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We use Steam. What is the Steam gaming platform?

Steam is a service that is primarily useful to people who are interested in computer games. What does Steam give us? Using it, you can activate your new toy, download its components via the Internet, download updates and news about the game.

Steam is the brainchild of Valve. Accordingly, Steam works with Valve products and products of those developers who have signed a contract with Valve.

In addition, through Steam, without leaving home and without being distracted from your computer, you can buy new games from Valve and other developers.

Who works with the Steam service?

Activision;
Codemasters;
Eidos Interactive;
EA Games;
Epic Games;
GSC Game World;
id Software;
Sega;
Atari;
Rockstar Games;
UbiSoft;
NCSoft;
and many others.

According to statistics for October 2010, up to 3 thousand products are sold through Steam, and the number of registered users reaches 30 million. The main products of Steam are computer games, trailers and modifications for games.

The word Steam itself means “steam” in English.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the emerging service on modern market computer games. The most serious development was found by developers of independent games. Previously, large publishing houses were very wary of new non-standard games, since it was not known in advance how profitable these developments would be. Now the situation has changed. Indie games are distributed through Steam, which gives a start-up team of programmers a chance to get into serious business in the field of computer entertainment.

Steam is a new word in the sales of computer games via the Internet. The method by which Steam operates is called digital distribution. If the publisher uses this method, then he significantly reduces his costs for a whole series positions. There is no need to spend money on producing discs, packaging, printing covers or transporting them. Now everything is possible via the Internet. Accordingly, the financial risk of independent games is reduced several times. In addition, if an independent game finds particular popularity among Steam users, then the developers will have the opportunity to get a contract with a major publisher.

There is no doubt that digital distribution is a step into the future. These technologies are used not only in the field of computer games, but also in the music business. The time is coming material assets, but the time for ideas that bring material profit.

“You can break a sword, but you cannot destroy an idea.” (Victor Hugo)

Steam - service to pump money out of your wallets digital distribution of licensed video games, programs and films; TV series and music may also appear in the future.

The developer and owner of the service is worldwide famous company Valve is the developer of these popular games like Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and others.

A little history

The Steam service began its history in 1999, but it officially appeared in 2002 and then it was not yet a platform for sales and was simply an unnecessary component for games.

Around the same time, Valve came up with the idea of selling digital content through its service. At the time, such an idea was very expensive to implement, so the company decided to partner with Amazon, Yahoo or Cisco to help solve the problem. Negotiations between them led nowhere, and Valve begins to bring the idea to life on its own.

So already in 2003, sales of digital goods began in the Steam store, and in 2004, with the release of the game Half-Life 2, the presence of a Steam client became mandatory.

Another year later, games from other developers began to appear intensively on Steam.

The service is developing, new functions are appearing, the design is changing several times and, having gone quite a long way, it becomes what we see it today.

You can learn more about the history of the service by following the links:

Steam History: Wikipedia
Steam History: Steam User Content

What is Steam?

If I were asked to briefly and clearly give a person an answer to the question “what is Steam?”, then I would say something like the following:

Steam This is a service that provides access to thousands of licensed products, mainly games. Here you can buy the game for real money and immediately download the licensed version to your computer.

All purchased games will be linked to your account and you will be able to access them at any time, years later, even from another country. Even if the game is deleted from the service for some reason, you will still be able to download it and play it if you purchased it before deletion.

In addition to paid products, there are many free ones, some of which are really high quality and worth your attention.

In addition, Steam has a social part, that is, you can add other users as friends, share achievements, screenshots, videos from games, etc. with them.

What is Steam for?

I decided to answer this question by listing everything positive aspects of this project:

A huge catalog of games with easy search and navigation makes it easy to find and purchase games. Your collection will always be with you, even when you have to reinstall the operating system or even change your computer. A couple of clicks and the library will be restored. It's convenient.
Steam is famous for its spontaneous sales and promotions, and the discounts themselves have become business card. Although we are not talking about new products, old games that were released a year or more ago can definitely be obtained at a good discount, up to 90%. The biggest sales are the Summer Sale and the Winter Sale. There are also less global sales, such as Autumn sales, or dedicated to some holiday, such as Halloween. There are also mini-sales - all games from one developer or publisher receive discounts. And that's not all. Every week, several games also get good discounts and "free weekends", meaning you can play the game for free over the weekend.
Steam has long been not only trading platform, but also some semblance of a social network. Convenient communication with friends, social services (comments, likes, etc.) and many network games, which were developed thanks to Steam.
Don't forget about others useful services. For example, Steam Family Sharing allows you to share games with your family or friends. There is also Steam Cloud, which makes it possible to store settings and saves from games on Valve servers. This means that even if you lose all the data from hard drive you can continue the game thanks to cloud storage your saves.
If a game or other product turns out to be bad or you simply don’t like it, you can cancel the purchase, thereby getting your money back. But it’s worth noting that the game can only be returned if you’ve played it for no more than two hours. This opportunity encourages developers to release as much as possible quality product, and you are guaranteed the fairness of the service.

Steam provides the opportunity to receive money to its users. Ordinary players definitely won’t be able to earn much, but you can earn $10 a month (if you work from several accounts) by selling game cards, things, emoticons, backgrounds, etc. But designers have room to expand, as they can create their own models of items for the workshop.
Steam has become a real paradise for indie developers. After all, on the vastness of the entire Internet, it’s easy for a small project to get lost, but Steam is easily capable of raising a worthwhile product to the top.
As mentioned above, Steam has many online games that can be played by people all over the world. However, there are users who play with cheats and other auxiliary programs. An anti-cheat was developed especially for such games and players, which is not flawless; the most “rage” cheats are able to detect and prohibit the player from playing this game on this account for life. In addition, Valve is preparing a neural network that should learn to detect foul play on its own.

You can often hear the question of what Steam is and how to use it. Steam is the best at the moment, a service for online purchasing of computer games. Here you can find hundreds of different operating games Windows systems and MacOS. In this article we will look at the main features that Steam provides to users.

The Steam service has four main parts, these are: Store, Library, News and Community. We will now look at each of these parts in more detail.

Shop this is a catalog of games where you can choose and buy the game you like. After the game is purchased, it moves to the Library section and begins downloading; after the download is complete, you can play.

Library This is a catalog of games you have purchased. Having purchased a game once, it remains in your Library forever, and you can always download it using Steam and start playing. This way, all your games are centralized and cataloged in one place.

News not a particularly interesting section. News about the Steam system, new games and updates are published here.

Community This social network for gamers. Here you can chat with Steam users you have added as friends. The community provides many opportunities for organizing joint leisure time playing computer games.

Key features of STEAM

Purchasing games. If you don't know what Steam is, it's best to start by purchasing games. There are a large number of games available in the Steam catalog. And most of these games can be purchased from anywhere in the world. All you need is Internet access to top up your Steam account and download the game after purchase. By purchasing at least one game, you will quickly understand all the capabilities of this system. You can top up your Steam account using Webmoney, MasterCard, American Express, Visa, PayPal, as well as other payment services. Replenishment occurs quickly and without problems.
Free games. Steam users are given access to a large number free games.
Convenient client. You can also work with Steam using a browser. To quickly get acquainted with what Steam is, go to . But, in order to gain access to all the features of Steam you need. The client is an application with which you can top up your account, buy games, communicate with other players and much more.
Saving game settings to the Steam Cloud online storage. By saving your settings online, you don’t have to worry about their safety.
Creating offline backups of games. If you have a slow Internet connection and downloading games is difficult for you, you can create a backup copy of those purchased from Steam games and burn it to a disk or other

What is Steam and what is it for?

Do you know what Steam is? If you have a child school age, he knows for sure. But adults, as our experience of communicating with parents shows, are often not aware of what kind of service this is and what it is needed for. Steam is the largest online store for computer games. In it you can get both games from Valve, the creator of Steam, and other developers. Along with a large number free programs, Steam also has paid content. Both purchased and free games are launched through the program of the same name. One way to get a paid game is to buy an activation key. All purchases are linked to the player’s account: no matter what device the user logs into his account from, he always has access to his collection of games.

In addition to distributing gaming content, Steam is also a social network for gamers. There they can communicate, add other users as friends, create and join communities, give gifts, receive achievements, like, exchange items, and much more.

What are the pros and cons of this gaming platform and why should parents know about its existence?

Let anonymous communication remain anonymous

If Steam is a social network, then children and teenagers communicate on it. Moreover, Steam has a ton of multiplayer games in which players also have the opportunity to communicate with each other. The main, in our opinion, features of communication both on the network itself and in games from a security point of view are that, on the one hand, players communicate with a mass of random and unfamiliar people, and on the other hand, they usually use nicknames - “Pilot777 ", "ХХХваняХХХ" and so on. That is, in this environment, communication with strangers, which at the same time does not flow not only into personal meetings, but even into acquaintance as such with the exchange of personal information. It should remain that way. Explain to your child that such anonymous communication is completely acceptable, but in no case should it be de-anonymized - you cannot tell someone you know from the game your real first and last name, age, especially address or phone number, or give a link to pages on social networks.

Some gaming communities practice meetings between their participants. Your child should know that if he plans to go to such a meeting, he should definitely tell you. You can go to it, but only on condition that the message about such a meeting was posted in the public domain, and did not come in a private message from one of the players. At such a meeting, the child will be able to evaluate for himself who is who, see children of his own age and get to know them personally. With older players, he can continue to communicate in the game, but transfer communication to social networks or real life It’s not worth it, because just because a child saw this person at a meeting does not make him a good friend, and this person could still turn out to be a criminal.

What is my child doing? Check it out on Steam!

Parents should consider registering for Steam themselves and adding their child as a friend. This will allow you to see who your child is hanging out with, what games they are playing, and how much time they are playing. last time was online. This will help not only to make sure that he does not spend too much time in games and does not play games that are prohibited for his age, but also to better understand his interests, and maybe even share them.

By the way, the family account settings and parental controls inside Steam will allow you not only to look at what he is playing and sigh, but also to limit your child’s access to games, for example, 18+, or to certain works that are not suitable for children.

There are no new games. Money too.

Fraudsters are well aware that children, on the one hand, are very interested in new games and “pumped up” characters and, on the other hand, do not have enough money to buy and do not want to spend a lot of time on “pumping up”. As a result, fraudulent schemes are emerging that target schoolchildren looking for cheaper and simple ways get new games and “pump up”. And if a scammer targets a schoolchild, that means the parents’ wallet is at risk. Tell your children that the following tricks are scams and should not be fooled.

Sale/giveaway of invalid Steam keys

On the web huge amount stores offering to purchase keys. Buying a key is always a pig in a poke; until the moment of activation it is impossible to know whether it works or not. Here you can only count on the seller’s integrity. Often users are in pursuit of new game and the attractive price tag is forgotten simple rules security and purchase keys on dubious sites. As a result, they may become the owners of an already used key, and, of course, no one will return the money spent on its purchase.

Fraudulent stores have an extremely short lifespan, so along with this type of fraud, a more sophisticated scheme is also used - drawing random (“random”) keys. The random key is a lottery. By paying, for example, 60 rubles for participation in the drawing, the user, according to the organizers, can get any game: from a cheap one for several tens of rubles to a top-end one, the price of which can reach several thousand.

The process of drawing a key, however, is not demonstrated on the sites, so it is impossible to verify its fairness: among the prizes, there may not be keys that are more expensive than the cost of participation, so we advise you to refrain from participating in such dubious lotteries.

Buying/stealing an account.

Along with selling keys, these same dubious stores are also selling accounts. Why do people buy them? Having made a decent discount on purchased games, things, etc., the seller gives the user a ready-made profile. The buyer only needs to log into his account using the purchased login and password, and he becomes happy owner not only game content and things, but also all the achievements of the previous owner. However, it is impossible to get someone else’s account and be one hundred percent sure that it has completely come under your control: the purchased profile may turn out to be stolen, and the original owner can return it at any time.

Everything acquired through backbreaking labor!

In addition to schemes aimed at the user’s wallet, gamers may encounter attempts to steal their account. For your child, losing a Steam account can be a real tragedy, because a lot of time and pocket money have been invested in it. Here are some methods that allow scammers to gain control of your account:

Phishing sites.

This scheme is simple, but most effective, since it is designed for inattention and ignorance of users. Here's how it works:

You receive a link with a tempting offer on Steam (free giveaway or discount on inventory, exchange of items, etc.). There are many ways to get such a link: in a letter, in comments to articles, in public pages or in personal message on social networks.

Clicking on it takes you to a page that is almost indistinguishable from the official Steam page. Where you are asked to enter your username and password for your account to continue.

The user, in anticipation of an excellent exchange/purchase of goods, enters all the data required of him, not paying attention to the address bar of the site. The official Steam domains are steamcommunity.com and steampowered.com. Fraudsters register very similar domains to lull the victim's vigilance. For example:
- steam.stearncommunity.click
- steamcammunitty.com
- steamcammunity.ml
- steamcamrnunitty.com
- steamcommunity.ml
After entering the data, it is leaked to the scammers, and along with it, access to the account.

Third party programs.

Another way to steal an account is to install additional programs (in particular on mobile devices), supposedly intended to protect the account, add additional functions, ban and damage to the enemy’s reputation on Steam, etc. There are a huge number of such programs, but you shouldn’t trust them. The only exception is Steam Guard. official application from Valve to protect your account.

If they are installed, not only data for accessing Steam can be stolen, but also other personal information: contacts, SMS, and even logins and passwords from accounts on other sites.

Tell your child about these schemes so he can protect his account.

How to protect yourself?

There are some simple ones, but effective rules to help you avoid falling for scammers:

Treat with healthy skepticism the too attractive prices of goods offered to you. Don't forget that the miser pays twice.
Never click on links received from unknown senders. If it was sent by a person you know, first find out from him what it is and why he sent it: his account could have been hacked by scammers.
Buy games online only from reputable stores.
Use security solutions for your devices and update databases on time. Antivirus will protect you from downloading malicious programs, and anti-phishing will protect you from switching to fraudulent resources.
Always be careful when entering logins, passwords and other personal information on any resource.

You should not protect yourself from the Steam gaming platform itself. This service has more pros than cons: it teaches children and teenagers to use licensed software, allows parents to keep track of their children’s gaming activity, and can limit access to adult content. Learn to use this service as another tool to ensure your child's digital safety.

Before you figure out how to use Steam, it’s worth explaining what the program is and why it is needed. Steam is a well-known and largest digital store for games and updates for them on the Internet. The name translated into Russian sounds like “valve”. Users simply call it “Steam” among themselves. Using Steam, you can purchase more than three thousand products on this topic and more. At the moment, Steam has more than 63 million users, which is an undoubted record for such a resource. The owner and creator of the store is the famous company Valve Software.

Steam Features

free use of already purchased and activated games,
automatic free game updates. Updates are installed automatically upon release,
gaming world news,
informing about new products,
search for games and servers for them by various criteria and filters,
purchasing a game for another person as a gift at your own expense,
various communities of interests,
chat between users.

How to install the program and how to use it to activate games and use the full variety of resource capabilities? Let's look at the step-by-step instructions.

Installing "Steam" and creating an account

To install Steam, you need an Internet connection. It is best to download the program from the official website.
During installation, the program will ask for a login and password. If this is your first time installing Steam, you will need to go through a formal registration process. To do this you need to fill out following fields: “Account name” is your unique name (login) in the Steam system, “Password” is your password, respectively. In the next field, you will need to re-enter the specified password. Next, press the “Next” key
If the login you created already exists in the system, you will be given the opportunity to change it to a new one.
Next, enter the active address in both fields email and select a secret question that may be needed in the future to recover your password. Answer the question and press the “Next” button.
The system will display a message on the screen indicating that registration is complete. Click “Finish”

Entrance

When you first log in, enter your login in the “Login” field and enter your password in the “Password” field. Next, press the “Remember my password” button for convenience. Next time, you will be logged into your account automatically. And this will allow you to run games without connecting to the Internet, which is very convenient if the connection suddenly disappears, but you want to play. Press the “Login” button.

Game activation

Registered, logged in, looked around and now the key question is how to activate the games? How to use Steam? To activate the game, you must complete the following steps:

Open the program menu item called “Play Games”
In this window, click on the name of the game
If your copy of the game has not yet been activated, Steam will automatically offer you to buy it.
Click on “Register a product I already own”
Next you need to enter your individual registration number copies of the purchased game and press the “Next” button.
After checking the number and downloading updates, the program will complete activation

Payment for purchases

Payment in the Steam store is carried out in the following ways:

credit Visa cards, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, JCB
debit cards Visa, Mastercard
PayPal
Webmoney
ClickandBuy
Yandex.Money
Xsolla
QIWI Wallet
And others less common (depending on the region).

An important point to remember in the context of how to use Steam is that it is not possible for two users to play from the same account.
if, when loading an activated game, the speed is lower than what your connection can provide, you need to go to “Settings” - “Download” and context menu change download server.
look for game secrets in various thematic communities.
Be sure to wait for the games to load 100% and do not allow the Internet connection to be interrupted, otherwise the entire activation procedure will need to be started again.