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To be fair when Steam first dropped, the idea of digital distribution was hopelessly naive and everything similar to it (like GameTap) was shut down pretty quickly.
Everything that tries to be "like Steam" also fails hard.
So there was a time when I was laughing at Steam with the rest of them.
Steam came before it's time, while we were still on dialup. Once high-bandwidth internet became common then it made sense, as did many other cloud-computing and cloud-storage ideas.
Sadly, it still has problems, especially when end users can't get along with the customer-facing staff and lose access to their licenses. There's also the problem that has revealed itself with other game clients, when games shut down, when distro-clients go out of business (I still hold a grudge with Stardock / Gamestop) and when governments seize cloud storage without consideration for the end-users (as happened with MegaUpload). When Newell dies or retires, then we only can wait to see what becomes of Steam and our libraries and what company is going to attempt to buy (and exploit) all that responsibility.
It's going to be trading Robert Baratheon for Joffrey.
I used the old Stardock/Impulse/GameStop game platform as well! I'd mostly switched to GoG (and Steam) by the time it shut down, but there are certainly some games that were lost to the platform shutting down.
I don't think I even signed up for Steam until 2010 or so. Certainly it was pretty clear that Steam had "won" by the time I made an account
I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn't trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.
Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.
As a patient gamer, I only buy older games on sale under ten bucks. I don’t replay games too often, so if I lose access it’s a big whatever.
My colleague (late 40s) is still like that. Buys only GoG or I guess physical, although it's mostly codes nowadays anyway? I mean good for him but he misses out on like 80% of games.
I don't think Steam will ever die but I hope it won't fall into enshittification at some point.
As long as Valve remains a private company, and Gabe remains in charge, I don't see them getting too shitty.
But if they go public? Forget about it.
This is my fear. Gabe won't last forever, and I don't know anyone else who has a customer centric approach as he does. Maybe that guy from Costco who threatened to kill someone over the hot dog price.
I was one of them. But I mean, back then most people either didn't have Internet or at least didn't have broadband. I had dial-up until like a month after it released.
I remember Steam's launch and understand completely.
I hated Steam for a long time because of Half-life 2.
I mean yeah.
I had to install some program and connect online to PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME? I have the CD already and entered my CD key. Why does it need validation?
This is surely the death of PC gaming.
To be fair, 2005-2009 felt like a Death of PC Gaming since people stopped making PC Ports of games out of fears that that just invited piracy.
RIP games with no Steam release like Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and Enchanted Arms
Hope ports happen some day.
It’s ironic cause that’s when I ascended.
Seeing the ps3 as a quasi computer made me see the writing on the wall.
Oh MAN. I forgot about those times, hand typing in a 36 character CD key that was spat out by a dot matrix printer with questionable typeset legibility…
And importing foreign copies because they sold for cheaper in other countries. I still have a Korean box copy of Call of Duty 2. After buying one, my household needed a second so that I could play at the same time as my sibling, and didn't want to spend a whole $50 for the privilege. They would even send you a copy of the key in email while you waited on the physical box to show up, because the importers knew what they were doing.
I also may have had a Malaysian CD key or two in my time 😅
That's if Steam was even able to connect so you could enter the key.
This nightmare of the server being down on day 1 (and sometimes the whole week) is what trained me to never buy a game on release.
It still happens! To this day!
Same. I think Civ 5 was my gateway game.
TF2 here, when Microsoft laughed at the idea of continously updating one game instead of doing sequels or paid expansions, ya know because that used to be unusual, and shit-canned all updates for the Console verison I moved to PC... and... then switched back to playing the console version because my PC couldn't play online games worth a damn back then.
Then I abandoned my Steam account to rot... until Portal 2 came out and paying full retail price for a Portal sequel felt silly, so I just got the Steam version since if I recall that was not only cheaper but came with a bunch of other games in this thing called a potato pack that also gave me Super Meat Boy.
Then I realized that playing on consoles, paying for Xbox Live, and risking my physical media getting lost or damaged.. was kinda silly.
I remember the uproar when CS 1.6 required steam. It was huge and everyone was angry. It took a lot of pull that CS didn't die because of steam, a lot of players stayed on 1.5 for a long time. But HL2 was too big of an argument to stay off steam.
I was finally convinced when steam sales were incredibly favorable.
I could either go to Gamespot and buy a used game for $20 + tax and have to deal with some sweat giving me shit about my gaming choices. Or buy that same game digitally for $10.
Around 2011, I remember not buying consoles anymore and continuing to grow my PC collection.
Around 2017, my pirating dropped significantly. I think I had like 1000+ steam games from buying so many bundles.
By 2020, I didn't pirate a single PC game, the games I bought 10 years ago still work, and I bought a game from the Microsoft Store, only to rebuy it on Steam.
It was Garry's mod that got me personally. I saw it somewhere and my jaw dropped, I had to have it. Steam didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time, but the thought of a physics sandbox was practically unheard of before that.
I mean.... It was a gamble. Internet was still young. Speeds weren't keeping up with game sizes outside a few major cities. I was mailed a few large files because it was quicker than downloading them. Not to mention the desire for physical copies over a digital thing you can lose with a bad hard drive was at an all time high.
Then people realized the internet wasn't just nerd shit, ISPs slowly ramped up their DL speeds and suddenly the thing people mocked for not being feasible is doing well because of how convenient it became.
Gabe even admits he had doubts for awhile.
I wonder where gaming would be if he had listened to the doubters. There's no denying valve has had a major impact on modern gaming
I'd probably have a PS5 and complaing about how Sony has me by the booba
Someone would've picked up the model. The execution? Doubt it.
Yes, someone would have. Eventually.
But valve did it early.
It's easy to fill a niche once it's formed. Not so easy to do before, or as it's forming. Or predict if one will form.
I'm not saying valve or Gabe had some kind of foresight or wisdom, I still think it was a gamble. It just happens to be a gamble that worked.
It’s literally the risk taking behaviour to foster innovation that economists supposedly talk about.
You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game... which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called "dumping."
I'd be less blunt if people could admit it's a monopoly. 'Oh I never even consider other stores.' Uh-huh. 'I mean there's competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can't make theirs relevant.' You don't say. 'Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!' Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. 'How dare you.'
Steam is a monopoly, it’s just not cartoonishly evil and the bar for a good company is super low these days.
The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it's not viable.
GOG Galaxy is the closest I've seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it's a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that's what you get when you don't have any obligation to shareholders.
Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.
We broke up movie theaters for that shit.
Netflix was always bound to the shareholders desires, Valve was never and as far as Gabe and his successor are concerned, it won't. This and Valve's unique hierarchy are big factors into why they haven't enshittified.
Netflix didn't do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they'd steal Netflix's business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.
I think most ppl agree that it's a monopoly, it's just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I'm not sure if that's worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.
This, I mean.. Epic tried and had a storefront so terrible they had to bribe developers into making their games exclusive. Something that never fucking worked for any game that wasn't Kingdom Hearts; and only resulted in the games bombing because they released on a constantly malfunctioning storefront that constantly got bad publicity.
And Origin was literally ran by EA, so..... yeah...
GOG is the only real competitor Steam has, and most people's opinion of it is "This is nerd shit", which is a take even I agree with because the only games it really has are older than dirt, meaning I'm the only one who gives a shit about them.
I don't agree that being the best at a thing is a monopoly. Being the literal only thing is a monopoly.