another nice feature, allowing you to find friends you already know and make new friends you can play with. Since developers add their games to Steam directly, they don’t have to deal with a middleman, which makes it very accessible for smaller studios and makes the path to sale much more agile.

It’s also worth noting that some games are free and that you should keep an eye out for specials, where games are available at serious discounts. To get new games, you can buy them in the store with a regular credit card, or use Steam Wallet, a pre-paid system. There’s also a traditional settings area where you can change the defaults, add parental controls, and more.

No matter how you’re controlling the program, however, you’ll find that it’s roughly broken up into Library (your titles), Store (where you can buy new titles), and Community where you can add friends and talk to other users. If you can use it, we recommend that you do. If you’re using your PC with a game controller/TV, however, you’ll be able to use Big Picture mode - a stripped-down control method that makes the whole platform a lot more accessible.

The Steam interface leaves quite a lot to be desired - it’s clunky and old-fashioned, and if you’re new to the platform, it will probably take you a while to get to grips with it. The platform allows you to browse, download, and buy thousands of games across multiple genres, storing them on their servers, so you don’t clog up your own computer with space-hogging games. Steam is a videogame library and distribution platform that is essential software for anyone who likes to play video games, especially those who enjoy gaming on a PC. Essential software for anyone who likes PC gamingĪ wonderland of games available at your fingertips

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