[sakopov]

Back in my more involved gaming days, Steam was a catastrophe for PC gaming. Other than picking up a game at a good price and automatically getting game patches from Steam, there was really nothing great about it. They had virtually no support. Your best bet was the forums. Throttled downloads were really fun too. Especially when you download a 5-gig game pack and have to sit there and resume your download every 5 minutes. Constant startup issues. I was patiently waiting for Battlefield 3 and was delighted to find out that EA decided to ditch Steam for this release, however their own Origin platform wasn't much better. Honestly, If i had to pick between slightly higher prices at the stores and Steam - i'd pick the stores. With app stores rolling in all over different platforms i'm afraid to say there is going to be very little room for Steam and this is probably a good thing. I'd rather see a good remake of Counter Strike and Half Life from Valve, than a new gaming platform.

[nitrogen]

Throttled game updates? For as long as I've had my present Internet connection, I download updates from Steam with a median speed of 6 MB/s.

[petitmiam]

I've never had an issue with throttled downloads. Doesn't your ISP have a Steam mirror?

Also, Counter-Strike: GO is being released on Aug 21. http://store.steampowered.com/app/1800/

[sakopov]

The last game i purchased from Steam was roughly a little over a year ago and up to that point any game downloads would take days. I'm not on any kind of uber-fast connection (10mb) and never had any issues with any issues streaming or downloading content from any other service.

P.S. I have heard of CS:GO which is nothing more than old CS:Source with improved environment. It isn't a bad game by any means, but it is lagging behind multiplayer shooters like CoD, Battlefield.

[Goronmon]

The last game i purchased from Steam was roughly a little over a year ago and up to that point any game downloads would take days. I'm not on any kind of uber-fast connection (10mb) and never had any issues with any issues streaming or downloading content from any other service.

You're the first person I've ever heard say that Steam throttled downloads, and I've heard and had a lot of complaints about Steam in the past. That's just not one of them. In fact, the only thing close to throttling I've heard is users wanting the ability to manually throttle game downloads.

I'm not saying your lying, I'm just not sure that it was as a result of something on Steam's end.

[corin_]

The general feedback from the CS community has been either that GO is a good improvement, or that it is too different to its predecessors (Source and even more so the original CS, 1.6).

Obviously BF and CoD offer single player gaming, but for multiplayer there's a good case to be made (and one that often is made) that CS out-does both of them in terms of game play.