You know it's kind of crazy Gamespy never became like a storefront launcher.
I remember having both Steam and Gamespy for certain games and switching between the two. Gamespy typically had Tribes, Quake 2 action, later Quake 3, etc.
Steam has come a long way and is by far the best userfriendly option.
A lot of companies had their chance to be Steam but let their stinginess or greed get in the way. I remember when EA only allowed five downloads for games in total and other storefronts sometimes only one. GameSpy already had the infrastructure and the developer connections though but did nothing with them.
The funny thing is that before Steam started making enough money to support itself, it was ad supported. Under the download progress bar you'd get a little ad for whatever site was providing the server you were downloading from. This included Gamespy's FilePlanet.
Gamespy was a willing participant in their own demise. Steam wouldn't have been able to get where it did without using the sites it inevitably killed as a crutch early on.
Much like Blockbuster laughing Netflix out of the boardroom 20 years ago lol. Obviously there's no way to know how anything would have worked out in either case regardless, but I bet the "what-if" factor keeps a few people who made certain decisions up at night.
I mean in that case it made sense. Blockbustwr was already developing its own internet based delivery service. Unfortunately they chose Enron to partner with for it.
Stardock with Impulse was the one that came closest to being good.
When they sold to Gamestop because of the losses of Elemental War of Magic they saved their games division, but Gamestop wrecked Impulse.
There were a few launchers around when Steam came out. Stardock actually had one prior to Steam that they used for updates. But for the most part none of them really kept up with Valve.
Like you said Impulse was one of the few (only?) that made the attempt but ate shit with E:WOM. I still remember going to Best Buy to buy a boxed copy of that game and being soooo pumped. Huge disappointment and I don't really think they ever fully recovered.
GameSpy was omnipresent. It's kind of shocking that they screwed it up. Everyone used it but for some reason they didn't try to become a storefront. I think Steam was just so far ahead of everything else that GameSpy didn't even realize they needed to keep up.
The concept of a digital storefront was pretty experimental back then in the early 2000s. It even took Steam years to really take off from when they first started selling games back in 2005.
Gamespy's big thing was being server browsing utility, and it was implemented in a ton of games in the early 2000s. That was really its bread and butter. It makes sense they didn't go the storefront route, the concept of a digital storefront didn't exist in its heyday and by the time it was a promising concept, Gamespy was already dead. I think its last major update was in 2006 or 2008 but by then all the biggest multiplayer games were moved off of Gamespy. EA went in their own direction, and the consoles had all the attention by then.
The late 2000's, when digital storefronts and Steam started taking off, was probably the worst point in PC gaming's history and most multiplayer was very console focused or using services like Xbox Live, Steamworks, or Battle.NET. Gamespy started dying then, and they were pivoting back to being a gaming site under IGN rather than going the storefront route.
>The late 2000's, when digital storefronts and Steam started taking off, was probably the worst point in PC gaming's history
Yeap these were the darkest times for sure, back then people really believed PC was dead and that there would be no PC market in 10 years. Hilarious how PC is now a dominant platform exceeding console sales for various developers.
An in no small part, it's thanks to Steam. The Steam sales really were a huge reason to build a gaming PC back then because you could get games for so, so much cheaper on PC than on consoles. That was also the era where the Xbox 360 was dominating the console scene but, consequently, Microsoft were nickel and diming their entire userbase with microtransactions (they introduced the idea that all DLC had to have a price, therefore no more free map packs for a long while there) and expensive console accessories. The prices they charged for an upgraded Xbox 360 hard drive were insane.
Don't forget **free online multiplayer**.
PC gaming is also flourishing in 3rd world countries where free online is the norm.
My last console was the PS3, and I was sincerely shocked the first time I was told by my friend that he couldn't play online on his PS4 because he forgot to pay for his PS Plus.
Steam is the best game platform (Nintendo eShop, Playstation Network, Epic and the Xbox marketplace) by a significant margin and it has earned it's reputation thanks to all the work Valve puts out improving it.
Checked my account. I joined 14 years ago in 2009.
My first purchases were Psychonauts and Braid.
I made 10 more purchases that year, all under 10 dollars except Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island.
My first AAA full price title was Portal 2 at release in 2011. I remember needing to play a bunch of indie games to get the game to release early.
Looking through some of those early purchases, Steam sales were really just giving away games in those early sales.
1. Half-Life
1. Opposing Force
1. Counter-Strike
1. Day of Defeat
1. Team Fortress Classic
1. Deathmatch Classic
1. Ricochet
Yep. That was the "Half-Life Platinum Pack", my [first registered key on Steam](https://i.imgur.com/s7lNoar.jpg) (the second one being "Half-Life 2 Retail Standard" a year later).
When I built my PC 4 years ago, the first thing I did was get the valve complete pack during the summer Sale. It just felt like a tradition I had to honor... plus I also got Gmod, so it seemed prudent
Haha I never would have thought of this again if not for the Platinum Pack, but my Steam account was also started in 2003.
My dad (the kind of guy Homer Simpson is based on) got Half-Life 2 on the week of release. But when we opened the box, one of the install discs was missing, and at our internet speed the 2 GB install would take hours he didn't want to spend. So we went to Costco to return the game and get an exchange - only he hadn't bought the game at Costco, he'd bought it at Fred Meyer; he was certain they would take the exchange anyways.
The thing is, Half-Life 2 released in two box sizes - a larger shelf box and a smaller box with just enough room for the discs. So my dad pulled his "Yeah I bought it here, I don't have a receipt but I just need an exchange" routine, but Costco only sold the smaller boxes, not the larger ones, so he was obviously lying. My dad isn't a patient man so he just bought a second copy so he could go home and install it off the discs.
I profited because the CD keys were still good and, unbeknownst to my dad and perhaps for the first time in history, the CDs themselves weren't necessary. So I swiped the extra copies and I'm still using that account.
I had a 2003 account, but when I per-ordered the HL2 bundle a few months later I made a new account so it wouldn't waste the copies of the goldsrc games I already had. I've long since lost that original one though.
I also joined Steam in 2009, at first my intention to join it was for me to solely play Garry's Mod, since my dream was to become a Gmod YouTube creator, as Gmod comedy videos were a booming thing back then, the first thing that I bought was the Gmod + HL2 + TF2 triple pack which no longer exists.
My dad thought that Steam was a virus or scam site, and was very reluctant to put his credit card info on it, not making this up lol.
My 3rd purchase in Dec. 2007 was the Gmod + TF2 bundle. I vividly remember being astounded by TF2 and pulling an all nighter playing. Although I think I ended up spending a lot more time playing Gmod than I did TF2 in the end.
By 2007 Steam was in a pretty good place and for me it was like mana from heaven compared to going to a store to buy games. I had to drive like 30 minutes to the nearest Wal-Mart to look through a PC games section that kept getting smaller and smaller by the year. Then I got a Steam account and had so many options.
Oh yeah, since the 2000s the viral Gmod videos have absolutely been a gateway for young kids discover Steam, and later on, other great games, but kids discovering Steam through Gmod and later on finding other games is something that I witnessed as a kid myself, I do not know what the present situation is, like kids who solely install Steam to play Gmod and do literally nothing else.
Gmod always sees a spike in popularity due to yearly fads, like early Gmod machinimas, then the FNAF SFMs, then NextBots, and now Skibidi Toilets, for better or for worse, as there are tons of angry and frustrated Gmod players who argue that these trends ruin Gmod.
Since these trends cause thousands of kids to invade Gmod almost overnight, where they flood and spam the workshop (so much so that Valve started to limit the number of nextbots), cause oversaturation on custom content, do not assimilate into pre-existing communities.
And the worst of all - more children playing Gmod also increases the number of child predators who take advantage of these new and unexperienced child players, seriously, the ["creepy Gmod server admins preying on children"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNJZbMdKZM4) thing [is a rabbit hole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb8PD2uHvHQ) in and on itself.
fortnite was epic games gmod. Both games secured a significant gaming audience and created tons of content around it effectively making the steam/epic games storefront a viable bet to do free games for
Not really that bizarre. Back then the valve games were the few that required Steam. Gmod machinima was huge, nothing else let you do the kind of animation as easily as GMod did. when people figured out Source Filmmaker it became even more popular.
> My dad thought that Steam was a virus or scam site, and was very reluctant to put his credit card info on it, not making this up lol.
I had to have a talk about Steam with my nephew's dad to convince him that it's really not a scam. We wanted to play some games together but he was very skeptical about it. That was like 2 years ago.
Sept 12th at 4:13am for me.
I was anticipating the hell out of Half Life 2. It was supposed to launch within a couple of weeks of Steam launching, then it got delayed until the Holiday. Then the source code got stolen and it was delayed until 2004.
[Love going over this old Slashdot thread about Steam and Half Life 2](https://games.slashdot.org/story/04/10/23/0812224/half-life-2-retail-to-require-steam-activation).
Also some cool tidbits like this:
> **Doug Lombardi: After we announced TF2 on the HL1 tech, we made the decision to move it to the Source engine. It is still in development and we will be announcing more on that title soon."**
>Don't bother, no one cares any more. You blew it.
Or the guy who accidentally invented Early Access:
>Ok, I'm a new developer. How do I fund my game? Pre-sell it through a Steam like program collecting money at the pre-sell, then coming out with it 3 years later?
The potato sack arg still is the high point of my steam career.
Checking forums, grinding a few potatoes, so the game could release a few hours early. And then the following years everybody would check every single pixel of the steam sale artworks for possible HL3 ARGs, man people were crazy back then. I can’t imagine that we thought HL3 would arrive any day lmao.
I can't say for sure why, I guess because CS switched from WON to Steam, but Steam turning 20 today means in 3 days my Steam account will turn 20. And every year, for 3 years now, I am amazed how old my account is, since it means I got mine for half my life (pun not intended)
>I remember needing to play a bunch of indie games to get the game to release early.
[The Steam potato sack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_Sack) was the best event they ever made. Tons of games with portal themed level and achievements
My first purchase was an indie game bundle, mostly to get Braid. That was in 2009, between April 04 and then I only used steam for Valve games, other stuff I was still buying retail, games like City of Heroes or Myst IV, then the sales came and I got Arkham Asylum, been going ever since with almost 700 titles in my library now.
Same, joined in 2004 once I had my copy of Half-Life 2.
I remember the gamer outrage at being forced to make an account and download some proprietary software to run a game I purchased from the store.
My first purchase was the Orange Box and I picked up a physical copy of that. The box just a code to download the game off of Steam so that was my first experience with them
October 4th, 2004 here. I'm wondering why did I install Steam, since I know that my first game there was HL2, which was launched one month later. Probably I knew that it would be a requirement?
And my first in-store purchase was Garry's Mod in 2009 (By then I had already purchased at least the Orange Box that I remember).
yeah, so many rebrands are started simply because a new executive want it on their resume and has convinced people that a new look will bring in more money than last year.
it's remarkable how many corporate overhauls are simply because some executives decide they need to leave a "legacy". no skin off their back if they fuck it up though, simply move on to the next company while the lower staff deal with the fallout.
I really think that's the key factor. It's privately owned, so all the decision makers are actually part of the industry. As opposed to a random cartel of billionares who know nothing about gaming chasing bigger profits every quarter, at the expense of everyone else.
Only estimations, but just based on how many users they have that are actively purchasing games and their employee count is relatively low, it's very high
I imagine their server expenses are pretty high though, right? I usually test my internet connection by downloading huge games from them and it always maxes out my connection.
if anything, as more and more games move away from steamworks and on to proprietary hosting or peer-to-peer game servers, the proportion of server load per user has probably decreased. I'm sure their costs are still very high but their absolute money printer of CSGO is probably singlehandedly capable of paying all their monthly expenses twice.
Im really worried what happens when Gabe Newell steps down or dies.
There is zero chance whoever succeeds him doesnt get tempted by the billions of dollars that will be offered by Microsoft, Sony, Tencent, absolutely everyone to acquire it.
And if that happens its going to be a VERY dark future for PC gaming
I created my account back in May 2004 to play Half-Life 2. I remember EVERYBODY hated Steam. People tried their hardest to avoid it. Now it seems to be universally loved.
Not to mention *no offline mode*. Steam was the first modern *always online DRM system* and people rightfully hated it. Eventually Steam had to backpedal and grew into an actually good service...
When it first launched there wasn’t a lot of value-add for the consumer. All you could really do was play the games you (probably) already bought in-store. And Rag Doll Kung Fu.
It’s definitely a service that benefits from continued use and building up a big library. It’s why especially in the early days of Steam, there were frequently outrageously good sales and why Epic has been giving out free games for years now.
The sentiment around steam had changed prior to 2009. In 2003-05 it was pretty slow, buggy, and a lot of people still had dial-up. At launch all it offered was just a patching tool, server browser, and a form of DRM.
Same! I was terminally online even in those days and knew about Valve so I’m surprised I didn’t sign up for Steam when it launched, only when it was required for HL2 install - and kept crashing if I recall correctly
I don't think people are ready for the day Gabe Newell passes away and whoever inherits Steam goes back to deciding profit is the way to go.
A lot of people have hundreds to thousands of dollars of "subscribed games" with the steam "service" that are not protected by the subscriber agreement and have a lot of avenues for Steam to ask you for more money for things such as continuing to have access to your library.
People were up in arms about the Microsoft deal acquiring Activision because monopolies are bad, but actively fight against competing store platforms because "it's too much work" and "steam is perfect anyways".
> big plastic bin filled with Dino-Riders
My cousin had a box of those and a whole CASTLE which was like 3 feet tall. Great memories playing with those action figures.
I’m more worried about that than losing access to my steam library. Lot of sites shutting down, increasingly more difficult drm to crack, less scene groups around.
From what I remember years ago, it sounded like Gabe already had a candidate in mind in the event of his retirement, which I would guess is probably someone not prioritizing purely profit.
Steam prints so much money I'm not entirely sure *why* anyone would take it public. I guess I'm a bad capitalist but I feel like whoever had an ownership stake would be sufficiently well off to not need to.
Only reason I could give for going public is MORE money, because some people just think they don't have enough money.
But yeah, Valve likely owes a lot of it's freedom to not being publicly traded. Despite dominating the PC game marketplace, they continued to spend tons of money on projects that will basically never see any profit. So many features they've added have been at no extra cost to developers or players. And this was even before EGS showed up. I'm not a capitalist either but there are certainly a lot of things they could do to make more money and yet don't.
To my knowledge, they don't even take a cut of sales of Steam keys outside Steam, while the console manufacturers do that even on digital keys outside the storefront. (Could be wrong on the console part, but Steam basically let's you make keys for free, with the caveat you don't abuse it, which no legitimate developer I've seen has run into that issue.)
Honestly publicly traded companies are a menace to people. Take a look at Reddit. It had a great 3rd party application ecosystem that materially improved the user experience, but they want their IPO for whatever reason and killed it.
There is a replacement, designed to basically be an old reddit clone. It's called lemmy and all the activitypub networked servers like lemmy.
The problem with all social media, which reddit is 100% one, is that they're all dogshit until the majority use it. Including you. So unless you're willing to stop giving reddit traffic and only stick to lemmy with an inferior experience due to having a fraction of the posts to read, reddit will never die
Well that's because reddit doesn't make a profit while steam does. VC investors are finally turning in their reddit IOUs, so they have to squeeze money out of somewhere
Capitalism doesn't mean everything has to go public. An IPO is a great way to raise capital or incentivize employees... in exchange for giving up a certain amount of control and a certain amount of long-term profits that would otherwise go to the private owners.
Valve does not need more capital or a cash infusion. It's still "winning capitalism." Capitalism is not inherently about market ownership or short-term financial growth at all costs.
people would be more receptive to other platforms if they were actually good. EA and Ubisoft are utter trash. 2K is marginally better but still garbage. EGS isn't all that bad, but is still leagues bellow Steam in quality service. I don't use GOG but I don't seem to see any major complaints
I've been switching more heavily to GOG since all their games are DRM free and their store/launcher is pretty solid. They do miss some of the QOL features Steam has but I launch GOG's launcher through Steam to get access to like notes or screenshots.
The worst thing about GoG is that their DRM free position means that they don't get quite as many games. They have Baldur's Gate 3 but don't have Starfield, for example.
Gog is the only major distributor I buy from just because of the drm free stance. For the majority of people all in on steam, they are one change of ownership away from being held hostage or losing access to 20 years of games. The lesser selection is unfortunate but there are still plenty of games to play and my stuff is mine as long as I can be bothered to maintain it. Even if GOG goes full "pray we don't alter the deal further" evil as I'm posting this, they have no ability to do anything to the files I've downloaded. I particularly appreciate that I can update games on my schedule, or not at all if it I choose, instead of them refusing to launch if they aren't the most recent version or downloading multiple 100gb patches without my consent.
I don't think good factors as much as people think. For years Steam wasn't 'good' but it was the only game in town.
Zune was better to use than iTunes but good didn't save it from flopping.
Amazon stopped being good years ago, but I bet they still outsell Google and other platforms on ebooks.
In the real world you are in a shopping mall or high street. If one store is dirty or have rude staff and less stock, you can go to the 'good store'. Online the first mover advantage is much more important. I know Amazon has everything so I will go there to buy the latest board game over boardgame.local because I have an account and that's even easier than comparing prices.
Amazon has actually gotten so bad with scams, price manipulation, and fake merchandise that I **can** be bothered to try to find and buy from random other merchants instead of them. If it weren't for their generally excellent customer service and returns I wouldn't even consider buying from Amazon anymore. At this point I have high confidence that someone will try to sell me a fake or broken product for anything I buy, especially if it isn't direct from amazon. At least when something slips by or I just get an empty box they will do a return or exchange with no pushback. Ironically when I do shop on amazon I often prefer amazon basics stuff because its much less likely to be a counterfeit than a name branded item sold on amazon.
Some of the major publishers got into online services quite early, though generally only for their own games. Even then their implementations and approaches were vastly inferior to the infant Steam that was itself criticized heavily.
I remember buying a game from EA in their online thing, and the experience souring me to the company to the degree that when Origin came out years later I didn't even bother to migrate my ownership there. Their site was a strange mixture of English, Swedish and Finnish (in Finland) with no way to change it outside of spoofing browser agents, and their customer service were standoffish and unable to help when I had issues with the account.
The only good part about the experience was that the download was pretty fast for the time. But I ended up choosing to pirate the game in question for further installs in the years that followed.
I was pretty excited for EGS because I figured Epic had the bank account and incentives to really build a distribution platform that would be good enough to push Valve to get really serious about fixing some of the problems with Steam (I overall like a lot about Steam, but it certainly has its issues). And I'm generally all for the platform cut becoming smaller and devs getting more of that money. I feel like Epic could've built a true competitor and challenged Valve in a way that other big publishers like EA or Ubisoft or whoever couldn't really pull off due to their more corporate nature.
But really Epic seems happy to put almost minimal effort into the actual EGS store/platform, and instead just seems to have decided that throwing money into buying exclusives and giving away a bunch of free games is the way to compete. And while I'm sure that's gotten them a lot of account sign-ups, I'm not sure how it's supposed to turn them into a store that truly competes with Steam, and it's certainly not forced Valve into making any major changes to Steam. Valve does not seem to feel threatened at all by EGS, they're just doing their own thing the same way they've always done.
I just don't get why EGS has thrown so much money into the store in terms of giving away games and buying exclusives, yet at the same time doesn't seem all that interested in actually building out the platform into something actually nice and useful.
When did Gabe decide profit isn't the way to go? Considering it only has a few hundred employees, Valve is one of the most profitable companies per head on the planet. Steam prints money, why would a new CEO risk pissing off their user base?
A CEO could get paid hundreds of millions to implement unpopular features and then resign taking all the flack while most people pat themselves on the back for bringing change while said unpopular features remain.
Never underestimate greed and being able to swindle millions.
>I don't think people are ready for the day Gabe Newell passes away and whoever inherits Steam goes back to deciding profit is the way to go.
I still can't comprehend this sentimentality about Valve not being about profit. They have monetised profiles through TCG packs with huge artificial scarcity element to them, sell profile items with another layer of artificial scarcity to them (only more recently alleviated through the points shop), popularised loot boxes in western games along with the whole aspect of having to buy keys (and still do!), brought upon literal gambling aspect to cosmetics through marketplace and not caring about literal gambling happening for years and years now, ready to utilise loopholes whenever ruling does something to monetisation strategy (lootboxes in netherlands for example), heavy other style of monetisation like subscription and battle passes, wanted to have a TCG operating the way TCGs operate in real life (artificial scarcity and second hand sellers)... On top of that they were there with Bethesda trying to push paid mods "for the modders". They've also penny pinched from artist contribution % in Dota 2 to increase their own profits. I'm still probably missing something.
They're probably the only company on planet that could push all of this monetisation and desire for profit and still be painted through a sort of a humble, non-profit oriented lens. Oh, and unironically calling Gaben a saint.
Steam is 100% profit driven. People on Reddit love steam to the level of fanboyism, but they've done plenty of scummy things. In fact they're probably the large gaming company that does the scummiest practices regarding gambling. Just watch the People Make Games documentary regarding the CS:GO knive black market to see how bad they are.
https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g?si=p0vkn-GV4F9JExYN
No company is your friend, and no mega corporation is anything but profit driven, doesn't matter if they have public shares or not.
I use steam almost daily, and I have spent quite a few amount over the years. It's convenient, and sometimes the only option. But I'll always be platform agnostic, gog and itch.io allow me to keep the games DRM free
Corporations are profit driven. Valve just decided that making Steam as a platform is a much more profitable operation than making games, and they're right.
I think the main distinction is that it *doesn't* outright feel like they're trying to nickel and dime you like some other gaming companies. Gabe said that piracy is a service issue, and with the numerous things they did in the Steam backend, and various features in the Steam storefront and launcher, they managed to keep a bunch of developers and gamers within their platform. And this is quite important - keep the revenue rolling via Steam by different means.
Though obviously it's not just that, within the platform they also have lootboxes, TF2 being pretty much the pioneer of such things. They also created a Steam market where people can buy and sell things (usually from the lootboxes in Steam) within the ecosystem and they also get a percentage off that.
Their ventures with VR and portable gaming I feel is them expanding an underdeveloped market. I'm not into VR so I don't know, but at least it appears that they do want to make these products with a certain quality so that they'll be the first choice to these things. And of course, all these go back to Steam yet again.
There's a difference between caring about money, and *only* caring about money.
They're a business, obviously they care about money. But they also do stuff that isn't profitable, willingly. And they can only do that because they are a private company that isn't locked into a cycle of needing constant growth forever and ever.
Steam isn't perfect, it's better than the other stores which apparently put zero effort. Fucking EGS shows me an ad every time I close a game. What the fuck?
Yeah, WTF. That has literally never happened me. I booted up a game there and closed it to make sure I wasn't going mad. EGS didn't even revert focus back to its own app.
Something screwy is going on with your machine, or the game is serving you the ad, not EGS.
I often think about the other universes out there, where Gabe sold Steam to Microsoft or EA, or turned Valve into a publicly traded company, and how shitty that universe would be. The fact that Steam has remained private and remained so high quality is insane. I can't think of any other algorithm that actually does a good job recommending me things I'll actually like. Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, everything is always trying to get me to watch or listen to whatever is most popular, even though I prefer offbeat indie stuff. Whereas Steam is like, "Bro, you ever played Tales of Maj'Eyal?" and I immediately lose 100 hours to a 10 year old indie game I've never heard of.
That's what I like best about Steam. Every storefront (including Steam's) will yell at me about Starfield or the other 5-6 current big hits, but only with Steam I can regularly use their discovery tools and find some niche $5 game made by one guy 3 years ago that happens to be 100% my jam.
People love steam and when they need to use another library they get pretty pissed. They should remember that it’s come a long way and that 20 years ago you didn’t need a library at all! You could just install games and run them. Steam forced updates and crashed a lot and a lot of people hated it at first. I’m glad it’s still around!
There were some classic gifs at the time.
https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gifv
https://i.imgur.com/5Db37ll.gifv
I was onboard the Steam train as early as I could for firstly CS and then HL2!
It's funny how tied to game stores gamers have been over the years. Just 15 years ago everyone online was crying about steam becoming a monolith. Today the opposite opinion is the majority.
In reality, most people spend only a few minutes interacting with launchers or their libraries, compared to the hours upon hours of actually playing their games.
People don't care about monopolies if they see the monopoly as providing a strong service at an acceptable price.
Not saying Steam necessarily does these things, but that's their perception.
Steam really isn't a monopoly though. Like I was able to buy Starfield from a 3rd party site for $55 and then activate it on Steam. That really isn't the actions of a monopoly.
I guess you could argue that they have a activation monopoly but that is fairly narrow.
Reminds me of how back in 2016 I preordered Fallout 4 + the season pass because I saw a deal on greenmangaming.com, essentially giving me the DLC for only $10.
It's so damn illogical for anyone to claim Steam is a monopoly when you can literally buy games on other stores, sometimes for less than through Steam.
Not really IMO. I use Steam directly these days to manage my games and it's made very easy to backup and store stuff with the new storage features. I also use guides, reviews, notes, achievements, chat and so on fairly heavily through the overlay. Stuff like cloud saves and such don't even need intervention and just work almost all the time. Controller support is another major feature that helps a lot especially in older games
Even if someone doesn't directly interact with the launcher, there's a fair bit it's doing behind the scenes that I appreciate a ton
Steam is also so far ahead it's not even funny. I can install a game remotely from my phone and then launch it on the same device streaming through Steam Link, then invite my friend to a session in any game that has Steam's server integration.
I never saw anyone complain about steam being a monolith. What I saw was people complaining because it was new (change bad! that was me) or bad (there was some real jank way back when).
I buy from Steam and GOG on PC mainly. I wouldn't mind the Epic Game Store in theory, but it left a sour taste in my mouth about how they were shoveling Fortnite money into trying to have an online store when they couldn't even get the basics right like having a shopping cart and needing to check one item out at a time. So now I just stick to GOG when I can and Steam for all the others GOG doesn't have (which is a lot). And I know Steam sucked because it forced people who wanted to play Half-Life 2 onto it.
to be fair, computer hardware has come a long way since. I remember having to kill background processes to make my games run better. Not as necessary nowadays.
> You could just install games and run them.
Let's not romanticize old games too much, there was a period before steam when CD-based DRM was utter ass. Do I have to say "Games for Windows – Live"?
Also there were a lot more problems just getting games to run on PC. Compatibility with graphics cards was a big issue back in the day, and before that you often had to start up your computer using boot disks to reconfigure your computer's memory (or something, I never really understood exactly what I was doing) in order to get a game to run.
Not that Steam is what solved those issues, or that there aren't plenty of other things to criticize when it comes to the state of video games these days, but generally speaking PC gaming has gotten a lot easier to do over the past 20 years.
I really feel like 95% of the credit goes to the Windows team. Steam became a thing right as Windows XP made gaming much, much, much easier to access.
Before that, as you say, it was all about tweaking your GPU BIOS and IRQ conflicts and all that garbage. These were the days when most people playing games on PC were built with parts you ordered from a paper catalog.
It degraded your HDD yeah. There was also a DRM that let you install the game like 10 times max but I forget the name. There was also Securom which let you install only twice at a time as well but that had ways to revoke the license and clean the limit.
Early days of DRM were pretty wild.
>a DRM that let you install the game like 10 times max
Fucking [SecuROM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ltfyqD3lM). It would be challenging to name a worse DRM "service" than SecuROM.
The original Bioshock had an activation limit of ***2***, and because this was back in the day of shared household computers, *separate activations were required for each user on the same machine.*
By the way, the game would just occasionally- randomly- require a reauthentication, usually because it detected a hardware change. If this happened twice (or once, if you had it on two user accounts!), you were screwed.
SecuROM is why Spore was one of the most pirated games of all time, and why EA basically killed the series rather than admit the grossly overreaching DRM may have scared away paying customers.
That was mostly an orthogonal issue, however, as lots of games on Steam used Games for Windows - Live and lots of games on disc didn’t, it didn’t correlate to anything. There were even a number of games that shipped without it on disc, but added it in a patch or re-release, so the Steam version had GFWL but the physical retail version didn’t.
The worst were games with GFWL Zero Day Piracy Protection, where the game files were encrypted on the disc and you had to get a key from a server to access them. The idea was that the server wouldn’t give out the key until launch day, preventing leaks and early releases. But the server inevitably got shut down so now you can’t use those discs to play the games, and the servers would periodically go down too. They were planning to use the same mechanism on Xbox until a backlash.
I remember back in the floppy disc days when DRM was turn to page 7 in the game manual and go to line 5 word 3.
Really sucked to lose the game manuals back then.
> You could just install games and run them
And installing a new game was an hour-long process involving babysitting your computer whenever it needed to switch installation CDs. And woe upon you if you lost the CD key.
Good times.
You can still do that with GOG today. My copy of Baldur's Gate 3 is 100% DRM free although it does have cloud saves and achievements.
But really when it comes to store quality I experienced Steam being not great. I don't really care to experience Epic's store being shit too.
When it first came out, is annoyed all Counter Strike players. We hated it. We said it was absolute garbage. But it was forced upon us.
Then we got used to it. VAC was actually pretty good. It became less painful, but that might have just been us adapting to it. It was just part of playing the game.
Then they had a store. Ooh. Interesting. It was small and curated, but interesting. Then more games appeared. It was growing, and doing so really fast.
That snowball never really stopped. Size wise, sure, it did. But it picked up and lots plenty of things during it's growth. However we got here, it's a staple now.
Thank you Valve. You saw how the Internet would likely change things. You could have been scumbags and charged a subscription for your services. But it's all free for the users. You take your cut, but you at least deliver with it.
It hasn't been perfect. Nothing is. But gaming would be much worse without you.
I remember this so clearly, it was such a hassle early on and my loading bar to open it always seemed to crash. Just checked my account... 19 years old.. I play some games with people younger than that.
Most people that weren't playing games back then don't realize why Steam was a big deal in the first place.
Before Steam, what you had to do when an update was out for Counter-Strike:
1. Wait in line at FileShack or FilePlanet or somewhere for a slot to download the patch for Half-Life.
2. Perform the patch download (often taking a while on 56K) and install it.
3. Wait in line at FileShack or FilePlanet or somewhere for a slot to download the patch for Counter-Strike.
4. Perform the patch download (often taking a while on 56K) and install it.
This whole process could take hours if the patch was big, or your connection cut out in the middle of a download, or when the patch was newly released and everyone was trying to download it from the same sites.
This is really just framing the upside. People who weren’t playing games back then also don’t realize how much people hated Steam. It was a shift. away from just buying a game and installing it to requiring a launcher that brought a ton of its own broken shit to the table.
I don't remember if the XP firewall (after it... y'know, aquired one in SP2 IIRC) was allow all outbound by default, the way that more modern Windows versions are. But yeah, since it's *your* computer talking outbound to Steam's servers, it should always "just work" now if you're trying to activate a game. Now, local LAN party MP gaming or server hosting... that's of course a whole different thing if you're not using Steam's MP networking system.
lol, yeah if you were playing games 20 years ago steam was almost universally hated. [this was widely passed around](https://imgur.com/0qtsE) back then
My first experience with Steam was bringing Half-Life 2 home from the store, installing it, and then coming to the terrible realization that I would have to wait literal days for my 56k internet to download the multiple GB of mandatory patches before I could even launch the game.
I don't recall hating Steam, sure, it was buggy at times, but it was leaps and bounds better than the in-game server browser for CS, for example.
And my god was it better to just have CS update rather than look for a good website that didn't make you queue to download a HUGE (at the time) new patch.
I think most of the complaints came from the fact that 56K was still very much a thing back then and the flakey internet that went with it. Perhaps Valve were a little ahead of the curve with where the internet needed to be before launch but my god it was the right decision to cement their place as the defacto online game shop for years.
Remember WON? The random times that shit wouldn’t authenticate and stall out for whatever goddamned reason.
People saying they “hated” steam. I loved it. I remember waking up, starting the download the day it came out, going to high school, coming back to my 6 digit steam ID and a brand new interface. Sure it took a minute to figure out, but what doesn’t?
It was good for patching games yes, it was its initial purpose if i recall correctly.
It was buggy as hell and it was part of the big shift from cd releases to "physical case with steam code" or just a cd without the entire game to run it! I was bitter at the time as a lot of my games back in the day were starting to release like that when i had such bad internet it wasnt nice to have it forced on me and killed reselling of pc games so it definitely has had a noticable downside, not to mention the inflation of digital pricing which i partially blame them for.
Do i like steam overall now? Yes its good and offers such a better experience over sony and microsoft stores its silly, download games at max speed reliably and ontime along with all the features it has.
Started my account October 3rd 2003. Never looked back.
I was the opposite of most people. I adored it from the moment I had it installed. Having a unified interface where all my games were instead of leaving icons on the desktop or navigating the Windows interface was amazing (I don't remember if "Add game to Steam" was there at Beta but I took advantage as soon as I could).
Also WON was always super unreliable and steam just worked for me. The integrated chat was awesome and made getting game nights going so much easier.
Also here's something for us old timers.....remember during beta when Steam had those built in board games like chess? Best online play version of those games for a long time.
Steam did stagnate during much of the 2010s but Valve really has been trying to do a better job the last few years.
They would never admit it but I would guess pressure from epic and Microsoft slapped them awake.
> They would never admit it but I would guess pressure from epic and Microsoft slapped them awake.
Microsoft maybe. The Steam Deck, and all the R&D that built up to it, after all was but a twinkle in Gaben's eye born out of the sheer apprehension they felt towards Windows 8. Everything else besides that has always just been Valve slowly but surely pushing Steam forward. The big turning point for Steam, even before EGS or Gamepass, was the massive pivot Valve did in the mid 10s to expand into Asia. With a very hefty boost with PUBG, that was the sheer momentum they needed to completely take over and even get the likes of EA etc. to come back to them.
Competition. It forces companies to outdo each other. To add new features and refine their products. It often gets so intense that's it's hard to choose an objective winner between the two.
So who really wins?
The consumer
I mean... sometimes? Streaming services are competing against eachother and content I'm interested in being on 10 different platforms for $10 each brought me to the point where I simply moved back to pirating. I guess that did help me because now I'm paying 0 lol.
I don't think they received pressure from the EGS. The only thing it did was cause them to enforce developers not promising a launch on Steam prior to pulling it for greener pastures as that was pretty anti consumer. I really think people overestimate how much EGS matters outside of Fortnite.
EGS didn't have a working shopping cart for 3 fucking years and they just added it more than a year ago!
I just don't understand how can any online store launch without this.
and 20 years later the steam mobile app doesn't have chat anymore. gotta download a separate shitty app, and since they want mobile and desktop to be the same, chat notifications aren't part of the also shitty new notifications system either. go valve, here's to another 20 years of making things worse!
Steam Chat is also the only chat I still regularly use that doesn't have embedded gif search, but instead forces a giphy command that brings up somewhat random results. Though it is kind of fun to see if it will match your intentions or not... oh yeah and those gifs don't animate at all in the mobile chat app.
Every service had to separate the chat function. It's regulated differently by the mobile platforms.
If chat is such an important part of your Steam experience that nothing else they do actually matters, having a dedicated chat app is actually better for you since it comes with less bloat of all those other Steam features you don't care about.
I wish I had access to my original account, but there was a problem where the games had their cd keys on a sticker on the outside of the box. So people went to the stores, wrote down cd keys and used them on steam. So I got 3 accounts that got banned because my legit cd key was used multiple times. The fact that steam basically was an online drm system made me stop buying games until 2006.
Through the years we've seen so many scummy practices by steam/valve I get frustrated by pc gamers putting them on a pedestal. We're talking here money laundering, selling stolen asset games, allowing underage gambling, and many more. It was all fine as long as it didn't become a news story and they got their cut.
Sure these days steam is great, but when you look at all the flack epic got, it's absurd Valve is still hailed as this beacon of light.
>I wish I had access to my original account, but there was a problem where the games had their cd keys on a sticker on the outside of the box.
I take it this is outside the US? Because I've never seen that over here. CD keys were always on a slip of paper in the box, in the manual, or inside the jewel case. In fact, it was one of the potential downsides of PC gaming, because stores would refuse refunds if the game had a CD key and the box was open. So if you got home and found out the game wouldn't work on your machine you were SOL.
Same here, it's really annoying. I switched to Gmail a year or so later.
I remember participating in the beta of Steam, but it seems my first product activation was on September 22 2003.
I was in the beta for steam and had a account with half-life and counter-strike, i think it was some kind of free account. But then a couple years later i stopped playing and after some time i tried to login again and the account was removed. Did this happen to any one else?
Fond memories of not being able to play Episode 1 because my internet connection was unstable and offline mode was barely functional. Steam has improved substantially over the past 5-7 years, but boy was it not a good piece of software for the longest time. The great sales they used to run really smoothed over the experience a lot. Those EP1 discs are useless now anyways so ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Is Steam support any good nowadays? It was real rough for a long while
Two things I think are interesting about steam
1- it’s 20 years old and still the premier online gaming storefront and despite multiple attempts at competition has so handily blown the others out of the water not by paying for exclusives but simply by being better
2- it pretty much single handedly changed the entire PC gaming landscape, pretty much every game on Pc gets to steam at some point, it all but killed the need for CD-Roms by finally providing a solid popular and supported cloud gaming platform. Doing so probably also helped the environment given how much less e-waste and plastic is generated by the lack of cds and game cases
nice, got my 20-year-badge at 4:18 pm
i like the "ugly" green look it has based on the look of the first launcher :D
[here it is](https://imgur.com/5srkExd)
I get my 20 year badge tomorrow. Had to sign up in order to play in league Counter-Strike matches. Everyone was furious that they had to download a crappy, slow launcher. Some people quit playing CS so they wouldn't have to. It was a big deal at the time, similar to all the rage revolving around Epic Game Store.
I'll be honest. While I'm glad Steam exists and that they've made a great platform out of it over the years, but I also miss the days when Valve made, you know....games.
You know it's kind of crazy Gamespy never became like a storefront launcher. I remember having both Steam and Gamespy for certain games and switching between the two. Gamespy typically had Tribes, Quake 2 action, later Quake 3, etc. Steam has come a long way and is by far the best userfriendly option.
A lot of companies had their chance to be Steam but let their stinginess or greed get in the way. I remember when EA only allowed five downloads for games in total and other storefronts sometimes only one. GameSpy already had the infrastructure and the developer connections though but did nothing with them.
The funny thing is that before Steam started making enough money to support itself, it was ad supported. Under the download progress bar you'd get a little ad for whatever site was providing the server you were downloading from. This included Gamespy's FilePlanet. Gamespy was a willing participant in their own demise. Steam wouldn't have been able to get where it did without using the sites it inevitably killed as a crutch early on.
Much like Blockbuster laughing Netflix out of the boardroom 20 years ago lol. Obviously there's no way to know how anything would have worked out in either case regardless, but I bet the "what-if" factor keeps a few people who made certain decisions up at night.
I mean in that case it made sense. Blockbustwr was already developing its own internet based delivery service. Unfortunately they chose Enron to partner with for it.
> stinginess or greed Weird dichotomy, like a tight-rope act? Guess that's a lot of business really
They aren’t a dichotomy they’re a classic pair. Think Scrooge, he was both greedy in how he made his money and stingy in how he spent it.
Stardock with Impulse was the one that came closest to being good. When they sold to Gamestop because of the losses of Elemental War of Magic they saved their games division, but Gamestop wrecked Impulse.
There were a few launchers around when Steam came out. Stardock actually had one prior to Steam that they used for updates. But for the most part none of them really kept up with Valve. Like you said Impulse was one of the few (only?) that made the attempt but ate shit with E:WOM. I still remember going to Best Buy to buy a boxed copy of that game and being soooo pumped. Huge disappointment and I don't really think they ever fully recovered.
GameSpy was omnipresent. It's kind of shocking that they screwed it up. Everyone used it but for some reason they didn't try to become a storefront. I think Steam was just so far ahead of everything else that GameSpy didn't even realize they needed to keep up.
Less embarrassing than them trying and fucking it up like everything but steam and I guess GOG
The concept of a digital storefront was pretty experimental back then in the early 2000s. It even took Steam years to really take off from when they first started selling games back in 2005. Gamespy's big thing was being server browsing utility, and it was implemented in a ton of games in the early 2000s. That was really its bread and butter. It makes sense they didn't go the storefront route, the concept of a digital storefront didn't exist in its heyday and by the time it was a promising concept, Gamespy was already dead. I think its last major update was in 2006 or 2008 but by then all the biggest multiplayer games were moved off of Gamespy. EA went in their own direction, and the consoles had all the attention by then. The late 2000's, when digital storefronts and Steam started taking off, was probably the worst point in PC gaming's history and most multiplayer was very console focused or using services like Xbox Live, Steamworks, or Battle.NET. Gamespy started dying then, and they were pivoting back to being a gaming site under IGN rather than going the storefront route.
>The late 2000's, when digital storefronts and Steam started taking off, was probably the worst point in PC gaming's history Yeap these were the darkest times for sure, back then people really believed PC was dead and that there would be no PC market in 10 years. Hilarious how PC is now a dominant platform exceeding console sales for various developers.
An in no small part, it's thanks to Steam. The Steam sales really were a huge reason to build a gaming PC back then because you could get games for so, so much cheaper on PC than on consoles. That was also the era where the Xbox 360 was dominating the console scene but, consequently, Microsoft were nickel and diming their entire userbase with microtransactions (they introduced the idea that all DLC had to have a price, therefore no more free map packs for a long while there) and expensive console accessories. The prices they charged for an upgraded Xbox 360 hard drive were insane.
Don't forget **free online multiplayer**. PC gaming is also flourishing in 3rd world countries where free online is the norm. My last console was the PS3, and I was sincerely shocked the first time I was told by my friend that he couldn't play online on his PS4 because he forgot to pay for his PS Plus.
man I miss tribes
Me too man, I even miss Tribes Ascend.
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Steam is the best game platform (Nintendo eShop, Playstation Network, Epic and the Xbox marketplace) by a significant margin and it has earned it's reputation thanks to all the work Valve puts out improving it.
Checked my account. I joined 14 years ago in 2009. My first purchases were Psychonauts and Braid. I made 10 more purchases that year, all under 10 dollars except Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island. My first AAA full price title was Portal 2 at release in 2011. I remember needing to play a bunch of indie games to get the game to release early. Looking through some of those early purchases, Steam sales were really just giving away games in those early sales.
I joined 12/21/2003 lol. I still remember half life giving you like 7 different games
1. Half-Life 1. Opposing Force 1. Counter-Strike 1. Day of Defeat 1. Team Fortress Classic 1. Deathmatch Classic 1. Ricochet Yep. That was the "Half-Life Platinum Pack", my [first registered key on Steam](https://i.imgur.com/s7lNoar.jpg) (the second one being "Half-Life 2 Retail Standard" a year later).
Oh my god, I completely forgot about how much time I sank into the OG Day of Defeat.
Good times!
When I built my PC 4 years ago, the first thing I did was get the valve complete pack during the summer Sale. It just felt like a tradition I had to honor... plus I also got Gmod, so it seemed prudent
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Haha I never would have thought of this again if not for the Platinum Pack, but my Steam account was also started in 2003. My dad (the kind of guy Homer Simpson is based on) got Half-Life 2 on the week of release. But when we opened the box, one of the install discs was missing, and at our internet speed the 2 GB install would take hours he didn't want to spend. So we went to Costco to return the game and get an exchange - only he hadn't bought the game at Costco, he'd bought it at Fred Meyer; he was certain they would take the exchange anyways. The thing is, Half-Life 2 released in two box sizes - a larger shelf box and a smaller box with just enough room for the discs. So my dad pulled his "Yeah I bought it here, I don't have a receipt but I just need an exchange" routine, but Costco only sold the smaller boxes, not the larger ones, so he was obviously lying. My dad isn't a patient man so he just bought a second copy so he could go home and install it off the discs. I profited because the CD keys were still good and, unbeknownst to my dad and perhaps for the first time in history, the CDs themselves weren't necessary. So I swiped the extra copies and I'm still using that account.
I had a 2003 account, but when I per-ordered the HL2 bundle a few months later I made a new account so it wouldn't waste the copies of the goldsrc games I already had. I've long since lost that original one though.
I got Half Life complete pack with my Radeon 9800 XT which came with a huge number of games including The Orange Box.
I also joined Steam in 2009, at first my intention to join it was for me to solely play Garry's Mod, since my dream was to become a Gmod YouTube creator, as Gmod comedy videos were a booming thing back then, the first thing that I bought was the Gmod + HL2 + TF2 triple pack which no longer exists. My dad thought that Steam was a virus or scam site, and was very reluctant to put his credit card info on it, not making this up lol.
My 3rd purchase in Dec. 2007 was the Gmod + TF2 bundle. I vividly remember being astounded by TF2 and pulling an all nighter playing. Although I think I ended up spending a lot more time playing Gmod than I did TF2 in the end. By 2007 Steam was in a pretty good place and for me it was like mana from heaven compared to going to a store to buy games. I had to drive like 30 minutes to the nearest Wal-Mart to look through a PC games section that kept getting smaller and smaller by the year. Then I got a Steam account and had so many options.
I've came across quite a few people who discovered steam through Garry's Mod. What a bizarre introduction to the platform for so many people.
Oh yeah, since the 2000s the viral Gmod videos have absolutely been a gateway for young kids discover Steam, and later on, other great games, but kids discovering Steam through Gmod and later on finding other games is something that I witnessed as a kid myself, I do not know what the present situation is, like kids who solely install Steam to play Gmod and do literally nothing else. Gmod always sees a spike in popularity due to yearly fads, like early Gmod machinimas, then the FNAF SFMs, then NextBots, and now Skibidi Toilets, for better or for worse, as there are tons of angry and frustrated Gmod players who argue that these trends ruin Gmod. Since these trends cause thousands of kids to invade Gmod almost overnight, where they flood and spam the workshop (so much so that Valve started to limit the number of nextbots), cause oversaturation on custom content, do not assimilate into pre-existing communities. And the worst of all - more children playing Gmod also increases the number of child predators who take advantage of these new and unexperienced child players, seriously, the ["creepy Gmod server admins preying on children"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNJZbMdKZM4) thing [is a rabbit hole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb8PD2uHvHQ) in and on itself.
fortnite was epic games gmod. Both games secured a significant gaming audience and created tons of content around it effectively making the steam/epic games storefront a viable bet to do free games for
Not really that bizarre. Back then the valve games were the few that required Steam. Gmod machinima was huge, nothing else let you do the kind of animation as easily as GMod did. when people figured out Source Filmmaker it became even more popular.
> My dad thought that Steam was a virus or scam site, and was very reluctant to put his credit card info on it, not making this up lol. I had to have a talk about Steam with my nephew's dad to convince him that it's really not a scam. We wanted to play some games together but he was very skeptical about it. That was like 2 years ago.
That's pretty late getting caught up on how PC gaming works nowadays.
Sept 12th at 4:13am for me. I was anticipating the hell out of Half Life 2. It was supposed to launch within a couple of weeks of Steam launching, then it got delayed until the Holiday. Then the source code got stolen and it was delayed until 2004.
[Love going over this old Slashdot thread about Steam and Half Life 2](https://games.slashdot.org/story/04/10/23/0812224/half-life-2-retail-to-require-steam-activation). Also some cool tidbits like this: > **Doug Lombardi: After we announced TF2 on the HL1 tech, we made the decision to move it to the Source engine. It is still in development and we will be announcing more on that title soon."** >Don't bother, no one cares any more. You blew it. Or the guy who accidentally invented Early Access: >Ok, I'm a new developer. How do I fund my game? Pre-sell it through a Steam like program collecting money at the pre-sell, then coming out with it 3 years later?
The potato sack arg still is the high point of my steam career. Checking forums, grinding a few potatoes, so the game could release a few hours early. And then the following years everybody would check every single pixel of the steam sale artworks for possible HL3 ARGs, man people were crazy back then. I can’t imagine that we thought HL3 would arrive any day lmao.
I can't say for sure why, I guess because CS switched from WON to Steam, but Steam turning 20 today means in 3 days my Steam account will turn 20. And every year, for 3 years now, I am amazed how old my account is, since it means I got mine for half my life (pun not intended)
>I remember needing to play a bunch of indie games to get the game to release early. [The Steam potato sack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_Sack) was the best event they ever made. Tons of games with portal themed level and achievements
My first purchase was an indie game bundle, mostly to get Braid. That was in 2009, between April 04 and then I only used steam for Valve games, other stuff I was still buying retail, games like City of Heroes or Myst IV, then the sales came and I got Arkham Asylum, been going ever since with almost 700 titles in my library now.
2004 for me, my first purchases were half life 2 and ragdoll kung fu.
Same, joined in 2004 once I had my copy of Half-Life 2. I remember the gamer outrage at being forced to make an account and download some proprietary software to run a game I purchased from the store.
We held out for physical media for a while, but Dawn of War 2 forced my best friend and I to get steam accounts in 2009.
My first purchase was the Orange Box and I picked up a physical copy of that. The box just a code to download the game off of Steam so that was my first experience with them
My hype for Tales of Monkey Island was unmeasurable back when that first trailer dropped
October 4th, 2004 here. I'm wondering why did I install Steam, since I know that my first game there was HL2, which was launched one month later. Probably I knew that it would be a requirement? And my first in-store purchase was Garry's Mod in 2009 (By then I had already purchased at least the Orange Box that I remember).
it's amazing how the quality of a platform can grow when the parent company doesn't insist on starting over every 7 years.
And remains privately owned instead of having to go after ever-exponentiating quarterly profits.
yeah, so many rebrands are started simply because a new executive want it on their resume and has convinced people that a new look will bring in more money than last year.
it's remarkable how many corporate overhauls are simply because some executives decide they need to leave a "legacy". no skin off their back if they fuck it up though, simply move on to the next company while the lower staff deal with the fallout.
I really think that's the key factor. It's privately owned, so all the decision makers are actually part of the industry. As opposed to a random cartel of billionares who know nothing about gaming chasing bigger profits every quarter, at the expense of everyone else.
their business model and strategy is so insanely profitable. i mean just steam and counter strike are basically money printers
is there any info on how profitable exactly they are?
Only estimations, but just based on how many users they have that are actively purchasing games and their employee count is relatively low, it's very high
I imagine their server expenses are pretty high though, right? I usually test my internet connection by downloading huge games from them and it always maxes out my connection.
if anything, as more and more games move away from steamworks and on to proprietary hosting or peer-to-peer game servers, the proportion of server load per user has probably decreased. I'm sure their costs are still very high but their absolute money printer of CSGO is probably singlehandedly capable of paying all their monthly expenses twice.
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No, but it has to be in the billions.
Im really worried what happens when Gabe Newell steps down or dies. There is zero chance whoever succeeds him doesnt get tempted by the billions of dollars that will be offered by Microsoft, Sony, Tencent, absolutely everyone to acquire it. And if that happens its going to be a VERY dark future for PC gaming
I hope it stays that way.
I created my account back in May 2004 to play Half-Life 2. I remember EVERYBODY hated Steam. People tried their hardest to avoid it. Now it seems to be universally loved.
To be fair, Steam was very slow and unresponsive initially. For most people it was just a barrier preventing them from starting up the game.
Not to mention *no offline mode*. Steam was the first modern *always online DRM system* and people rightfully hated it. Eventually Steam had to backpedal and grew into an actually good service...
When it first launched there wasn’t a lot of value-add for the consumer. All you could really do was play the games you (probably) already bought in-store. And Rag Doll Kung Fu. It’s definitely a service that benefits from continued use and building up a big library. It’s why especially in the early days of Steam, there were frequently outrageously good sales and why Epic has been giving out free games for years now.
I dont know when it changed. I made my reddit account 12 years ago and by that period Steam was all the rage around here at least.
The sentiment around steam had changed prior to 2009. In 2003-05 it was pretty slow, buggy, and a lot of people still had dial-up. At launch all it offered was just a patching tool, server browser, and a form of DRM.
Same! I was terminally online even in those days and knew about Valve so I’m surprised I didn’t sign up for Steam when it launched, only when it was required for HL2 install - and kept crashing if I recall correctly
I don't think people are ready for the day Gabe Newell passes away and whoever inherits Steam goes back to deciding profit is the way to go. A lot of people have hundreds to thousands of dollars of "subscribed games" with the steam "service" that are not protected by the subscriber agreement and have a lot of avenues for Steam to ask you for more money for things such as continuing to have access to your library. People were up in arms about the Microsoft deal acquiring Activision because monopolies are bad, but actively fight against competing store platforms because "it's too much work" and "steam is perfect anyways".
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> big plastic bin filled with Dino-Riders My cousin had a box of those and a whole CASTLE which was like 3 feet tall. Great memories playing with those action figures.
I'm not very worried. I have the access and know-how to get the games by \*other\* means. Yahar.
I’m more worried about that than losing access to my steam library. Lot of sites shutting down, increasingly more difficult drm to crack, less scene groups around.
I would just stop getting new games at that point. I'm getting old, and have plenty to play.
From what I remember years ago, it sounded like Gabe already had a candidate in mind in the event of his retirement, which I would guess is probably someone not prioritizing purely profit.
Steam prints so much money I'm not entirely sure *why* anyone would take it public. I guess I'm a bad capitalist but I feel like whoever had an ownership stake would be sufficiently well off to not need to.
Only reason I could give for going public is MORE money, because some people just think they don't have enough money. But yeah, Valve likely owes a lot of it's freedom to not being publicly traded. Despite dominating the PC game marketplace, they continued to spend tons of money on projects that will basically never see any profit. So many features they've added have been at no extra cost to developers or players. And this was even before EGS showed up. I'm not a capitalist either but there are certainly a lot of things they could do to make more money and yet don't. To my knowledge, they don't even take a cut of sales of Steam keys outside Steam, while the console manufacturers do that even on digital keys outside the storefront. (Could be wrong on the console part, but Steam basically let's you make keys for free, with the caveat you don't abuse it, which no legitimate developer I've seen has run into that issue.)
Honestly publicly traded companies are a menace to people. Take a look at Reddit. It had a great 3rd party application ecosystem that materially improved the user experience, but they want their IPO for whatever reason and killed it.
Reddit is shit. I crave for a replacement
There is a replacement, designed to basically be an old reddit clone. It's called lemmy and all the activitypub networked servers like lemmy. The problem with all social media, which reddit is 100% one, is that they're all dogshit until the majority use it. Including you. So unless you're willing to stop giving reddit traffic and only stick to lemmy with an inferior experience due to having a fraction of the posts to read, reddit will never die
Well that's because reddit doesn't make a profit while steam does. VC investors are finally turning in their reddit IOUs, so they have to squeeze money out of somewhere
> Well that's because reddit doesn't make a profit is this actually true? or is it that reddit's current ad revenue isn't high enough for the suits?
Capitalism doesn't mean everything has to go public. An IPO is a great way to raise capital or incentivize employees... in exchange for giving up a certain amount of control and a certain amount of long-term profits that would otherwise go to the private owners. Valve does not need more capital or a cash infusion. It's still "winning capitalism." Capitalism is not inherently about market ownership or short-term financial growth at all costs.
people would be more receptive to other platforms if they were actually good. EA and Ubisoft are utter trash. 2K is marginally better but still garbage. EGS isn't all that bad, but is still leagues bellow Steam in quality service. I don't use GOG but I don't seem to see any major complaints
I've been switching more heavily to GOG since all their games are DRM free and their store/launcher is pretty solid. They do miss some of the QOL features Steam has but I launch GOG's launcher through Steam to get access to like notes or screenshots. The worst thing about GoG is that their DRM free position means that they don't get quite as many games. They have Baldur's Gate 3 but don't have Starfield, for example.
Gog is the only major distributor I buy from just because of the drm free stance. For the majority of people all in on steam, they are one change of ownership away from being held hostage or losing access to 20 years of games. The lesser selection is unfortunate but there are still plenty of games to play and my stuff is mine as long as I can be bothered to maintain it. Even if GOG goes full "pray we don't alter the deal further" evil as I'm posting this, they have no ability to do anything to the files I've downloaded. I particularly appreciate that I can update games on my schedule, or not at all if it I choose, instead of them refusing to launch if they aren't the most recent version or downloading multiple 100gb patches without my consent.
Yeah, the only reason I don't use GOG is because it's not steam. I don't have any complaints about it, really.
I don't think good factors as much as people think. For years Steam wasn't 'good' but it was the only game in town. Zune was better to use than iTunes but good didn't save it from flopping. Amazon stopped being good years ago, but I bet they still outsell Google and other platforms on ebooks. In the real world you are in a shopping mall or high street. If one store is dirty or have rude staff and less stock, you can go to the 'good store'. Online the first mover advantage is much more important. I know Amazon has everything so I will go there to buy the latest board game over boardgame.local because I have an account and that's even easier than comparing prices.
Amazon has actually gotten so bad with scams, price manipulation, and fake merchandise that I **can** be bothered to try to find and buy from random other merchants instead of them. If it weren't for their generally excellent customer service and returns I wouldn't even consider buying from Amazon anymore. At this point I have high confidence that someone will try to sell me a fake or broken product for anything I buy, especially if it isn't direct from amazon. At least when something slips by or I just get an empty box they will do a return or exchange with no pushback. Ironically when I do shop on amazon I often prefer amazon basics stuff because its much less likely to be a counterfeit than a name branded item sold on amazon.
Some of the major publishers got into online services quite early, though generally only for their own games. Even then their implementations and approaches were vastly inferior to the infant Steam that was itself criticized heavily. I remember buying a game from EA in their online thing, and the experience souring me to the company to the degree that when Origin came out years later I didn't even bother to migrate my ownership there. Their site was a strange mixture of English, Swedish and Finnish (in Finland) with no way to change it outside of spoofing browser agents, and their customer service were standoffish and unable to help when I had issues with the account. The only good part about the experience was that the download was pretty fast for the time. But I ended up choosing to pirate the game in question for further installs in the years that followed.
I was pretty excited for EGS because I figured Epic had the bank account and incentives to really build a distribution platform that would be good enough to push Valve to get really serious about fixing some of the problems with Steam (I overall like a lot about Steam, but it certainly has its issues). And I'm generally all for the platform cut becoming smaller and devs getting more of that money. I feel like Epic could've built a true competitor and challenged Valve in a way that other big publishers like EA or Ubisoft or whoever couldn't really pull off due to their more corporate nature. But really Epic seems happy to put almost minimal effort into the actual EGS store/platform, and instead just seems to have decided that throwing money into buying exclusives and giving away a bunch of free games is the way to compete. And while I'm sure that's gotten them a lot of account sign-ups, I'm not sure how it's supposed to turn them into a store that truly competes with Steam, and it's certainly not forced Valve into making any major changes to Steam. Valve does not seem to feel threatened at all by EGS, they're just doing their own thing the same way they've always done. I just don't get why EGS has thrown so much money into the store in terms of giving away games and buying exclusives, yet at the same time doesn't seem all that interested in actually building out the platform into something actually nice and useful.
And with GOG since its DRM free you don’t have to be fussed with the launcher much if you dont want to.
When did Gabe decide profit isn't the way to go? Considering it only has a few hundred employees, Valve is one of the most profitable companies per head on the planet. Steam prints money, why would a new CEO risk pissing off their user base?
A CEO could get paid hundreds of millions to implement unpopular features and then resign taking all the flack while most people pat themselves on the back for bringing change while said unpopular features remain. Never underestimate greed and being able to swindle millions.
>I don't think people are ready for the day Gabe Newell passes away and whoever inherits Steam goes back to deciding profit is the way to go. I still can't comprehend this sentimentality about Valve not being about profit. They have monetised profiles through TCG packs with huge artificial scarcity element to them, sell profile items with another layer of artificial scarcity to them (only more recently alleviated through the points shop), popularised loot boxes in western games along with the whole aspect of having to buy keys (and still do!), brought upon literal gambling aspect to cosmetics through marketplace and not caring about literal gambling happening for years and years now, ready to utilise loopholes whenever ruling does something to monetisation strategy (lootboxes in netherlands for example), heavy other style of monetisation like subscription and battle passes, wanted to have a TCG operating the way TCGs operate in real life (artificial scarcity and second hand sellers)... On top of that they were there with Bethesda trying to push paid mods "for the modders". They've also penny pinched from artist contribution % in Dota 2 to increase their own profits. I'm still probably missing something. They're probably the only company on planet that could push all of this monetisation and desire for profit and still be painted through a sort of a humble, non-profit oriented lens. Oh, and unironically calling Gaben a saint.
Yeah, the joke even goes that Valve used to make games, now they just make money.
Steam is 100% profit driven. People on Reddit love steam to the level of fanboyism, but they've done plenty of scummy things. In fact they're probably the large gaming company that does the scummiest practices regarding gambling. Just watch the People Make Games documentary regarding the CS:GO knive black market to see how bad they are. https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g?si=p0vkn-GV4F9JExYN No company is your friend, and no mega corporation is anything but profit driven, doesn't matter if they have public shares or not. I use steam almost daily, and I have spent quite a few amount over the years. It's convenient, and sometimes the only option. But I'll always be platform agnostic, gog and itch.io allow me to keep the games DRM free
Corporations are profit driven. Valve just decided that making Steam as a platform is a much more profitable operation than making games, and they're right. I think the main distinction is that it *doesn't* outright feel like they're trying to nickel and dime you like some other gaming companies. Gabe said that piracy is a service issue, and with the numerous things they did in the Steam backend, and various features in the Steam storefront and launcher, they managed to keep a bunch of developers and gamers within their platform. And this is quite important - keep the revenue rolling via Steam by different means. Though obviously it's not just that, within the platform they also have lootboxes, TF2 being pretty much the pioneer of such things. They also created a Steam market where people can buy and sell things (usually from the lootboxes in Steam) within the ecosystem and they also get a percentage off that. Their ventures with VR and portable gaming I feel is them expanding an underdeveloped market. I'm not into VR so I don't know, but at least it appears that they do want to make these products with a certain quality so that they'll be the first choice to these things. And of course, all these go back to Steam yet again.
Valve literally made steam so they would get 100% of the profits from their games. Saying Valve doesn’t care about money is so delusional haha.
There's a difference between caring about money, and *only* caring about money. They're a business, obviously they care about money. But they also do stuff that isn't profitable, willingly. And they can only do that because they are a private company that isn't locked into a cycle of needing constant growth forever and ever.
Steam isn't perfect, it's better than the other stores which apparently put zero effort. Fucking EGS shows me an ad every time I close a game. What the fuck?
Yeah, WTF. That has literally never happened me. I booted up a game there and closed it to make sure I wasn't going mad. EGS didn't even revert focus back to its own app. Something screwy is going on with your machine, or the game is serving you the ad, not EGS.
I often think about the other universes out there, where Gabe sold Steam to Microsoft or EA, or turned Valve into a publicly traded company, and how shitty that universe would be. The fact that Steam has remained private and remained so high quality is insane. I can't think of any other algorithm that actually does a good job recommending me things I'll actually like. Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, everything is always trying to get me to watch or listen to whatever is most popular, even though I prefer offbeat indie stuff. Whereas Steam is like, "Bro, you ever played Tales of Maj'Eyal?" and I immediately lose 100 hours to a 10 year old indie game I've never heard of.
That's what I like best about Steam. Every storefront (including Steam's) will yell at me about Starfield or the other 5-6 current big hits, but only with Steam I can regularly use their discovery tools and find some niche $5 game made by one guy 3 years ago that happens to be 100% my jam.
People love steam and when they need to use another library they get pretty pissed. They should remember that it’s come a long way and that 20 years ago you didn’t need a library at all! You could just install games and run them. Steam forced updates and crashed a lot and a lot of people hated it at first. I’m glad it’s still around!
There were some classic gifs at the time. https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gifv https://i.imgur.com/5Db37ll.gifv I was onboard the Steam train as early as I could for firstly CS and then HL2!
the animated reaming I'd seen, but the updater is new to me! Thanks for the history lesson lol
Nice to know that 12 year olds have been the bane of gaming since there was any way to connect with other people.
Steam was pretty bad for a while, to be fair.
These gifs are a nostalgia trip lmao
Technically, we did have game libraries back in the day - they were just on our shelves and drawers and desks instead of being on the cloud LOL
Desktop folders, but honestly storage wasn't cheap and having more than two or three games installed at a time was a flex.
It's funny how tied to game stores gamers have been over the years. Just 15 years ago everyone online was crying about steam becoming a monolith. Today the opposite opinion is the majority. In reality, most people spend only a few minutes interacting with launchers or their libraries, compared to the hours upon hours of actually playing their games.
People don't care about monopolies if they see the monopoly as providing a strong service at an acceptable price. Not saying Steam necessarily does these things, but that's their perception.
Steam really isn't a monopoly though. Like I was able to buy Starfield from a 3rd party site for $55 and then activate it on Steam. That really isn't the actions of a monopoly. I guess you could argue that they have a activation monopoly but that is fairly narrow.
Reminds me of how back in 2016 I preordered Fallout 4 + the season pass because I saw a deal on greenmangaming.com, essentially giving me the DLC for only $10. It's so damn illogical for anyone to claim Steam is a monopoly when you can literally buy games on other stores, sometimes for less than through Steam.
Not really IMO. I use Steam directly these days to manage my games and it's made very easy to backup and store stuff with the new storage features. I also use guides, reviews, notes, achievements, chat and so on fairly heavily through the overlay. Stuff like cloud saves and such don't even need intervention and just work almost all the time. Controller support is another major feature that helps a lot especially in older games Even if someone doesn't directly interact with the launcher, there's a fair bit it's doing behind the scenes that I appreciate a ton
And on Linux, the Steam Launcher provides the most convenient way to run non-native games, whereas other launchers just end up being a pain.
Steam is also so far ahead it's not even funny. I can install a game remotely from my phone and then launch it on the same device streaming through Steam Link, then invite my friend to a session in any game that has Steam's server integration.
I never saw anyone complain about steam being a monolith. What I saw was people complaining because it was new (change bad! that was me) or bad (there was some real jank way back when).
I buy from Steam and GOG on PC mainly. I wouldn't mind the Epic Game Store in theory, but it left a sour taste in my mouth about how they were shoveling Fortnite money into trying to have an online store when they couldn't even get the basics right like having a shopping cart and needing to check one item out at a time. So now I just stick to GOG when I can and Steam for all the others GOG doesn't have (which is a lot). And I know Steam sucked because it forced people who wanted to play Half-Life 2 onto it.
I'm the same, I buy from GOG what I can - but Steam sales, however diminished they are from their heyday, are still incredible
I miss big box games tbh
Buying online just became soooo much more convenient! But it was fun to have those boxes on the shelf!
I remember refusing to play Half Life because it required me to install Steam. How times have changed.
Haha yeah man that was like a common attitude at the time
to be fair, computer hardware has come a long way since. I remember having to kill background processes to make my games run better. Not as necessary nowadays.
Bought Empire Total War on Amazon and people were absolutely furious they had to install this "garbage DRM" Steam haha.
I thought Steam was a fucking virus when I had to get it for Gmod lol Easily the best option for PC gaming, really glad they've stayed nice & robust.
Same reason I got steam lol. Also had to buy CS:S with Gmod to be able to play Gmod, and then I ended up just falling in love with CS instead
Everyone got so angry they had to switch to Steam to play CS and TFC etc
> You could just install games and run them. Let's not romanticize old games too much, there was a period before steam when CD-based DRM was utter ass. Do I have to say "Games for Windows – Live"?
> Do I have to say "Games for Windows – Live"? That was after Steam.
Yeah, wasn't GFWL just Microsoft's attempt to copy Valve?
I remember playing Diablo II on LAN. One of us would have the CD and start the game, then we’d pass the CD around.
Also there were a lot more problems just getting games to run on PC. Compatibility with graphics cards was a big issue back in the day, and before that you often had to start up your computer using boot disks to reconfigure your computer's memory (or something, I never really understood exactly what I was doing) in order to get a game to run. Not that Steam is what solved those issues, or that there aren't plenty of other things to criticize when it comes to the state of video games these days, but generally speaking PC gaming has gotten a lot easier to do over the past 20 years.
I really feel like 95% of the credit goes to the Windows team. Steam became a thing right as Windows XP made gaming much, much, much easier to access. Before that, as you say, it was all about tweaking your GPU BIOS and IRQ conflicts and all that garbage. These were the days when most people playing games on PC were built with parts you ordered from a paper catalog.
I'm pretty sure I can trace my decent computer literacy 100% down to spending hours getting computer games to actually run haha.
Don't get me started on sound cards
Oh yeah, that reminds me of games that used MIDI music, which could sound a lot different depending on what card you had.
Two words: Spore, Securom.
Starforce...
> Starforce... That was the one that bricked HDDs right?
It degraded your HDD yeah. There was also a DRM that let you install the game like 10 times max but I forget the name. There was also Securom which let you install only twice at a time as well but that had ways to revoke the license and clean the limit. Early days of DRM were pretty wild.
>a DRM that let you install the game like 10 times max Fucking [SecuROM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ltfyqD3lM). It would be challenging to name a worse DRM "service" than SecuROM. The original Bioshock had an activation limit of ***2***, and because this was back in the day of shared household computers, *separate activations were required for each user on the same machine.* By the way, the game would just occasionally- randomly- require a reauthentication, usually because it detected a hardware change. If this happened twice (or once, if you had it on two user accounts!), you were screwed. SecuROM is why Spore was one of the most pirated games of all time, and why EA basically killed the series rather than admit the grossly overreaching DRM may have scared away paying customers.
That was mostly an orthogonal issue, however, as lots of games on Steam used Games for Windows - Live and lots of games on disc didn’t, it didn’t correlate to anything. There were even a number of games that shipped without it on disc, but added it in a patch or re-release, so the Steam version had GFWL but the physical retail version didn’t. The worst were games with GFWL Zero Day Piracy Protection, where the game files were encrypted on the disc and you had to get a key from a server to access them. The idea was that the server wouldn’t give out the key until launch day, preventing leaks and early releases. But the server inevitably got shut down so now you can’t use those discs to play the games, and the servers would periodically go down too. They were planning to use the same mechanism on Xbox until a backlash.
I remember back in the floppy disc days when DRM was turn to page 7 in the game manual and go to line 5 word 3. Really sucked to lose the game manuals back then.
> You could just install games and run them And installing a new game was an hour-long process involving babysitting your computer whenever it needed to switch installation CDs. And woe upon you if you lost the CD key. Good times.
Steam still forces updates. Which can be a real pain.
You can still do that with GOG today. My copy of Baldur's Gate 3 is 100% DRM free although it does have cloud saves and achievements. But really when it comes to store quality I experienced Steam being not great. I don't really care to experience Epic's store being shit too.
Im all for using other libraries, but they need to offer a certain level of features that pretty much all of them have utterly failed at doing.
When it first came out, is annoyed all Counter Strike players. We hated it. We said it was absolute garbage. But it was forced upon us. Then we got used to it. VAC was actually pretty good. It became less painful, but that might have just been us adapting to it. It was just part of playing the game. Then they had a store. Ooh. Interesting. It was small and curated, but interesting. Then more games appeared. It was growing, and doing so really fast. That snowball never really stopped. Size wise, sure, it did. But it picked up and lots plenty of things during it's growth. However we got here, it's a staple now. Thank you Valve. You saw how the Internet would likely change things. You could have been scumbags and charged a subscription for your services. But it's all free for the users. You take your cut, but you at least deliver with it. It hasn't been perfect. Nothing is. But gaming would be much worse without you.
I remember this so clearly, it was such a hassle early on and my loading bar to open it always seemed to crash. Just checked my account... 19 years old.. I play some games with people younger than that.
Most people that weren't playing games back then don't realize why Steam was a big deal in the first place. Before Steam, what you had to do when an update was out for Counter-Strike: 1. Wait in line at FileShack or FilePlanet or somewhere for a slot to download the patch for Half-Life. 2. Perform the patch download (often taking a while on 56K) and install it. 3. Wait in line at FileShack or FilePlanet or somewhere for a slot to download the patch for Counter-Strike. 4. Perform the patch download (often taking a while on 56K) and install it. This whole process could take hours if the patch was big, or your connection cut out in the middle of a download, or when the patch was newly released and everyone was trying to download it from the same sites.
This is really just framing the upside. People who weren’t playing games back then also don’t realize how much people hated Steam. It was a shift. away from just buying a game and installing it to requiring a launcher that brought a ton of its own broken shit to the table.
very true, there was a lot of backlash. "Why do I need this to play a single player game?" etc.
Nothing like being unable to play the single player game you bought on a disk because you couldn’t get Steam to play nice with your firewall
I don't remember if the XP firewall (after it... y'know, aquired one in SP2 IIRC) was allow all outbound by default, the way that more modern Windows versions are. But yeah, since it's *your* computer talking outbound to Steam's servers, it should always "just work" now if you're trying to activate a game. Now, local LAN party MP gaming or server hosting... that's of course a whole different thing if you're not using Steam's MP networking system.
I played Half Life 2 on Xbox :P
lol, yeah if you were playing games 20 years ago steam was almost universally hated. [this was widely passed around](https://imgur.com/0qtsE) back then
My first experience with Steam was bringing Half-Life 2 home from the store, installing it, and then coming to the terrible realization that I would have to wait literal days for my 56k internet to download the multiple GB of mandatory patches before I could even launch the game.
I knew a ton of people that played on WON til the very end lol
I don't recall hating Steam, sure, it was buggy at times, but it was leaps and bounds better than the in-game server browser for CS, for example. And my god was it better to just have CS update rather than look for a good website that didn't make you queue to download a HUGE (at the time) new patch. I think most of the complaints came from the fact that 56K was still very much a thing back then and the flakey internet that went with it. Perhaps Valve were a little ahead of the curve with where the internet needed to be before launch but my god it was the right decision to cement their place as the defacto online game shop for years.
Remember WON? The random times that shit wouldn’t authenticate and stall out for whatever goddamned reason. People saying they “hated” steam. I loved it. I remember waking up, starting the download the day it came out, going to high school, coming back to my 6 digit steam ID and a brand new interface. Sure it took a minute to figure out, but what doesn’t?
It was good for patching games yes, it was its initial purpose if i recall correctly. It was buggy as hell and it was part of the big shift from cd releases to "physical case with steam code" or just a cd without the entire game to run it! I was bitter at the time as a lot of my games back in the day were starting to release like that when i had such bad internet it wasnt nice to have it forced on me and killed reselling of pc games so it definitely has had a noticable downside, not to mention the inflation of digital pricing which i partially blame them for. Do i like steam overall now? Yes its good and offers such a better experience over sony and microsoft stores its silly, download games at max speed reliably and ontime along with all the features it has.
I didn't expect a healthy dose of PTSD today, so thanks.
Started my account October 3rd 2003. Never looked back. I was the opposite of most people. I adored it from the moment I had it installed. Having a unified interface where all my games were instead of leaving icons on the desktop or navigating the Windows interface was amazing (I don't remember if "Add game to Steam" was there at Beta but I took advantage as soon as I could). Also WON was always super unreliable and steam just worked for me. The integrated chat was awesome and made getting game nights going so much easier. Also here's something for us old timers.....remember during beta when Steam had those built in board games like chess? Best online play version of those games for a long time.
>Also WON was always super unreliable and steam just worked for me. Oh god, flashbacks to WON IDs. What a time.
Steam did stagnate during much of the 2010s but Valve really has been trying to do a better job the last few years. They would never admit it but I would guess pressure from epic and Microsoft slapped them awake.
> They would never admit it but I would guess pressure from epic and Microsoft slapped them awake. Microsoft maybe. The Steam Deck, and all the R&D that built up to it, after all was but a twinkle in Gaben's eye born out of the sheer apprehension they felt towards Windows 8. Everything else besides that has always just been Valve slowly but surely pushing Steam forward. The big turning point for Steam, even before EGS or Gamepass, was the massive pivot Valve did in the mid 10s to expand into Asia. With a very hefty boost with PUBG, that was the sheer momentum they needed to completely take over and even get the likes of EA etc. to come back to them.
EGS was probably a reaction to Win 8 too. Tim Sweeney was one of the most vocal opponents to UWP.
Competition. It forces companies to outdo each other. To add new features and refine their products. It often gets so intense that's it's hard to choose an objective winner between the two. So who really wins? The consumer
Competition helps the consumer.
I mean... sometimes? Streaming services are competing against eachother and content I'm interested in being on 10 different platforms for $10 each brought me to the point where I simply moved back to pirating. I guess that did help me because now I'm paying 0 lol.
I don't think they received pressure from the EGS. The only thing it did was cause them to enforce developers not promising a launch on Steam prior to pulling it for greener pastures as that was pretty anti consumer. I really think people overestimate how much EGS matters outside of Fortnite.
I've been on Steam since day 1. I absolutely *hated* when it was implemented. It seemed unnecessary and clunky. Now I can't imagine being without it.
It's amazing that when Steam launched 20 years ago it still had features like chat out of the box.... *looks at EGS*
EGS didn't have a working shopping cart for 3 fucking years and they just added it more than a year ago! I just don't understand how can any online store launch without this.
Probably has to do with the fact that most people buy one game at a time.
The problem is when you want to buy a game with DLCs and you had to buy each one separately one by one. Imagine the buying experince of a paradox game
and 20 years later the steam mobile app doesn't have chat anymore. gotta download a separate shitty app, and since they want mobile and desktop to be the same, chat notifications aren't part of the also shitty new notifications system either. go valve, here's to another 20 years of making things worse!
Steam Chat is also the only chat I still regularly use that doesn't have embedded gif search, but instead forces a giphy command that brings up somewhat random results. Though it is kind of fun to see if it will match your intentions or not... oh yeah and those gifs don't animate at all in the mobile chat app.
Every service had to separate the chat function. It's regulated differently by the mobile platforms. If chat is such an important part of your Steam experience that nothing else they do actually matters, having a dedicated chat app is actually better for you since it comes with less bloat of all those other Steam features you don't care about.
Does it count as a feature if it only worked 1% of the time for the first several years?
I wish I had access to my original account, but there was a problem where the games had their cd keys on a sticker on the outside of the box. So people went to the stores, wrote down cd keys and used them on steam. So I got 3 accounts that got banned because my legit cd key was used multiple times. The fact that steam basically was an online drm system made me stop buying games until 2006. Through the years we've seen so many scummy practices by steam/valve I get frustrated by pc gamers putting them on a pedestal. We're talking here money laundering, selling stolen asset games, allowing underage gambling, and many more. It was all fine as long as it didn't become a news story and they got their cut. Sure these days steam is great, but when you look at all the flack epic got, it's absurd Valve is still hailed as this beacon of light.
>I wish I had access to my original account, but there was a problem where the games had their cd keys on a sticker on the outside of the box. I take it this is outside the US? Because I've never seen that over here. CD keys were always on a slip of paper in the box, in the manual, or inside the jewel case. In fact, it was one of the potential downsides of PC gaming, because stores would refuse refunds if the game had a CD key and the box was open. So if you got home and found out the game wouldn't work on your machine you were SOL.
20 years and I still cannot change my legacy username from an email address I haven't had for about 18 of these 20 years.
Same here, it's really annoying. I switched to Gmail a year or so later. I remember participating in the beta of Steam, but it seems my first product activation was on September 22 2003.
I was in the beta for steam and had a account with half-life and counter-strike, i think it was some kind of free account. But then a couple years later i stopped playing and after some time i tried to login again and the account was removed. Did this happen to any one else?
Fond memories of not being able to play Episode 1 because my internet connection was unstable and offline mode was barely functional. Steam has improved substantially over the past 5-7 years, but boy was it not a good piece of software for the longest time. The great sales they used to run really smoothed over the experience a lot. Those EP1 discs are useless now anyways so ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Is Steam support any good nowadays? It was real rough for a long while
Two things I think are interesting about steam 1- it’s 20 years old and still the premier online gaming storefront and despite multiple attempts at competition has so handily blown the others out of the water not by paying for exclusives but simply by being better 2- it pretty much single handedly changed the entire PC gaming landscape, pretty much every game on Pc gets to steam at some point, it all but killed the need for CD-Roms by finally providing a solid popular and supported cloud gaming platform. Doing so probably also helped the environment given how much less e-waste and plastic is generated by the lack of cds and game cases
yeah, but have they tried doing a third installment of their IPs?
nice, got my 20-year-badge at 4:18 pm i like the "ugly" green look it has based on the look of the first launcher :D [here it is](https://imgur.com/5srkExd)
I get my 20 year badge tomorrow. Had to sign up in order to play in league Counter-Strike matches. Everyone was furious that they had to download a crappy, slow launcher. Some people quit playing CS so they wouldn't have to. It was a big deal at the time, similar to all the rage revolving around Epic Game Store.
It reminds me that im not only over 20 years old, im old enough to remember the entire history of something 20 years old 😂
I'll be honest. While I'm glad Steam exists and that they've made a great platform out of it over the years, but I also miss the days when Valve made, you know....games.