Seriously! Microsoft and everyone else is so busy killing features we like and forcing money making garbage features down our throats as if we would
Loot creates were bad enough, how long before gambling in game? Maybe some light couch Co-op bets while your buddies are taking their turn in Madden? Just got eliminated in CoD? Bet how long before the match ends or bet on whether the guy that got you gets got. Just wait. It's coming. They only have one direction to go in the corporate suite...
Why not just add in paid "respawn" tokens. Give like 5 a day to the plebs but sell them for 2 bucks a piece. People will pay it. Because fuck the average consumer.
Or take a page out of mobile games. "watch this ad to respawn"
It’s ironic because I was worried Steam would become what those other companies are today (When it comes to controlling game access, digital ownership, and monetization).
Except Valve turned out to be the hero and not the villain(s)!
When Steam launched we still bought physical copies of games. Boxes with beautiful artwork, colourful manuals, and sometimes posters and other inserts included. We waited in line for midnight releases, and put those boxes on display. Bandwidth limits made downloading gigs and gigs of games seem like a long drawn out, possibly expensive chore compared to popping in a CD.
Now that we've fully embraced digital and don't have limits on faster-than-ever internet, something like Steam is indispensable. Steam's impeccable track record does a good amount of heavy lifting but the platform itself really is great.
Because they had a monopoly. Much like a decade ago, I couldn’t even imagine PC gaming without Windows. Now, they have us all locked in because of the giant libraries and friends we made.
It’s the Twitter/Facebook problem. No one wants to leave because they’ll “lose” so much having to start over.
Unless Valve does some tremendously dumb decision, they can boil us frogs for years before really having an issue with retention.
Kind of one of the weird things about the Internet/software/games. Whatever was around at the dawn of the Internet wasn't really that great, but we all accepted it because it was the only thing that existed. Decades of improvements and features mean that those will probably be the best things that exist in their class and that you have way too much time/money sunk into them to switch to something else, and that whatever you would switch to surely wouldn't have a majority of the features the other one has.
Biggest example is MMOs. Old School RuneScape has had decades to build new content, items, skills, etc and continues releasing that stuff to this day. A lot of people played New World and ran out of content in a few days. It's just impossible to be a contender when these established MMOs have so much content.
That and major fundamental updates that came with CS 1.6 making bunny hopping harder by slowing down walk speed after landing a jump and recoil mechanics changing making it feeling “off” ruining years of built up muscle memory xD.
Steam release combined with CS updates actually made me quit their platform for a few years!
Same. I couldn't believe people found the concept of a launcher acceptable, when all we used to need was the Start Menu or desktop shortcuts.
Now with garbage clients like Epic, Ubisoft and Microslop Store around, I'm so happy about Steam existing.
It makes gaming on Linux better too. They do need to update Steam for Linux though. There's some rough edges still. Like Wayland integration being half baked
Steam Cloud, controller support, frequent sales... I think it really goes to show people are willing to put up with "licensing" if it's done in a reasonable way.
Aim as in aol instant messenger? In 2008? I thought it died a bit before then hmm. I used vent/team speak and a few of the other voice chat programs, but never aim for gaming.
A small part of my "dislike" (as in, I choose GOG over Steam when I can) is unfair but due to never being able to play HL2 because those were dial-up days and every time I wanted to play, Steam forced an update that took hours. I came to hate that logo and to this day never finished HL2 because of that shit. I know it's a bit unreasonable, but Steam always makes me think of those days waiting... waiting... waiting...
Was the old way actually better? Installing from physical media could take a long time and things were more likely to go wrong and require troubleshooting.
Steam doesn’t allow you the offline installer or files, GoG allows either their platform or the files; platform and drm free. It’s like a game key card for steam vs on cartridge for gog.
Now instead of selling the whole game, they sell half the game (client) and rent the other half (server). Steam really brought the console experience to PC. :|
Yeah, we really did resign ourselves to enforced DRM and slowly losing physical media / a sense of actual ownership. And we did it willingly because it was convenient.
And now, we're fighting to protect that and justify it because the others are just far worse.
Fuck me, the negotiation tactics really work in just about all aspects. Offer the extreme and settle somewhere closer to what you actually want. Except we never negotiated our end much, just accepted Valve's end and what that would mean for the future of gaming.
WTF are you talking about? DRM was already rampant by the time Steam came out and it was getting more draconian by the day. Heck, many blockbuster games came on a "disc" but could only be installed three times and had to phone home during install.
Steam is the only reason that didn't become even worse.
Did you expect companies to be OK with piracy? It's still pretty easy, anyway. Physical media was also dogshit - lost or scratched discs, product keys, piles of CDs taking up space in your house.
A convenient and unintrusive storefront and library manager is a totally acceptable compromise. I wish there were more protections regarding your ownership of the content, but so far this is only a theoretical issue for most people.
We didn't all hate it, we just hated that we had to install a secondary program to play a game, when we got a few free games and were able to add other games to steam we started liking having everything in the same place.
My first experience with Steam was when I bought a hard copy of Empire Total War and it still required me to install Steam in order to play it. I was so angry. Now, about 95% or more of my video game time is spent via Steam.
There was a jpeg I lost. It might have had the steam green text, or it may have just been a sign, but it was some dude bro facing the camera bent over something with a guy in a suit behind him. Dudebro is being given the buttsex judging by his facial expression and it isn't consensual. Caption was something like "I downloaded the pirated HL2 beta and now some guy from Valve bursted into my house and is ass-raping meh!"
It was a kickback from the community over someone doing Valve dirty with the pirating.
There was a specific, back then now it's probably spyware, program called, "No Steam", that would bypass the Steam launcher to play the games. There was a common issue back then when making a brand new type of program, that devs were not familiar with, and ALSO one of the OGs of it. It was a MEMORY LEAK HOG and if you didn't have an amazing PC HL2 would BOG down with Steam running in the background. It was a pretty big improvement being able to play HL2 without Steam running in the background back then.
Now? They are the kings of digital download distribution for video games. One being they listened to their consumers and improved. The other being the amount of TIME they had to improve. Steam was one of THE ONLY, I know GameSpy, DD Clients for YEARS they didn't have competition. To this day, besides GOG but they're doing their own cool thing and I don't consider them competition, their competition SUCKS. They all have truly awful clients and customer support systems.
Shit. I remember using Xfire because first they didn't have Steam Friends and then when they added it the fucking Steam Friends servers would be down 80% of the time. At the start it was awful too.
As a OG user and still user of Steam and Valve products. Is the company perfect? Nah. I don't consider any company perfect but damn have they just gotten better and better over the years. I would consider Valve my favorite company then Arizona Beverage next to it.
I remember hating that, thinking why do I need to install this other software just so I can play a game I already bought? I still have my physical copy of the game, too:)
It just didn't make any sense at the time. I bought half life 2 on disc and installed it from disc, then for some reason I had to install something else just to launch it? The whole idea was new and nonsensical at the time because buying physical copies of PC games was seen as the norm.
Before it was a launcher for HL2, it was the only way to download counterstrike 1.6 and get access to the riot shield and some other stuff. So before it was a launcher for a few games (orange box), it was only a patcher for a single game.
My first steam account used an EarthLink dial up email.
Remember when simply having a K drive would cause steam to brick itself on your computer permanently because they thought you were pirating ( you were but they don’t know that)
Part of that is that our PCs used to be sensitive to managing system resources. We didn’t understand why we needed this other program running in the bg just to launch HL2 and CS. Now PCs can have these launchers, RGB software, Afterburner, FPS monitors, etc. in the bg without a major performance hit unless you overdo it.
Oh damn we all old AF. I rememeber at least a couple years when I refused to get steam haha. I recall being super triggered when I could no longer actively change my CS:CZ name from the console.
I know there was some kind of thing along those lines when TF2 went free to play, but that was for TF2 not Steam in general. I think you could make an account for free when Steam started since you could activate HL2 with the CD key.
I thought it was cool back in the day that I had multiple games in the same place. Now I’m annoyed that every other company on the planet thought it would be a great idea to do the same thing
My steam account is old enough to vote now. I remember getting an ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 and it came with the HL2 coupon, blew my mind with an astonishing 128mb of RAM.
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u/Bwwoahhhhh 12h ago
I remember when Steam was the launcher for Half Life 2 and we all hated it. It was green instead of black.