Steam how does it work

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Our bloggers. Follow Common Sense. Personalize your media recommendations. How old is your kid? Have an account? Here's how to sign up for a Steam account:. Go to steampowered. Select Join Steam. On the next screen, enter your email address , and re-enter it to confirm.

Click the links to review the Steam Subscriber Agreement and Valve Privacy Policy , and then check the box to acknowledge you've read and agree to them. Select Continue. Leave this page open. If you access your email with a web browser, do it in a new tab.

After you confirm your email address, you will return to this page to complete the signup process. When the Verify Your Email dialog box appears, Valve sends you a confirmation email. Open the email, and select Verify My Email Address. Close the email verification page and return to the Steam signup page that you left open earlier.

In the Steam Account Name box, enter a Steam account name. Steam checks to ensure the name you choose is available. If you don't like the name you chose during this step, you can change the username that other Steam users see at any time. Changing your Steam name is free, and you can do it as often as you like.

In the Choose Password box, enter a password, then re-enter it to confirm. Select Done. After you sign up for a Steam account, set up your profile. When you set up your profile, your friends can find you on the service. One of the best things about Steam is that you can play games online with your friends.

Here's how to set up your Steam profile:. Go to steamcommunity. Select your username. When the drop-down menu appears, select Profile. Select Setup Steam Profile. Enter a profile name. The profile name is the name that other steam users see when you interact with them. You can change it at any time. Enter a real name.

You don't have to use your legal name. If you are concerned about security or privacy, leave this field blank or use a fake name. This field is useful if you want your friends to find you by searching Steam for your real name.

Enter a custom URL to help people find your profile more easily. With Steam, you log in to the Steam service to install and play games, and this is entirely separate from your Ubuntu user account. Multiple Steam users can be and often are set up on the same machine. A game two users have purchased is not generally stored twice on the hard drive, but it is accessible just while logged in to Steam as a user who has purchased it.

In some ways, this is inconvenient--if I purchased two unrelated games, why can't my friend play one of them on one of my computers while I play another one on my computer?

On the other hand, this is also convenient--I needn't worry about what computers are available; I can log in to my Steam account anywhere and install the games and they won't affect anybody else's Steam account, even on the same machine. The availability of Steam on Linux is not just important because it's a games store, but because it signifies that a major commercial player in the PC games space now cares about Linux.

With PC games we're largely at the mercy of whichever platforms the producers choose. Bringing PC gaming to Linux attempts to address, for many Linux users who are also keen PC gamers, the one thing they still dual-boot with Windows for. These games by their nature are proprietary; they require significant investment in artwork and design to produce which does not lend the resulting product very well to open source equivalents of the same standard being made unlike other software like office suites, video players or 3d graphics editors.

Thus these games tend to remain proprietary, which means that users are at the mercy of whichever hardware platform and OS the game producers wish to target. Steam on Linux gives such game producers a little more reason to target Linux as well as Windows. It's not just the lack of quality games, it's also the historically poor quality support from hardware vendors, particularly graphics card vendors, that has held back PC gaming on Linux.

It's a chicken and egg scenario, and someone had to go first. The fact that Steam is going first means other players, once they see value in PC gaming on Linux, potentially have some reason to follow. Each game would need to be individually ported to Linux in order to be available via Steam - it's not enough just that the store itself now supports Linux.

Thankfully, a number of titles are already available for Linux and the number is expected to grow at a slow pace. Steam is a multi-player platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online. Steam provides the user with installation and automatic management of software across multiple computers, community features such as friends lists and groups and in-game voice and chat functionality. In addition to being a central hub for gaming software,they have created a version of Steam with altered functionality to be used in schools for educational software.

There are many single player games also available in the Steam store. For more check this out. Ubuntu Community Ask! Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Learn more. What is "Steam" and how does it work? Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 10 months ago. Active 3 years, 5 months ago. Viewed k times. Should I install Steam? Improve this question. Eliah Kagan k 51 51 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Ringtail Ringtail Related but not a duplicate : How can I install Steam? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. If You Are a Developer Steam is particularly relevant to: developers of games already provided through Steam by Valve , developers making mods for those games, and game developers planning proprietary software projects or, potentially, games with proprietary art but FOSS engines.

Basically, anything where content whose distribution is restricted by copyright and must be distributed selectively to customers.

For End Users: One Simple Question For users , however, it's usually pretty simple to figure out if you might benefit from subscribing to, installing, and using Steam: Are there programs you want to run, that are available for your operating system, and that are distributed on Steam? Core Concepts There is a saying which I think might originate in BSD culture, but I'm really not sure : You don't use an operating system, you use applications.