Portal free on steam until the 24th.

[kandrathe]

I don't think its free. When I first went to Steam, it said, "Download". I had to make an account and download steam, and once I did that, it now says, "Play", but not download. Does this mean I can only play it on Steam free until May 24th unless I buy it?

EDIT: I don't even think Steam is working?!? I click the PLAY button, and my task manager says something is on, and Steam is in the applications, but it will not open and nothing is happening? Is it suppose to be downloading Portal? This is one of the reasons I deleted Steam before... I couldn't stand its interface!

Maybe you don't understand Steam. When I buy a game through steam, it knows I own it, even if I uninstall it from my system. So, over time I own many games recognized by steam, but I only have the ones installed that I want to play. For example, I own HL2, but I played through it for a few months, and now it's not installed on my system. I removed it to make room for Left For Dead, and Left for Dead 2. There was a PopCap special a couple years ago where I could buy like 30 popular Popcap games for $30, but I don't play them all the time, so I have like one or two favorites installed, but should I desire, it would take about 15 minutes to pull one down from steam. I played through Torchlight for $10 when it was on special, and played it for about 100 hours over a couple months. Same deal, I install it when I want to play it.

Now, another feature of steam is that my account moves with me by signon, so if I move to another machine, I can play the games I own there as well. A friend of mine builds gaming machines, so once or twice a month he has a gaming party and a bunch of us head over to his house and we all jump on one of his machines and duke it out until the wee hours of the morning. We all have Steam, and we can play whatever games we all have licensed.

So, yes, Steam is free, you install it and run it when you like. If you don't want it running, you can shut it down. It will download games into a local content area, and if you want to free up the space you can remove the local content if you like (and download later if you like). It also allows me to add shortcuts to non-steam games, so I can use Steam's interface to launch all my games if I like.