The most well known game platform.
Steam allows its users to buy, download and install games from their platform. Steam also updates most of the games automatically, which freed the user from the burden of doing it manually.
Official games platform (with miltiplayers options) by Valve's company, which allows users to download games purchased or free if-possible via their servers, no risk of viruses or other infections (unless you hack anything).
By cons, Steam is subject to bugs that sometimes requires all redownload very painful if you have several GB, or even tens of GB for big gamers.
It is the same for their games sometimes poorly updated or improperly downloaded.
One of the best digital distribution services for PC games. Great security thanks to Valve Safeguard and VAC, and I've never seen anything remotely suspicious or dangerous on the site. Very highly recommended!
Valve operates a fairly unprofessional and unorganized storefront and community service that, excluding the storefront, experiences constant network dropouts and unreliable social networking and communication services. There is a downtime of the 'friend' and 'item' server network every couple of days, and no one over at Valve, or even the Valve-loyal community, seems to acknowledge that these downtimes even exist, and if they do, they tend to downplay the importance of these downtimes, and essentially shrug them off as minor inconveniences.
When their servers encounter problems, the entire friend and community network becomes unreachable, and communicating with your friends is impossible until the connection is restored. The length of these downtimes tend to be rather short, averaging at two minutes or less.
However, when the downtimes occur every couple of days on average, the frequency, not the length, becomes the main source of annoyance.
Aside from the rather poor network reliability of the social networking and community services, the functionality and features of the Steam community cannot be matched by any other service or platform. Steam, when it is actually available and online, is a truly remarkable service with fantastic social, privacy and game-focused features, such as group or clan creation and management, profile customization via the new badge program, and even the central community feed which provides a similar look and feel to the Facebook or Twitter social networks.
The people of the Steam community can be rather insulting, rude and immature at times, but if you look deeper within the community, you'll find a thriving world dominated by mature adult gamers. All communities have their trolls, and Steam is no different. Steam probably has the most immature 'trolls' of any game-related social network, as they also have the largest active gaming community. It's simply unavoidable.
All in all, the Steam Community is a nice social networking service for video gamers, but the constant network reliability issues can be a real annoyance, especially when the network itself contains so many rich and media-heavy social features. Having an unreliable environment also makes standard friend communication bothersome at times, if not outright impossible during the weekly downtimes and network outages. However, when it all works as intended, it works marvelously well. Just be warned, you will experience downtimes, which result in bad customer experiences. Hence my rating.
A website where you can download games and the famous Steam Client. It's completly safe (watch out for the links users leave though, Steam is being one big target for malicious software spreading). However it's not very safe since there are violent games, but it's not based on that, and it also doesn't have sexually explicit content, so yeah.