- Do I download the games to hard drive?
- How much is the service?
- Does Steam OS make the experience better or what?
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2I think you should start out on Steam's About page.– ken.ganongJul 10, 2015 at 19:34
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Hi Luis, Welcome to Arqade! Just a heads up, generally we prefer one question per 'question' asked here :)– Robotnik ♦Jul 12, 2015 at 15:05
1 Answer
Yes, games are downloaded to your hard drive before you can play them. You can select the location where the games are to be downloaded and stored by specifying a custom game library path.
Steam by itself is free to sign-up and use, however most games, to the exception of free-to-play ones, are paid and requires you to buy them. You can pay trough multiple means, including Credit Card and PayPal. You can also set up a Steam Wallet account to store funds dedicated to Steam purchases.
Steam OS is still a bit of an experiment for the upcoming Steam Boxes, and for dedicated Steam gaming computers. It doesn't make the experience particularly better as it is more of a Debian Linux distribution with Steam starting in Big Picture mode upon startup -- this implies the games you want to play must be running on Linux (indicated by the OS icons above the "Play" / "Buy" button on the game's Steam page), however their number is increasing and many are already available. For some games (mostly Source engine-based), there can even be a performance increase as they are optimized for the platform (more specifically, using OpenGL) and as there is minimal desktop interface overhead compared to Windows.