Free downloads freeing or enslaving the games addict ?

The summer of Steam downloads continues , and it seems Gabe and the gang at Valve have taken a little notice that Apple and Steve , when not handing out post antennagate iphonedoms  and trashing rivals , rule when it comes to  hooking users to their platform with free downloads , so from Steam  we have Alien Swarm free for every one .

This is the second pretty awesome free download in the last couple of months if you count Moon Base Alpha , each one of these brings a wave of new Steam users to the platform.


What Steam and Valve have in their court is a potential user base that is 10s of millions larger than Apples iTunes , and they cater for significantly more powerful hardware .


Would you rather pay  $5 for a full blown pc game , or $5 for an app , well the answer is you don`t have to . These days its likely you will get both a game from Steam and iTunes for free or , or for less .
Now this is synergy , and market forces at play , the free games and apps bring more users to iTunes and Steam , both encourage people to download legally , millions sign on and the costs to consumers decreases .


Initially


For now that is all of these free downloads are hooks , years from now we will be paying Steam and iTunes to store our beloved games and music collections on their clouds . So enjoy the free stuff ride whilst its here , in the long run we will be paying them back for cloud  server storage maintenance and backup .


but wait there is another hope...................but I haven't finished the script for that one yet ..

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