Gamers Gate www.gamersgate.co.uk

I've been using Gamersgate for nearly 4 years now, and plan to go on using them for years to come (or until I finally concede that maybe I need to finish so much as a quarter of the games that I own already). Their download model is perfection itself. Unlike the awful Steam model, all you will ever have is your game download progress in a little box. No ridiculous, needless third party parasite to install, that forces itself onto your Startup entries, and many of the games are DRM free - read it and weep, Steam fans. Of course - Gamersgate do sell a lot of Steam games - the sad fact being that a publisher's choice to just whack a game out on Steam is beyond Gamersgate's control. But EA are still allowing Gamersgate to sell Battlefield 3. Try searching for that on Steam.

The sales on Gamersgate are INSANE around Christmas and the New Year. There are AAA titles to be had for less than £3. There are also daily deals on top of this. Also, usually throughout the year, the start of the week sees another week of sales and often Daily Deals. Though the weekly sales can end up being the same titles, if you are in any way dismissive of this I would suggest you directly compare with Gamefly.co.uk and have a look at their weekly sales - which are pathetic by comparison. All I ever hear, among the inherently lazy gaming journalists and/or bloggers of today, is mention of Steam sales - as if it's the only place worth bothering with. Gamersgate often trounce Steam for price. And they do it a lot more often. The site itself is incredibly easy to navigate, and they've worked hard to improve it over the years in terms of intuitiveness - compared with the sloppy mess you're confronted with via Steam.

I hate to keep on comparing with Valve's third party parasite but in a world that is largely under the illusion "there is only Steam" I feel it my duty to level the playing field somewhat, in some small way. But let me finally focus on the key points : site navigation is a pleasure, customer service are helpful if you run into problems, downloading of games is an absolute breeze.

I usually leave the larger games downloading overnight while I sleep and they're then waiting for me the next morning. After you've installed the game you're given the option to remove the temporary files that were used during the downloading process which only serves to make the whole process even cleaner. Direct2drive were the other main alternative that had no third party software to download your game, but sadly they have now turned into Gamefly - which does require it's own dreadful third party download client. Bear in mind on a final point that Gamersgate is run BY gamers. You only need find their YouTube account to see proof of that.

Gamersgate is a very solid, reliable service, with huge amounts of offers every year. I would not hesitate to recommend them to any PC gamer.