Steam. So what is it?

[StaticRadion]

The downside is that Valve take a cut from everything, which can be less than nice for game developers but it has got to the point that if you are not big enough to own your own portal, you have to be on Steam (or possibly GoG, the nearest it has to a rival) to be seen at all.

GoG is a marketplace that sells DRM free games and only DRM free games. Their limited niche is what everyone wants, but for the most part we understand that it is no longer possible for AAA games and most of the gaming industry because creating a game without Digital Rights Management is basically asking to have your game pirated.

The three major DRM's out there I can think of off the top of my head are Steam, Origin, and Uplay. They employ a library management system that is also part of the DRM that limits your ability to in most situations to copy, share, or sell the games you have purchased. This is why you see physical PC editions of games, like Fallout 4, being sold with basically empty boxes, redemption codes, and online requirements.

So that is the little bit of wisdom I have left at this super late... er... early time of night/morning.

P.S. Shop for games from http://www.cheapshark.com where you can see the price history of games and set up email alerts when games you want fall below a price you set.

[Nethaufer]

*snip* I wasn't a great lover of steam when it first came out, but now I cant live without it, I will say that I don't play elite through it as I have multiple accounts so use the frontier launcher instead.

I never got into it right when it came out, 'cause I was a wee little lad and was only just getting into PC gaming. Suffice to say, I have not bought a hard copy of a game since getting it.
Although, like you, I don't play ED through Steam either, for various reasons, but the largest thing is that Valve will take cuts from everything you purchase for ED, even supposedly if you get it through FDev's store.

Also, another bonus of Steam is that if you get a liking of the overlay and ingame community features and stuff, it is completely possible to add a non Steam game to your library as a shortcut, and launch the game with the same overlay and features. That's how I normally run E:D, even though I used Frontier's launcher.
Speaking of the overlay, it's really nice because it has a built in web browser, so you don't have to alt tab as much. However, the browser is incredibly basic, and rather slow.

[Schmobius]

I use that browser overlay to play music (Pandora, Radio Sidewinder, Hutton Orbital Radio), keep my notes handy and log my achievements/ships/credits on Inara, plot my trade routes, and find components and single-hop trades on EDDB. I will often have 3-5 tabs open on there when playing Elite. It comes in very handy!

I'd love at some point to have a monitor arm swing out from the apparatus my HOTAS is attached to on the couch, and hold a tablet with some of that info (and maybe another arm for my keyboard, so I can stop moving it from the cushion next to me to my lap...), but for now, the overlay gets the job done.

[TorTorden]

And here I just play in borderless window and use a proper browser and media players

[Schmobius]

And here I just play in borderless window and use a proper browser and media players

Everything would be too small if I did that. I can barely read some things on the HUD as is.

[TorTorden]

Well I kind of cheat in that regard having a 34" ultra wide.
I could rather easily and comfortably fit 3 browser windows up at the same time in full size

But perhaps you misunderstand.
Borderless is practically the same as fullscreen. It just also work like a regular window and I can alt+tab freely.

Inow windows itself works like the overlay making it utterly superfluous.

[Schmobius]

Yeah, but wouldn't the point of that be to make it smaller so you can have another window up, or at least click around the edges?

[TorTorden]

You can make it run any resolution you could otherwise, but if you select a lower resolution than your desktop it will be a smaller centeted, and borderless window, since you are rendering dekstop resolution regardless that is the resolution sent to the monitor. Where as if you set it for a lower resolution and run fullscreen your monitor will be rendering that resolution and could internally scale it to fit.
PC monitors now pretty much look like absolute shite when given a resolution lower than its native, so you don't want to do that anyways.
I don't have g-sync or freesync, features such as that might very well require running in fullscreen since you are actively messing with refresh rates.

Used to be and quite frankly still is, that alt+tabbing during gameplay would cause something to go screewy when switching back and forth from desktop.
Its really great for watching videos on a second monitor or basically second monitor anything.
Its something gamers have been doing for quite some time to fix alt+tabbing woes but usually with variying sucess, its great more and more games now get this as a feature in the game directly.

[Schmobius]

Gaming about 10 feet from the screen makes most of that untenable.

[Mouse]

Only issue I have with Steam is that if I have to reboot or anything and my net connection is down.. I cannot play any of my single player games from Steam until I have an internet connection again.