PC Gaming

I remember Steam's launch and understand completely.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

The big thing with steam is that it had, what was, at the time, a leading developer, valve, behind it. So it was a no brainer to manage your valve games.

As other games were added to the service it just became convenient to pick them up on steam.

Now, I consider a game "not released on PC" unless it's on steam.

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.'