Purchaseing from steam

[Sleepery]

Their bandwidth costs per unit sold are likely to be peanuts.

I wouldn't bet on it, the price our company is charged for a dedicated 100mb connection to the internet backbone is sodding outrageous.

 

[bledd]

I often defend steam, but the download 'managing' side of it is shocking..


there should be a slider to donate exactly how much bandwidth you want towards it

-on a 10mb connection, you could easily leave it downloading 100kb/s without it effecting your ping, annoyingly, steam just pauses (or tries to pause) the download instead of giving you the 'advanced' option you may expect to see

 

[Gimpymoo]

But for most games on Steam, Valve aren't paying for the bandwidth.

How so?

 

[iviv]

I'm also disappointed to hear about activation limits - not that I've had problems with them so far, but I intend to keep these games forever. What happens after I buy my 5th machine?

The activation limits are only for a select number of games, and aren't anything do do with steam. The games with install limits have the warning noted on the page. Off the top of my head Crysis has them, as well as Anno1404 and I think X3 has them?

Most of these should provide a revoke tool to unregister an install, but that's not much help if your pc dies.