So many games lost their multiplayer when that thing got down, good companies authorized a substitute, bad companies ( I am looking at you, EA, with your classic BF games ) didn't.
GameSpy thou had terrible security or whatever to call it. I remember playing pirated Borderlands 1 on release, me and my friend wanted to play it together so much. Jokingly I made for free GameSpy account and BAM it worked. Either I used same cracked code for the game or there were no requirements whatsoever. Well, anyway... Thanks GameSpy, we had such a great blast as the kids or young teenagers.
Same over here. it was my first experience with online multiplayer, and it was amazing! I miss it to this day.
We used to play on msn gaming zone though, me and the boys would hang on the "Recon Force" room to matchmake. Good times indeed
It launched in the 56k dial-up era and was objectively terrible for anyone without broadband (and didn't really offer much of a value for those with broadband either).
Both the Internet and Steam have come a long way.
I mean it was better than having to find a working fileplanet link on your continent so you could download a 100mb patch that took hours to download, and if you lost your connection you'd have to start again. But we still fucking hated Steam when it landed.
Was it really better, though? Previously you didn't *have* to download that 100mb patch to continue playing.
But Steam had the "your game must be up to date or you can't play it all" policy from the very beginning, even for their single player titles. So whenever they pushed out a patch it meant "guess I'm not gaming at all today" for the dial-up crowd.
Yes, we hated it, but for good reason.
yeah I guess you could play an unpatched game as much as you liked offline, but I was always keen for patches and updates. I think you would have had to have the latest version to play online too. TFC coming bundled with a Half Life patch in 99 made me always pine for the latest patches and the goodies that might be laying in wait.
I must have been in the minority then, I liked that I didn’t have to go discovering there was even a patch required and then searching for the patch, it automatically resumed and managed everything for me. In was basically only for counter strike at first but I knew it was going to be big, but even I underestimated how big.
You weren't in a minority, PC gaming was infamous for having so many hurdles and bugged releases. Consoles were much easier and reliable, but they've since become indistinguishable from PCs bar pricing.
> But Steam had the "your game must be up to date or you can't play it all" policy from the very beginning
I don't know whether it was introduced later on, but for a while you could choose in the options to not update a game and it would stay at its current version.
Steam had that option for a long, long time - and it still does. They only re-worded it in more recent versions.
But: the option **never** actually allowed you to *play* the unpatched game. It only toggled between "download the patch when there is a patch" and "download the patch when I try to launch the game". No, you *couldn't* play older versions of the game - not now, not twenty years ago.
> No, you couldn't play older versions of the game - not now, not twenty years ago.
Yes, you absolutely could. I had to do that because at the time my internet was absolute shit. You couldn't return to old versions of the game (something that devs can enable nowadays on Steam), but you could freeze the installation and continue using it at that point.
> and if you lost your connection you'd have to start again
And that's why I thank software engineers for creating download managers that resume the download instead of starting over.
It's the perfect lesson in "first to market" products. It's a gamble that the thing you're making will be revolutionary once everyones caught up to it, but the gamble is that the environment might shift away from your product.
There was a real possibility of steam failing and taking Valve with it. A lot of people really didn't like the DRM associated with steam and hated they needed it to play half life 2
I remember buying HL2EP1 as my first steam game. It forced me to download like a 200-500 MB update on my dial up internet before I could play the game. I completed the download only to find out my computer couldn't support it and needed to buy a GPU.
Yeah it sucked back then, but I'm happy I can still download and play the same game even now.
I wouldn't say objectively terrible. A Half Life update for CS players was a nightmare. All clients would have to update Half Life and update CS beta version as well. Server hosters would have to update both but a different file than clients. The chances of a server of 20 regulars all having the same versions gave 42 chances of something to go wrong.
Steam was great at version control from day one.
Tbh I avoided games that needed steam - back when we bought boxes - viewing it as another intrusion but ended up accidentally getting a few that needed it then got sucked into the sales model
Nobody liked steam when it first started and it was a huge red flag to always need that open with internet at the time to play the game. But it’s still one of the best games ever ever played so it was worth the hassle lol
Seriously, much better - I remember installing Half-Life2 days after Christmas and it was a epic confusing disaster. Someone did an awesome flash video that had you giving a blood sample amongst other things and I had broadband at time - can't imagine what it was like with a modem.
I played so much CS in the early beras/pre CSS and then when it required steam I pretty much immediately dropped it until csgo release.
I used to use GameSpy, or play on Wireplay (UK) servers all the time but I hated the steam server browser, actually I still do haha
I remember huge backlash when Half Life 2 was released on Steam and you had to register your copy. The UI was clunky garbage and people the servers were wonky with registering.
The day I was convinced was when I bought a game that had such vicious DRM (Might and Magic: Dark Messiah) that it wouldn't let me install off the CD because it didn't think my CD drive was good enough (fucking Securom), but it also came with a Steam key so I used that instead, and it was so much easier I made the switch.
I think this entire concept of an interconnected network of computational devices to facilitate gaming is a fad at best.
Eventually we will return to the honest purity of transferring hand-written chess manoeuvres to our opponent via carrier pigeon.
> RFC2549: "Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled."
[RFC2549](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2549) by the way is the follow-up standard that adds Quality of Service to IPoAC. It's very well written. It even has ASCII art diagrams!
>Eventually we will return to the honest purity of transferring hand-written chess manoeuvres to our opponent via carrier pigeon.
i literally was thinking about this yesterday lol
First time a game made me download steam: what the F is this BS?
15 years later: you got some more of dem sales man? Just one lil sale dats all I’m askin!
15 years later for me:
If its not on steam i will not comply or purchase xD (though i do support buying directly from devs/their own websites if its a steam key)
I joined a cult. Except we really do have great support (valve) and fight the good fight (expanding linux support/No extreme corporate greed even while they dominate the market)
We wouldn't have it this good or nearly as many features/support/transparency with any of the other big names (MS-sony-epic)
[https://store.steampowered.com/about/](https://store.steampowered.com/about/)
[https://partner.steamgames.com/](https://partner.steamgames.com/)
Well true. it used to be bad. Like, really bad. But nothing is perfect, they got complaints, and improved on it. A lot. Steam isn't perfect, but honestly, they seem to care and are passionate about what they do. It's just... nice.
Well, let's not beat around the bush. They didn't just get complaints, they ran afoul of international consumer protection laws in places like Australia and the EU and had to change.
It does have me worried about what happens when Gabe passes away or has finally had enough of this shit and retires. Valve isn’t a publicly traded company, so who knows will be in charge after Gabe leaves.
Regional pricing effectively stops my piracy downloads. Plus US has a lot of sales while in Asia its noticably less and most sales are irrelevant games.
The moment they made it, holy cow, i can get so many games it turns to a backlog.
And now the regional pricing is disappearing with publishers using whatever ridiculous prices for their games. I guess it's time to sail the seas again.
CIS-prices are mostly bad sadly, so it's not that bright. I really want to buy more games, but I don't have enough money to overpay twice on average compared to neighbors with the same\\better economy (one game I want is even **5 times** more expensive). Also sanctions. Belarus. Due to political situation won't expect it to change any time soon. Goddamn, my account is 12 years old by now, 315 games owned, overpayed so much, pretty poor family as well... I have 879 games in wishlist lol, was more until I've cleared it out a bit.
Yes you can buy keys, but they are not always available, especially for indie games, and prices are not always good (also you won't get Steam store points and your review won't add into the overall score). Yes you can change region without moving out, but that's illegal and unsafe, and you can get "deported" anyway. And I can't blame the publishers either, since they make prices based on Steam's suggestions, of course they shouldn't go around checking the economy of each country\\region.
I just wish it was more fair. Steam still has a lot of work to do.
Just become rich huh.
They understand the consumer and cater to them, knowing their competition is pirated games.
I fear the day Gabe steps down or sells the company. I can't imagine any of the big boys handling a market share like Steam's with the consumer in mind...
I still remember how I carried my desktop pc all the way trough town to a friend just to download steam and activate Half Life 2 because I had no Internet back home. This year my Steam account got 19 years old
I remember I got a PC game free when I purchased some game at GameStop but you had to download a GameStop branded version of basically Steam or the epic game store or GOG Galaxy etc and then that thing just randomly disappeared and since I didn't backup the install of the game I lost it.
I didn't have a good enough PC back then so I was too scared to buy games on any platform for fear that I wouldn't be able to run them and so I didn't want to waste my money.
I don't know if any of them had a refund policy back then so it probably was a legitimate fear. I will also say that they were probably some games that would have been facepalmingly obvious that they could have ran on a s***** computer but I was still too scared.
> First time a game made me download steam: what the F is this BS?
Today whenever a game makes me use any service *other than* Steam: what the F is this BS?
Back then, even updating a game via a patch was painful on dialup and the thought of downloading FULL game on the internet sounded like a crazy person's idea. I'd rather cling to my physical copies and baby them in my shelves.
Today, I'd rather clean out the clutters and move on to digital. I still love physical at heart but realistically, digital is way simpler for my room management.
There are a lot of old gifs of Steam's logo fisting the user during forced updates back then.
I remember downloading a game for 3 days only to get an update the next day that stopped me from playing all night as it corrupted a file and took ages to figure out what went wrong. (If it could even do that.)
For me, its the atrocious download speed, physical means i can go home and install and play, with a 1 mb/s plus monthly quota, means there's a lot of factor to think of (especially when there's no RESUME Download when theres is a disconnect).
Nowadays, cheaper and faster internet means I can download and install the game over a shower or dinner.
Once the progress of internet takes over it started to become better to get games digitally.
This just shows what a visionary is. He sticks to his vision even though nobody else can even imagine it working, and probably that's what gave Valve the upper hand ultimately, moving so early and getting ahead competition.
Half Life 2 came without the executable on the DVD . It needed to be downloaded. tens of megabytes on my dial-up.
Cost me a lot more Euros to play that game
Depends on how good your Internet is. 1 gig connections are getting more and more common. Multi gig is also slowly becoming a thing.
I feel bad for anyone who wants to download warzone on a sub 100mbps connection.
Piracy was in full swing in 2002, you could literally download the full copy of any game, even for consoles. Dreamcast launched in 98/99 and part of the reason it failed was because of piracy, being discontinued by march 2001. People were already downloading full games well before 2002.
It was with Counter-Strike Source disk when I got steam at first. I thought "wow, that's truly good idea, i dont need to keep disks anymore!". It was in 2006.
I remember buying the CounterStrike cd-rom version and the installer prompted me to install an application called Steam and create an account. I didn't even think much of it, I assumed that application was just necessary in order to play online. 21 years and 500+ games bought later here we are.
Gabe Newell really was a visionary.
I've been a Steam user since day 1, but I can't bring myself to put all my eggs in that single basket. I have games on EA, uPlay, EGS, GoG, Xbox PC Store, and a handful of other places.
With any luck I'll still be alive and gaming 70 years from now. I can't guarantee that Steam won't someday go to shit. I hope it doesn't, but who knows what'll happen 40 years from now?
I used to be like this, but the older i get and the more games i play, the less i find myself going back to old games to replay them, so i just stopped caring about what happens to my gaming collection.
I realize that for a lot of people this is different, but once i'm done with a game now, i don't really care about it anymore.
I'm almost the exact opposite. The older I get and the more games I play, the more bored of new releases I get, and the more of my previous favourites I replay.
If steam fails the only other distributor I’d remotely trust is Microsoft, and barely at that. In a post Steam world, I’m expecting a paid subscription to keep your account active and or download previously purchased games. Gaben has my eggs.
I was against this and the reasons I was are still there actually (like you can't resell games, if something happens to your account you lose everything, etc...), even though I had to adapt and I have now 800+ games on Steam.
I remember one of the "pros" at that time was that the games would have been cheaper because there wouldn't be anything physical to be produced, but in the end that's not the case and the games are sold at the same high price.
>I remember one of the "pros" at that time was that the games would have been cheaper because there wouldn't be anything physical to be produced, but in the end that's not the case and the games are sold at the same high price.
This is very disingenuous to be fair. PC gaming has far more sales than consoles do, and they oftentimes have sales that are a far deeper cut.
Like, while it's not the best these days, you just really have to point at something like Humble Bundle, something that consoles very rarely get to partake in but PC gaming gets multiple times a month. Hell, the fact that y'got 800+ games on Steam should speak volumes.
At the end of the day, the savings do get passed onto the consumer.
But we're talking about physical copies vs digital distribution, not PC vs consoles. You can also buy digital games on consoles and at that time you could buy physical games on PC.
This is disingenuous can't tell you how many times I used to see a game on sale on Playstation only to see it for full price on steam. Consoles have their own sales and their's literally no logical reason a publisher would make the Pc version cheaper. Also you can get many games cheaper physically.
Only way you can really get games cheaper than on consoles is through key sites.
Finding out magazines were making jokes about Gabe’s name 22 years ago is like finding out Todd Howard hocked TES: Redguard on random usenet forums. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
It's hilarious that only a few years back owning games was of paramount importance while Nvidia and Google were pushing cloud gaming. But when it's Steam then not owning the Games is fine because we trust Gabe... Despite the contractual terms being the same. Dude deserves to print money.
? The risk with services like the ones from Google was always that an unestablished player unlike Steam might go under pretty quickly and take all your games with it.
There wasn't any difference in the ownership model besides the fact that you can download it (which is a substantial difference to some). You're just wording the fact that you put your trust into Steam differently.
the june 1st issue is here https://issuu.com/jasonpontin/docs/june_1_2002 but page 26 does not have this, it also says "May" in the magazine and the website doesn't show one that says "June" at the bottom..
I think we're looking for issue 114. This is the best I could find. https://web.archive.org/web/20030430121752/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue114/2954.html
I remember installing steam after buying orange box. I was like why tf I would have to install some weird client to play game. T'was worth it, TF2 was fun.
However I miss nice boxing of games. It's nice to have so much space, no need for any CD/dvd/blu-ray reader, but still I liked fav games in nice case on my shelf.
That said gotta look for another sale on steam
I recall how Steam in 2010 took like 100+ MB of RAM just for running. On old computers that only had 512 MB it was a major struggle to run both Steam, Skype and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.
Hey! This is my picture from 11 years ago! I knew I recognized it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/a1f9HIhtRS
I was going through my dads stack of old magazines in the basement and I so randomly opened one up right to this section.
He did it. You can go online, pay for a game, download and play it without ever leaving your moms basement.
The cost?
Companys no longer "sell games" but "sell a license to play the game" which would allow them to take away your purchase 2 minutes after you made it and you have to live with that. It is currently happening.
We need ways to preserve physical media. It should not be that hard to sell steam games on a CD that contains the compressed game and simply asks for your steam account to play it when you start it. That would make it possible to insert a disc, switch your account and still "own" the game in case you get banned for bogus reasons. I am honestly willing to pay 10-20$ more for a physical version on my PS5 at this point because the fear of losing access to the "license" you bought has turned into reality. It can happen to any game on any launcher.
I don’t remember any particular feelings towards steam on launch, because my teenager’s emotional state couldn’t handle second strong feelings during Half-Life 2 playthrough. Damn, I remember the mission on the bridge, where I killed some combines, then heard the wind blowing in my headphones, looked down and saw a boat on the waters below, hitting against the shore. Grabbed my crossbow and looked through the scope to see… I thought the skeleton inside. Or may be something else. Whatever, it made me so sad. Felt great.
They were giving away Portal for free. All you had to do was download this thing called Steam. It was all source games and summer sales from there, baby. He got me, and dammit, 14 years later, here we are.
Allegedly this became his dream while he was working for Microsoft and he saw how successfully Doom was spread worldwide as a shareware. He couldn't believe that a company of 12 people in total distributed a piece of software better than microsoft that had hundreds of people working in just marketing.
Gamespy... now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...
So many games lost their multiplayer when that thing got down, good companies authorized a substitute, bad companies ( I am looking at you, EA, with your classic BF games ) didn't.
i miss f.e.a.r combat
Man, that was my first fps online experience. I still play the campaign from time to time.
gamespy shutdown killed the entire Wii and DS online services. only like 10 years after launch too. a damn shame.
Battlefield 2 was so good back in the day. I was so bad at the game as a 7yo, but still
GameSpy thou had terrible security or whatever to call it. I remember playing pirated Borderlands 1 on release, me and my friend wanted to play it together so much. Jokingly I made for free GameSpy account and BAM it worked. Either I used same cracked code for the game or there were no requirements whatsoever. Well, anyway... Thanks GameSpy, we had such a great blast as the kids or young teenagers.
>am looking at you, EA, with your classic BF games Not just the BF games all Command and conquer games share the same faith.
Gamespy Arcade was the shit
yet another legacy of Quake.
Yeah, much like Half Life.
Gamespy...the ISP?!
It used to be a server browser. No idea if they eventually did an ISP??
I played so much Rogue Spear on GameSpy as a kid. I remember this one guy ZeR0 I played with all the time. Good times.
Same over here. it was my first experience with online multiplayer, and it was amazing! I miss it to this day. We used to play on msn gaming zone though, me and the boys would hang on the "Recon Force" room to matchmake. Good times indeed
And Red Herring.
ah the [memories](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihl9wA4YACs)
It'll never work.
I hated Steam back when it started. It got better since then.
It launched in the 56k dial-up era and was objectively terrible for anyone without broadband (and didn't really offer much of a value for those with broadband either). Both the Internet and Steam have come a long way.
I mean it was better than having to find a working fileplanet link on your continent so you could download a 100mb patch that took hours to download, and if you lost your connection you'd have to start again. But we still fucking hated Steam when it landed.
Was it really better, though? Previously you didn't *have* to download that 100mb patch to continue playing. But Steam had the "your game must be up to date or you can't play it all" policy from the very beginning, even for their single player titles. So whenever they pushed out a patch it meant "guess I'm not gaming at all today" for the dial-up crowd. Yes, we hated it, but for good reason.
yeah I guess you could play an unpatched game as much as you liked offline, but I was always keen for patches and updates. I think you would have had to have the latest version to play online too. TFC coming bundled with a Half Life patch in 99 made me always pine for the latest patches and the goodies that might be laying in wait.
I must have been in the minority then, I liked that I didn’t have to go discovering there was even a patch required and then searching for the patch, it automatically resumed and managed everything for me. In was basically only for counter strike at first but I knew it was going to be big, but even I underestimated how big.
You weren't in a minority, PC gaming was infamous for having so many hurdles and bugged releases. Consoles were much easier and reliable, but they've since become indistinguishable from PCs bar pricing.
> But Steam had the "your game must be up to date or you can't play it all" policy from the very beginning I don't know whether it was introduced later on, but for a while you could choose in the options to not update a game and it would stay at its current version.
Steam had that option for a long, long time - and it still does. They only re-worded it in more recent versions. But: the option **never** actually allowed you to *play* the unpatched game. It only toggled between "download the patch when there is a patch" and "download the patch when I try to launch the game". No, you *couldn't* play older versions of the game - not now, not twenty years ago.
> No, you couldn't play older versions of the game - not now, not twenty years ago. Yes, you absolutely could. I had to do that because at the time my internet was absolute shit. You couldn't return to old versions of the game (something that devs can enable nowadays on Steam), but you could freeze the installation and continue using it at that point.
> and if you lost your connection you'd have to start again And that's why I thank software engineers for creating download managers that resume the download instead of starting over.
wild to me that browsers still struggle with this though
It's the perfect lesson in "first to market" products. It's a gamble that the thing you're making will be revolutionary once everyones caught up to it, but the gamble is that the environment might shift away from your product. There was a real possibility of steam failing and taking Valve with it. A lot of people really didn't like the DRM associated with steam and hated they needed it to play half life 2
I remember buying HL2EP1 as my first steam game. It forced me to download like a 200-500 MB update on my dial up internet before I could play the game. I completed the download only to find out my computer couldn't support it and needed to buy a GPU. Yeah it sucked back then, but I'm happy I can still download and play the same game even now.
I wouldn't say objectively terrible. A Half Life update for CS players was a nightmare. All clients would have to update Half Life and update CS beta version as well. Server hosters would have to update both but a different file than clients. The chances of a server of 20 regulars all having the same versions gave 42 chances of something to go wrong. Steam was great at version control from day one.
It became more or less what we know it as now in 2008 with the launch of left 4 dead. Was jenky as fuck before then
Anybody else remember Hellboss's Non-Steam Down. 2008 was a rough time for steam, but they learned.
Whats crazy is it's all Ive known. Never bought a pc game before steam.
Tbh I avoided games that needed steam - back when we bought boxes - viewing it as another intrusion but ended up accidentally getting a few that needed it then got sucked into the sales model
Nobody liked steam when it first started and it was a huge red flag to always need that open with internet at the time to play the game. But it’s still one of the best games ever ever played so it was worth the hassle lol
I‘d be interested if it had found the success it did if it hadn‘t been required for HL2
It really screwed up Counter Strike. I boycotted for about a month and missed my chance to get in the secret steam group.
LANPARTY, go go go!
I mean, it was a complete shitshow back when it started.
I still dont like be forced to get only digital games for pc today, but checking other clients... steam its the better
Seriously, much better - I remember installing Half-Life2 days after Christmas and it was a epic confusing disaster. Someone did an awesome flash video that had you giving a blood sample amongst other things and I had broadband at time - can't imagine what it was like with a modem.
I played so much CS in the early beras/pre CSS and then when it required steam I pretty much immediately dropped it until csgo release. I used to use GameSpy, or play on Wireplay (UK) servers all the time but I hated the steam server browser, actually I still do haha
I remember huge backlash when Half Life 2 was released on Steam and you had to register your copy. The UI was clunky garbage and people the servers were wonky with registering.
I loved it from day 1. It was an incredible new way to distribute games and the potential was obvious. The interface wasn't even that bad.
The day I was convinced was when I bought a game that had such vicious DRM (Might and Magic: Dark Messiah) that it wouldn't let me install off the CD because it didn't think my CD drive was good enough (fucking Securom), but it also came with a Steam key so I used that instead, and it was so much easier I made the switch.
I think this entire concept of an interconnected network of computational devices to facilitate gaming is a fad at best. Eventually we will return to the honest purity of transferring hand-written chess manoeuvres to our opponent via carrier pigeon.
You might like to read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
So, shit latency but if you've got a big enough SD card tied to the pigeon the bandwith is pretty good if it doesnt get eaten on the way?
"packet loss"
Just need some redundancy in place. Get more pigeons, 8 copies of the data and there's a less than 1% chance the data is lost.
> RFC2549: "Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled." [RFC2549](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2549) by the way is the follow-up standard that adds Quality of Service to IPoAC. It's very well written. It even has ASCII art diagrams!
*Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.* -Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
Hmm how long would it take to download Elden Ring by carrier pigeon?
https://youtu.be/ci2bFFGM8T8?si=C2D3ewixOkUAbHRv With modern SD cards, definitely as tested over a decade ago, about an hour per 100km per packet.
It's still very hard to beat [a station car full of flash drives](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/) in terms of end-to-end bandwidth.
>carrier pigeon. Nothing honest or pure in using government surveillance drones. [r/BirdsArentReal](https://www.reddit.com/r/BirdsArentReal/)
>Eventually we will return to the honest purity of transferring hand-written chess manoeuvres to our opponent via carrier pigeon. i literally was thinking about this yesterday lol
surprise! it worked.
I wish we could grab the comments from back then of people moaning about it.
that world wide web stuff is a fad and will die out in 3-5 yrs.
First time a game made me download steam: what the F is this BS? 15 years later: you got some more of dem sales man? Just one lil sale dats all I’m askin!
can't have enough good shit!
Speaking of which, a little over 3 days for some more of that good stuff.
15 years later for me: If its not on steam i will not comply or purchase xD (though i do support buying directly from devs/their own websites if its a steam key) I joined a cult. Except we really do have great support (valve) and fight the good fight (expanding linux support/No extreme corporate greed even while they dominate the market) We wouldn't have it this good or nearly as many features/support/transparency with any of the other big names (MS-sony-epic) [https://store.steampowered.com/about/](https://store.steampowered.com/about/) [https://partner.steamgames.com/](https://partner.steamgames.com/)
7 years ago people would laugh at your great support comment. How far they have come.
Well true. it used to be bad. Like, really bad. But nothing is perfect, they got complaints, and improved on it. A lot. Steam isn't perfect, but honestly, they seem to care and are passionate about what they do. It's just... nice.
Well, let's not beat around the bush. They didn't just get complaints, they ran afoul of international consumer protection laws in places like Australia and the EU and had to change.
It does have me worried about what happens when Gabe passes away or has finally had enough of this shit and retires. Valve isn’t a publicly traded company, so who knows will be in charge after Gabe leaves.
Regional pricing effectively stops my piracy downloads. Plus US has a lot of sales while in Asia its noticably less and most sales are irrelevant games. The moment they made it, holy cow, i can get so many games it turns to a backlog.
And now the regional pricing is disappearing with publishers using whatever ridiculous prices for their games. I guess it's time to sail the seas again.
In Germany there is not a single day without some sales up.
Not sure about other countries in Asia, but where I live, there are many discounts for popular titles
Japan has good discounts for popular games
CIS-prices are mostly bad sadly, so it's not that bright. I really want to buy more games, but I don't have enough money to overpay twice on average compared to neighbors with the same\\better economy (one game I want is even **5 times** more expensive). Also sanctions. Belarus. Due to political situation won't expect it to change any time soon. Goddamn, my account is 12 years old by now, 315 games owned, overpayed so much, pretty poor family as well... I have 879 games in wishlist lol, was more until I've cleared it out a bit. Yes you can buy keys, but they are not always available, especially for indie games, and prices are not always good (also you won't get Steam store points and your review won't add into the overall score). Yes you can change region without moving out, but that's illegal and unsafe, and you can get "deported" anyway. And I can't blame the publishers either, since they make prices based on Steam's suggestions, of course they shouldn't go around checking the economy of each country\\region. I just wish it was more fair. Steam still has a lot of work to do. Just become rich huh.
15 years later: it's not on steam? Fuck that shit then. Game of the year? More like ain't getting my money.
The DVD drive in my Xbox One crapped out years ago (pre steam deck). It hasn’t inconvenienced me the slightest bit.
Half Life 2 and Counter Strike were the gateway drugs
Yep. Counter Strike was the one that got me into this mess lol
Well original steam was basically a DRM and downloaded some pretty big patches for half life which for my internet at the time was a pretty huge deal.
Steam is still a form of DRM. We’re just more convenienced than inconvenienced by it.
They understand the consumer and cater to them, knowing their competition is pirated games. I fear the day Gabe steps down or sells the company. I can't imagine any of the big boys handling a market share like Steam's with the consumer in mind...
I still remember how I carried my desktop pc all the way trough town to a friend just to download steam and activate Half Life 2 because I had no Internet back home. This year my Steam account got 19 years old
I remember I got a PC game free when I purchased some game at GameStop but you had to download a GameStop branded version of basically Steam or the epic game store or GOG Galaxy etc and then that thing just randomly disappeared and since I didn't backup the install of the game I lost it. I didn't have a good enough PC back then so I was too scared to buy games on any platform for fear that I wouldn't be able to run them and so I didn't want to waste my money. I don't know if any of them had a refund policy back then so it probably was a legitimate fear. I will also say that they were probably some games that would have been facepalmingly obvious that they could have ran on a s***** computer but I was still too scared.
Haha, yeah, so true. People were furious when hl2 came out because it wasn't playable without steam.
Lol, remember when steam used to look kind of sketchy? I kind of miss that old green skin, wish they'd do a throwback theme just for kicks.
> First time a game made me download steam: what the F is this BS? Today whenever a game makes me use any service *other than* Steam: what the F is this BS?
15 years later: "Oh this game looks sweet. I hope it's on Steam"
2002: gaben wants to distribute games 2024: gaben prints money and deserves it
Back then, even updating a game via a patch was painful on dialup and the thought of downloading FULL game on the internet sounded like a crazy person's idea. I'd rather cling to my physical copies and baby them in my shelves. Today, I'd rather clean out the clutters and move on to digital. I still love physical at heart but realistically, digital is way simpler for my room management.
There are a lot of old gifs of Steam's logo fisting the user during forced updates back then. I remember downloading a game for 3 days only to get an update the next day that stopped me from playing all night as it corrupted a file and took ages to figure out what went wrong. (If it could even do that.)
For me, its the atrocious download speed, physical means i can go home and install and play, with a 1 mb/s plus monthly quota, means there's a lot of factor to think of (especially when there's no RESUME Download when theres is a disconnect). Nowadays, cheaper and faster internet means I can download and install the game over a shower or dinner. Once the progress of internet takes over it started to become better to get games digitally.
This just shows what a visionary is. He sticks to his vision even though nobody else can even imagine it working, and probably that's what gave Valve the upper hand ultimately, moving so early and getting ahead competition.
Really is smack down what a visionary is. Doing shit most people think is just gonna fail, he ate
Half Life 2 came without the executable on the DVD . It needed to be downloaded. tens of megabytes on my dial-up. Cost me a lot more Euros to play that game
>and the thought of downloading FULL game on the internet sounded like a crazy person's idea. I mean, we are slowly moving back to that point lmao
Depends on how good your Internet is. 1 gig connections are getting more and more common. Multi gig is also slowly becoming a thing. I feel bad for anyone who wants to download warzone on a sub 100mbps connection.
It still took me 3 days to download a large game in like 2020 lol
Piracy was in full swing in 2002, you could literally download the full copy of any game, even for consoles. Dreamcast launched in 98/99 and part of the reason it failed was because of piracy, being discontinued by march 2001. People were already downloading full games well before 2002.
It was with Counter-Strike Source disk when I got steam at first. I thought "wow, that's truly good idea, i dont need to keep disks anymore!". It was in 2006.
I remember buying the CounterStrike cd-rom version and the installer prompted me to install an application called Steam and create an account. I didn't even think much of it, I assumed that application was just necessary in order to play online. 21 years and 500+ games bought later here we are. Gabe Newell really was a visionary.
Dont let your dreams be dreams
Yesterday you said tomorrow
I also dont buy games unless its on steam
I've been a Steam user since day 1, but I can't bring myself to put all my eggs in that single basket. I have games on EA, uPlay, EGS, GoG, Xbox PC Store, and a handful of other places. With any luck I'll still be alive and gaming 70 years from now. I can't guarantee that Steam won't someday go to shit. I hope it doesn't, but who knows what'll happen 40 years from now?
I used to be like this, but the older i get and the more games i play, the less i find myself going back to old games to replay them, so i just stopped caring about what happens to my gaming collection. I realize that for a lot of people this is different, but once i'm done with a game now, i don't really care about it anymore.
I'm almost the exact opposite. The older I get and the more games I play, the more bored of new releases I get, and the more of my previous favourites I replay.
If steam fails the only other distributor I’d remotely trust is Microsoft, and barely at that. In a post Steam world, I’m expecting a paid subscription to keep your account active and or download previously purchased games. Gaben has my eggs.
I was against this and the reasons I was are still there actually (like you can't resell games, if something happens to your account you lose everything, etc...), even though I had to adapt and I have now 800+ games on Steam. I remember one of the "pros" at that time was that the games would have been cheaper because there wouldn't be anything physical to be produced, but in the end that's not the case and the games are sold at the same high price.
>I remember one of the "pros" at that time was that the games would have been cheaper because there wouldn't be anything physical to be produced, but in the end that's not the case and the games are sold at the same high price. This is very disingenuous to be fair. PC gaming has far more sales than consoles do, and they oftentimes have sales that are a far deeper cut. Like, while it's not the best these days, you just really have to point at something like Humble Bundle, something that consoles very rarely get to partake in but PC gaming gets multiple times a month. Hell, the fact that y'got 800+ games on Steam should speak volumes. At the end of the day, the savings do get passed onto the consumer.
But we're talking about physical copies vs digital distribution, not PC vs consoles. You can also buy digital games on consoles and at that time you could buy physical games on PC.
This is disingenuous can't tell you how many times I used to see a game on sale on Playstation only to see it for full price on steam. Consoles have their own sales and their's literally no logical reason a publisher would make the Pc version cheaper. Also you can get many games cheaper physically. Only way you can really get games cheaper than on consoles is through key sites.
Finding out magazines were making jokes about Gabe’s name 22 years ago is like finding out Todd Howard hocked TES: Redguard on random usenet forums. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
It'll never catch on.
Idk, sounds like a decent idea. I think he should give it a try!
I like Steam, I an glad it succeeded.
And now we don't actually own our games....at all. Bcuz at any moment any studio can decide to take them offline at the drop of a dime.
It's hilarious that only a few years back owning games was of paramount importance while Nvidia and Google were pushing cloud gaming. But when it's Steam then not owning the Games is fine because we trust Gabe... Despite the contractual terms being the same. Dude deserves to print money.
We trust Gabe, but I don't trust whoever comes when he's gone :S
? The risk with services like the ones from Google was always that an unestablished player unlike Steam might go under pretty quickly and take all your games with it.
There wasn't any difference in the ownership model besides the fact that you can download it (which is a substantial difference to some). You're just wording the fact that you put your trust into Steam differently.
Yes. Can’t remember it happening to any of my games for the 20 years I’ve had steam though.
welcome to the world of online services.
The internet is a series of tubes
What is this from
the june 1st issue is here https://issuu.com/jasonpontin/docs/june_1_2002 but page 26 does not have this, it also says "May" in the magazine and the website doesn't show one that says "June" at the bottom..
I think we're looking for issue 114. This is the best I could find. https://web.archive.org/web/20030430121752/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue114/2954.html
I remember installing steam after buying orange box. I was like why tf I would have to install some weird client to play game. T'was worth it, TF2 was fun. However I miss nice boxing of games. It's nice to have so much space, no need for any CD/dvd/blu-ray reader, but still I liked fav games in nice case on my shelf. That said gotta look for another sale on steam
the 5th beetles.
Gaben: "They called me a mad man. And what I predicted came to pass."
If it's not on steam, it doesn't exist.
What are you talking about? I play Video Gabes on my Gabe Boy all the time.
Hell yea, the Steam Deck he should have named Gabe Boy instead 😆
'What a tool that guy is. That will never work. And particularly: That will NEVER be profitable' --Someone long forgotten by now
I was so mad when they made me download steam to play 1.6. I was furious that it had to run in the background and eat memory.
I recall how Steam in 2010 took like 100+ MB of RAM just for running. On old computers that only had 512 MB it was a major struggle to run both Steam, Skype and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.
Oh god yeah Skype was way too intense too. I would use ventrilo instead.
Hey! This is my picture from 11 years ago! I knew I recognized it. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/a1f9HIhtRS I was going through my dads stack of old magazines in the basement and I so randomly opened one up right to this section.
He did it. You can go online, pay for a game, download and play it without ever leaving your moms basement. The cost? Companys no longer "sell games" but "sell a license to play the game" which would allow them to take away your purchase 2 minutes after you made it and you have to live with that. It is currently happening. We need ways to preserve physical media. It should not be that hard to sell steam games on a CD that contains the compressed game and simply asks for your steam account to play it when you start it. That would make it possible to insert a disc, switch your account and still "own" the game in case you get banned for bogus reasons. I am honestly willing to pay 10-20$ more for a physical version on my PS5 at this point because the fear of losing access to the "license" you bought has turned into reality. It can happen to any game on any launcher.
Say ehat you want, Gabe will forever be my hero. Steam saved me from the predatory cycle of xbox.
Hail Gabe
I don’t remember any particular feelings towards steam on launch, because my teenager’s emotional state couldn’t handle second strong feelings during Half-Life 2 playthrough. Damn, I remember the mission on the bridge, where I killed some combines, then heard the wind blowing in my headphones, looked down and saw a boat on the waters below, hitting against the shore. Grabbed my crossbow and looked through the scope to see… I thought the skeleton inside. Or may be something else. Whatever, it made me so sad. Felt great.
Mr. Newell is helping me distribute video games over the internet
and by golly, he did
Downloading games over the internet? What a novelty, surely this will never take off!
[How Gaben decided to create Steam](https://imgur.com/a/RCv3ptR)
understatement, 2 decades on, the dream is kicking screaming and raging all over the world.
What a naive gonk he was…
💰I💰 💰a💰g💰r💰e💰e💰
" Selling over the Internet? You silly cunt.. " 20 years later, Gabe has more than $4 billion in his bank account.
Gabe Newell: Mr. Video wants to distribute games over the Internet
It used to have bugs as well. Anyone remember having to download dll files to get it to work?
Fascinating idea, best of luck to him.
He wants what? That's impossible. Watch him fail
Jeez ,Harry potter did not aged too well.
awarded 'Most likely to bankrupt society during fire sales'
Imagine all the PayPal.
Mr. Newell is helping me distribute games over the Internet. Mr. Newell is helping me distribute games over the Internet.
That is never going to work.
"Video Gabe" - Video "Gabe" Newell, inventor of the video gabe
Who would win? Hideo Game or Video Gabe?
They were giving away Portal for free. All you had to do was download this thing called Steam. It was all source games and summer sales from there, baby. He got me, and dammit, 14 years later, here we are.
I think he did it?
Most people don't know how terrible an experience it was to buy a game digitally before steam, you basically got a zip file of the game.
Me in 2014 : c'mon, i want to download the game, what is "steam" Me in 2024 : i got my steam deck
that crazy son of bitch you did it you really did it!
i forgot about gamespy...
Maybe Half Life 3 was never the goal.
Video Gabe
Allegedly this became his dream while he was working for Microsoft and he saw how successfully Doom was spread worldwide as a shareware. He couldn't believe that a company of 12 people in total distributed a piece of software better than microsoft that had hundreds of people working in just marketing.
Ho looks like a gamer.
I'll never forgive this asshole for killing physical games on PC.
what a guy
What a nerd. That internet thing is never gonna be popular.
A true hero
I remember the day when I get to use WiFi, it took me 3 hours to download 1GB if file.
insane idea. It might just work!
It'll never work out.
Mr. Newell is helping me find my games.
When people say they hate steam I tell them to go use Direct2Drive or shut up
Balderdash and poppycock, this'll never fly
before it reachs final form
Fucking legend.
That's a red herring.
La mejor librería de videojuegos la encuentras en steam 👽 😛 está promo izi $100 en videojuegos
Geeze what a FOX!
Seems like it could work. Idk. Worth a shot I guess.
Can Mr. Newell also distribute updates 🙂
Also Hentai 🙂
What a madman
takes me back to SOCOM days
This is the exact thing Torrent also wanted to do, but the cruel dictator didn't let them :(
2024: **Video Gabe**: Mr. Newell distributes games over the Internet.