Some things that Steam COULD bring to the table

[Fritz X]

@ Skoshi Tiger:

Even if your initial question was basically answered already, I'd still like to give you another, full answer myself.

What people told you so far is correct. If you're going through with things the way you have planned, you need to buy 2 copies of the game and register them on 2 different Steam accounts to play them simultaneously. The Steam license agreement ties one copy of a game to a single Steam account that is not supposed to be shared and forbidden to be sold to other people. Even if some smartasses create a new account for every new game they buy on Steam, just to be able to hand it to others...

If you're going to run both computers over the same internet connection, you may encounter connection problems due to a hardware/software conflict. In the past there have been similar problems with other online games via Steam, where people could only play online with only one account at a time, since there was a conflict while running two similar games via Steam over one router at a time. This can be solved with a change of the right port settings on your router. I'm no expert on this myself, but if you should encounter this problem, there definitely is a solution on the official Steam forums for this.

To the topic itself:

I'm a major fan of Valve's online destribution service. I'm using Steam for many years now and it changed over time to the better, alot. Yes, it was unstable in the very beginning and the integrated Friends system was pretty unstable until late 2007, things run smoothly now and grant players like me many advantages. Yes, there are some negative points about the whole deal, too.

For some people the offline mode simply refuses to work properly. A mate of me has this problem, he couldn't find a solution for this so far and I couldn't help him out, either. I can understand people disliking Steam if this happens to them.

The other thing is the fact that you can't (or at least you're not allowed...) resell games that make use of Steam. Definitely bad for players who buy alot of games to play through once and then sell them again. For people like me who buy only a few games and play them for years Steam however is simply perfect.

Many complaints I've read on these forums however seem to be utter, excuse me please, bullshit. Don't get me started with "Steam is viruz!!" talking...

[Blackdog_kt]

Well, thanks for your input Fritz X, it seems like you are making a balanced assessment of it.

You are one of the few people who use and like this service that actually went to the trouble to admit there are also drawbacks (as in anything else) and provide examples of them.