Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans.
Steam first opened its figurative doors all the way back in September 2003, and has since grown into the largest digital PC gaming storefront in the world, which is actively used by tens of millions of players each day.
“In case anyone’s curious about the odd colours, that’s the colour scheme for the original Steam UI when it first launched,” commented Redditor Penndrachen, referring to the badge’s army green colour scheme, which prompted a mixed reaction from players who remembered the platform’s earliest days. “I joined in the first six months,” lamented Affectionate-Memory4. “I feel ancient rn.”
Sept 12th 2003 is the date of my account. Tomorrow it turns 20. Very nice.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
Team 9/12/03 reporting in
I’m two days behind you.
“What’s your friend ID”
“123456”…
“Okay, what’s the rest of the numbers?”
“That’s it. Those ARE the numbers”
*pikachu face*Lmao I get this all the time. My account turns 20 tomorrow.
Oh man that’s awesome
Mine doesn’t turn 20 until January. I decided to wait a bit to see if it would actually fail first.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
I’d still prefer if we didn’t have to have these launchers.
What is cs2?
Counterstrike 2. But I guess I was misremembering, since I can’t find any reference to a CS2. I guess maybe it was CS 1.2. Shrug
You’re thinking about Counter Strike Source, which was on the new (at that point) Source engine. CS:Source is what came after CS 1.6
Yes that must be it! CSS. Ha! Web dev shit.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
Thanks. I think it was Counterstrike Source.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
I was a daily CounterStrike 1.6 player back then. I didn’t have a choice. Literally couldn’t play unless I converted over to a Steam account.
I was playing CS as well back then. I don’t recall being forced to use steam
They closed the WON network in November I believe it was, which is when I had to make my steam account.
My steam account was also created in November, so I’m going to say that is correct as CS was the reason I made mine too
CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
Same
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I remember thinking Steam would die in less than 6 months because nobody wanted dematerialised games…
Part of the problem was how poorly steam ran when it was first introduced
yeah at the time you were forced into it. the won servers were shut down and most peoples computers werent good enough to play CS and have this clunky software running in the background at the same time. it worked but alt-tabbing back then was a gong show and you definitely had the performance hit.
i played CS daily then so the first day was a shit show and I dont think I got much time in that day. mostly just trying to get connected…the servers were overloaded.
That brings back memories. I used to play ARC on WON. TEN prior to that. Anyone remember Kali? I think it’s still running.
I still remember that meme with the Valve gear fucking a guy in the ass. Steam was not well received.
I remember getting Half Life 2 for free with my graphics card, then realizing that I needed to download a whole ass other program to redeem my code and download the game. I thought it was for sure a scam and some kind of virus they were trying to get me to install. There were lots of “free” things back then that required you to download a virus to redeem.
Eventually I learned it was legit and downloaded it and got my free copy of HL2, but I was not happy about it.
Now every time I download a game at 800Mbps, I’m like, “I LOVE STEAM”
Edit: I just checked when I created my account. 16 years, 10 months ago. I still have a bit to go before I hit that 20 year mark. Apparently I created my account on my mom’s birthday? I wonder why I did that instead of doing something with her?
I too got hl2 free my graphics card, it was some kind of special edition that had like better cooling or something. It came in a special case too.
Unfortunately there was something wrong with it, don’t remember what. But I went back to the store and they didn’t had a replacement for it.
But for 50 bucks extra I could get a other, better card. They paid 50 themselves as a customer service thing, very nice that was!
I ended up flashing the card to unlock it to a higher tier card, never had any problems with it. So it was a truly great experience for me when hl2 launched.
The good old days.
Same thing here. I didn’t want another program just to manage my programs. I could do that without Steam. Of course now it’s pretty awesome, but it was fairly redundant when it released.
I cursed Valve for forcing me to install Steam to play HL2.
I didn’t want it, still don’t. I actively avoided any game that required it but seems I gave up on 23 July 2011
Wow, same here. I gave up June 30, 2011.
Skyrim?
Oblivion, actually. Skyrim didn’t come out until that November.
I pirated almost any game that required it, only ended up signing up in 2018 I don’t remember why at the time but I don’t think it was to buy games since I didn’t buy any until almost a year after creating the account.
I thought it was great. I got a physical copy of the Orange Box for $20 and didn’t care that I had to install Steam to play it. After I had it set up and realized I didn’t have to physically go to the store to get games anymore, I like it even more.
Ah man, mine is only 18 years old.
Did you make your account for Half-Life 2? My account is the same age, and that’s the game that introduced me to Steam.
I made an account in January 2005, probably for HL2.
I initially resisted making an account and I hated Steam back then.
They’ve since fixed a lot of things and I now have 250+ games on it.
I have to admit, Valve is one of the few big game companies that haven’t gone to absolute shit.
Though I dread the day GabeN steps down or sells out…Another thing that I didn’t agree with back in the day was WoW, paying a subscription to play was a hard no. Still haven’t played it, which kinda sucks because I was a big fan of the old Warcraft games and of RPGs in general.
Voting with my wallet certainly didn’t change much for them, although it probably was better for me.WoW is a bit nuts: you pay a subscription fee and buy expansions? What’s the damn fee for then?
Servers ain’t free. But they could at least roll the expansion cost into the subscription.
That’s quite similar to me. I got HL2 Jan. 2005. I played Guild Wars instead of WoW because I didn’t want to pay for a sub.
The first Guildwars was great.
The second one was nice too and I played it a bunch, but there’s something about the first I can’t quite put my finger on, might just be nostalgia.
My GW2 time has been mostly spent helping people with jumping puzzles, which are kinda cut short these days by mesmers making portals for them, which I also do sometimes.
I think so or CS, I’m not sure?
Christmas '04 Orange Box-er here checking in
17y 10m for me
Lol mine too. I guess I wasn’t that early of an adopter.
19 here :'(
deleted by creator
I remember connecting with WON before steam, nostalgia CS days
wish i could hide badges… the CS 10 year veteran badge makes it really shameful to play CS… because I never play CS, I just own it.
I too bought CS:S so I could use the assets in Garry’s Mod.
You have to choose to display them to begin with… You mean they won’t let you choose not to afterwards?
I couldn’t figure out a way to have Counter-Strike not show that badge
Interesting
One more year and my Steam account can legally drink and smoke. I’m taking it to Vegas!
You can start drinking at 18
In America, probably not. It’s 21 for all states due to a federal law. If a state has it lower than 21, they get way less funding for Federal high ways, as the bill was aimed to lower drunk driving.
“Only” 12 years here.
I hit 16 a few months ago.
Orange box homies say whatsup.
Yes! I spent entirely too much time in TF2 and Gmod.
Haha yup. I bought it for half life, but figured i would play the other games first. Portal was amazing, so I gave TF2 a shot next.
I didn’t play half life for like 2 years.
Hitting 20 in 5 hours… ;)
I am at 16 as well. I feel so old now lol
Only 18 here.
Same here. I created my account after getting Half-Life 2 for Christmas. Hard to believe that came out in Nov 2004.
15 here.
I only signed up to play hl2 I think before that I used keys and CDs for things like ground zero
I remember a work friend burnt HL2 on cd for me and the only way to make it work was he also gave me his steam login. and the dude had a ripper username I still remember to this day, even though I havnt seen him in nearly 20 years.
mrpoo
Incredibly, some of Steam’s early adopter accounts are still actively in use today, a full two decades after their creation.
There are dozens of us!
Probably thousands, if not more!
I’ve got about 8 hours, but I also live on the opposite side of the earth +12 hours, so we’ll see if it’s bound to UTC time 😂
At least
Edit: Mine turns 20 in 5 days
Apparently I’ve got 6 more days til mine turns 20, as well.
I finally managed to find my account age. 19 years and one month! Time flies.
I had a long hiatus, but I still play FPS games regularly. And I can still join a random HL2 deathmatch and pwn :).
Nice. I didn’t make a Steam account until it supported Linux back in 2013 or so. So I guess I’ll be celebrating 10 years on Steam soon.
Oh man. It is year 20. I think I made my account like 6 days in. I have a 6 digit steam ID.
I’m just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).
And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go “you maniacs, you blew it up!” and so on.
Really? I was against Steam when it came out, it felt like insanity: I have to create an account, then register my CD key and it’s gone!? How will I be able to share this game with my friends?!
But after a while it’s straight up better. Do you still remember SecuROM (which shut off its servers, so you can’t even get games with it to run nowadays)? Or having to go to the developer’s website to manually download update 1.0.1a to 1.0.1b to 1.1 to 1.1.2 to 1.3a to 1.4 to … (if you were lucky they offered bigger patches where you could directly jump from 1.0.1a to 1.4 or something). And then years later the developer was bought up or shut down, so the patches were no longer available.
Don’t even remind me of having to stand up, go over to my pile of games, find the right box, open it up, grab the CD, go back to the PC, put the CD in, then start the game I want (hopefully the CD wasn’t scratched). Nowadays I don’t even have a CD drive anymore and I currently have ~70 games installed that I can start in a second or two.
I grew up with sharing CDs (and keys) with friends, or putting a CD into one computer, boot the game, put the CD in a second computer, boot the game, then play on LAN. Steam is way better still. If you don’t like it, buy from GOG.
I do buy from GOG. It’s my primary online store. I only go to the others when something isn’t available there. Which is most of the time, because we live in the lamest dystopia.
For what it’s worth, fanboys are gonna fanboy, but I have no need to deny Steam’s conveniences to call them out on the anti-property DRM crap. Absolutely piecemeal DRM is worse. Not that Steam made it disappear, I had a game install Denuvo on me over Steam just this week.
Absolutely digitally purchasing games is better than digging up optical media for DRM checks. Absolutely it’s better to have worldwide digital launches where you just… get the game the second it launches instead of running around after it like a crazy person.
But we do live in a DRM dystopia where we own nothing and are supposed to like it, the tens of thousands of dollars dumped into my Steam account will go away the moment a Steam moderator decides they don’t like me and they will certainly evaporate after I’m gone, and many, many games are now lost media like we just started making TV but haven’t invented video tapes yet.
All those things get to be true at the same time. I was kinda joking with my original post just to remind people that Steam was far from controversial and beloved at launch, but since we’re talking about it… yeah, hell yeah, we gave up on basic ownership for the sake of convenience and Steam was absolutely part of that process.
“God damn you all to hell” indeed.
Not every game on Steam has DRM. There are plenty of indie games on there where you can download it, copy the files away and play them offline. And for what it’s worth: Gabe Newell did promise that if Steam ever shuts down they’ll offer you all your games as downloads (though so far they have been solid).
I’ve never heard of a legitimate Steam account getting banned. You might be thinking of VAC bans (where your account is flagged as a cheater), which can force you out of multiplayer servers. But losing your entire Steam library? Unheard of so far if you don’t mess up on purpose (like trading stolen items, excessive account sharing, using a stolen credit card, doing chargebacks, etc.).
Right. See, you think that list of bannable reasons at the end is making this sound less dystopian and DRM-abusive and stuff?
It’s kinda doing the opposite.
Don’t get me wrong, most of those are scummy (not sure about the account sharing one, though), but in real life you at best get fined or banned from a store or something. Nobody comes into your house and sets your 20 year old game collection on fire for being a bit of a dick.
Which, hey, whatever, I don’t expect my Steam account to get banned any time soon. But the EULA is very clear that none of those games are a thing that I own and I don’t get to give them away and people don’t get to inherit them eventually and if they DO decide I’m a scumbag those games are gone.
And that sounded quaint and hypothetical in the early 2000s, but dude, that account is a significant share of my assets by now. If I had bought all those games physically I could live on reselling them for months.
Go and do a chargeback on literally any other service on this planet and see what happens, whatever account it is will get nuked from orbit.
Reselling didn’t even work back in the day with physical copies. The CD key was often only good for x activations, then at some point you had to call a support line. It’s a dubious argument.
Yes, pay to license a game that doesn’t belong to you isn’t great, but I’m confident that at least in the EU Valve wouldn’t get away with taking access away from an entire game library. Especially for random TOS violations.
But we haven’t had a single legitimate case so far, so discussing what might or could happen is moot.
“Service” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. As is the narrow band of time and games you’re referring to that required online activations at all. For a long chunk of PC gaming even games with a CD key only performed an offline algorithmic check on the key.
So yeah, if you breach the EULA in a service you get banned. If you own a thing you don’t get it destroyed for a separate infraction, though. Which is my point.
And honestly, I seriously doubt that they wouldn’t get away with an account ban in the EU. There are many ways in which the EU does good stuff to curb abuses of so-called “services”, including dragging Steam kicking and screaming into having a semi-functional return policy, but EULA-based infractions driving account bans hasn’t historically been one of their pet peeves, and there are absolutely examples of people losing access to large libraries out there.
and there are absolutely examples of people losing access to large libraries out there.
Do you have an example? I’d love to read it. I only find people who lost their account (like forgetting their credentials), who got hacked or did illegal things (stolen credit cards, scamming, selling stolen items).
I can’t find someone legitimate so far who lost all access to their Steam account for ToS reasons.
I don’t inherently disagree with what you’re saying, but online DRM would have happened anyway sooner or later, and online isn’t always online.
But most importantly, I’d rather a billion times have Valve rolling in that Steam money than any other publisher on the videogame market: the industry would be just that much worse, with unexisting indie devs and no Proton.
I mean… would it? Indie devs not only existed before Steam, but typically have a hugely contentions relationship with them. I haven’t forgotten all the growing pains about races to the bottom through sales, arguments about curation and the entire Greenlight fiasco.
I’d give them credit for pushing indie devs enough to get Nintendo to stop being annoying to work with, but that was Microsoft pushing Sony which in turn pushed Nintendo. Steam is background noise in that process.
Valve solved the issue of PC piracy in the way Netflix solved the issue of TV and movie piracy: by creating a convenient service people liked to use that is significantly more hassle free than digging through shady websites. If they hadn’t figured it out, the next-in-line big store that happened was GOG, which is coincidentally a DRM-free storefront that grew as a reaction to Steam. I don’t know what the CD Projekt Deck would have looked like, but we at least would have gotten a third sequel of a game series, so there’s that.
Everyone saw the current landscape coming, and there was no way around it if we wanted online distribution. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, and love my physical collection, but it wasn’t Valve and Steam that ushered in this BS. You can avoid steam, and a large amount of DRM if you genuinely care about. There was pushback years later and even Apple allowed you to DRM-less options.
After years of MPAA and RIAA BS piracy claims from cd & dvd ripping and declining physical sales, every company and their mom was looking into DRM to allay the fears of copyright holders and enable digital distribution. It was going to happen regardless of Steam. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, etc were all launching the same shit. Apple launched the iTunes store months before with complete DRM and people ate that up. Companies new years before people would adopt it if the benefits of digital distribution outweighed the inconvenience, and they were right.
Shit like Denuvo was going to happen regardless, as despite the push back on some of the invasive DRM, some companies remain unconvinced. They do it even on top of Steam.
No, wait, it literally WAS Steam. I mean, it wasn’t just Steam, but those guys were there at ground level. Valve is ultimately an offshoot of Microsoft, it’s not like becoming the main app store on home PCs by introducing structured DRM, sales and download management software wasn’t part of their plan.
So let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. Denuvo? Yep, that sort of DRM predates Steam. License limits and online activation? That’s contemporary to Steam and it’s the problem Steam is trying to solve. Online app stores built around DRM? Steam is as early on that race as it gets, and it’s absolutely built for that purpose.
I like it as a piece of software, too, it’s well made, but why whitewash it?
Plus, I have to point out that you seem to be arguing two opposite things at once. Is DRM inevitable? Well, since you seem to be correctly arguing that DRM-free alternatives do exist and seem to be financially viable… I’m gonna say no?
My argument is that it was inevitable at the time, and everyone saw it coming. It was going to happen regardless of whether Valve created steam or not.
You literally state this:
Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
I don’t think any of that is true. You can avoid most of the shitty DRM today and the big brother-esque remote DRM. People who adopted it then, didn’t usher this in.
But they did it. They made it work. Somebody else might have, I suppose, but it was literally them. EA was trying hard to push online activations and failing miserably. Download managers paired with DRM were a dime a dozen and were not making a dent. It was Steam.
They took the most anticipated game in the PC landscape and acquired the most played mod, bundled them together with their trojan horse of a DRM-cum-online store and forced the entire PC community to buy into it or be unable to play the big stuff.
That´s what they actually did in the real world. I remember, I was there.
So given that Steam absolutely counts as “shitty DRM” in my book, I’m not sure your representation fits reality. Like I said above, I buy DRM-free games whenever possible and my Steam account is still growing way faster than my GOG account despite prioritizing GOG.
You might disagree with the Steam DRM wrapper in principle, but in practice it’s laughably easy to bypass (by design). The difference between a DRM-free game and a game solely running Steam DRM is five minutes of effort, at that point does DRM even matter?
The Steam DRM wrapper is an important part of Steam platform because it verifies game ownership and ensures that Steamworks features work properly by launching Steam before launching the game.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
It matters because it’s there. If it was meant to not be DRM it… wouldn’t be DRM. That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
In practice, the DRM matters because it discourages keeping a backup of fully owned game files. On GOG it’s trivial to backup offline installers, which are provided explicitly (and I do keep a backup of games I only own on GOG, by the way). Steam explicitly limits your access to your games and how you use them, presumably to support a secure microtransaction environment within the Steam platform. That’d be the “ensures the Steamworks features work” bit in that text.
That’s extremely nontrivial for Steam, for the record. Disputing the ability to drive separate MTX under Steam is why several major publishers ended up withdrawing for a bit until they realized it’s not commercially viable and Steam is effectively a quasi-monopoly on the PC platform.
There are different types of DRM. Your original post was that Steam “forces always online DRM” and “you never own anything you buy”. This doesn’t really apply to Steam DRM. You don’t need to be always-online and it is not for anti-piracy. It sounds more like you are describing Denuvo which is another thing entirely. Comparing Steam DRM to Denuvo is like comparing the Wright flyer to a fighter jet.
I don’t like DRM either but at the end of the day I can just run Steamless so I don’t really care. Streaming services like Netflix have the same thing but it all can be pirated anyway so no big deal. It would be different if Steam actually implemented effective DRM, but it doesn’t.
That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
Steam allows it, but they actually officially discourage the use of third party DRM
Anti-tamper / DRM: In general we don’t recommend use of such solutions across any PC platforms, as they may impact disk usage and overall performance. Getting them fully functional in the Wine environment can take some time and add significant latency to getting your title supported.
In regards to Valve discouraging it, once third party DRM is removed later (because all publishers do it due to subscription cost.) the performance and quality of the game improves on Windows and even more so on Linux.
Look, Valve people speak a very specific way. It takes a while to wrap your head around what they mean.
The quote you’re giving me is Valve-speak for “we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don’t add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform”.
And yes, those things do apply to Steam. You absolutely don’t own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you’re actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup. This is itself a breach of Steam’s EULA and not a service they provide. It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool and, while there is a “Offline Mode” you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.
The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam’s DRM is, in fact, DRM because it’s crackable is kind of shocking. It’s a testament to their PR, for sure, but also to their ability to do long term moves due to being a private company. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM, but it did take a competent CEO with no shareholders in his way to deploy that strategy.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not DRM or games-as-a-service. It absolutely is. Valve invented or perfected DRM, online distribution, battlepasses, monetized UGC and, technically NFTs. The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.
The quote you’re giving me is Valve-speak for "we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don’t add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games
Sounds good to me.
on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform".
Ah yes, the closed platform known as the Steam Deck. So closed that Valve gives you the tools to remove Steam from it entirely if you so wish.
You absolutely don’t own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you’re actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup.
So then backup your games. Who cares if it’s against the EULA, big bad evil Valve will not find out and even if they did they would not stop you. If Valve wanted to actually stop you from doing that, they could and they would.
It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool
What is? Steam or Steam DRM? These are two completely different things. Steam DRM is not piracy mitigation tool.
you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.
So basically you want Steam to provide you the installer in addition to the game yourself, that’s a valid criticism. The other one not so much, I play Steam games offline literally all the time.
The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam’s DRM is, in fact, DRM
You are just putting words in my mouth, I never implied that at all.
It’s a testament to their PR, for sure
…what PR? lol, Valve isn’t exactly known for it’s constant customer-facing communication… All of my links came from Steamworks documentation for developers.
It didn’t take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM
Yeah no shit, you think? It’s almost like “piracy is a service issue”…
Valve invented or perfected DRM
Valve invented or perfected DRM
Valve invented or perfected DRMhttp://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/incredulous.gif
The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.
You are talking about a company that revealed CS2 by shadow-dropping three YouTube videos and proceed to not give any updates for three months. Marketing geniuses indeed, lmao.
I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill. Steam DRM does not effect me negatively in any way, you are doing a pretty bad job justifying why I should hate it with every fiber of my being like you seem to.
Yeah, I’m not getting into an online quotefest and all of those points I’ve already addressed, so this is an agree to disagree for me.
Eh, I joined knowing full well that I was trading permanent ownership and the risk of losing access if steam failed for the convenience of installing and updating without needing to do every game separately. I wasn’t in the habit of trading in games anyway, and if I get an average amount of enjoyment across games then that works out whether I uninstall from steam or throw a box in the trash.
After using it for two decades steam is still the best decision I have made for gaming even of there is still a risk that they could go belly up or remove my games at will with no recourse. The few games I lost access to were online multi-player where the servers shut down, and physicsl media would not have avoided that. On the upside many games that would have lost support over time have always been available to install and run without needing to store physical media, and a combination of sales for lowered prices and a game just being available have made the platform my reliable go to.
Competitors like GoG that offer DRM free versions are another great avenue for people! I even have a couple of games from then, but convenience and consistent reliability has been the reason that I load a game in steam nearly every day even if just for a quick round. Basically the opposite of a hellscape in my experience, but then again I have had mostly reliable internet during that time.
On a side note, I have no idea what steam levels are or whar any of the steam perks stuff is. I just use it for launching games.
Cool. I don’t disagree with any of that, for the record.
It’s the defensiveness and outright denialism of the tradeoffs that I’m calling out, if anything.
When it was released, Steam was absolute shit, which is something people tend to forget or ignore.
It has certainly come a long way, but it’s still a “Games as a Service” where you don’t really own anything.
Then again, my account is 18 y.o.I remember when Steam the software was the worst piece of software on my computer. And it stayed that way for long enough that it became a meme.
Here’s your 🍪
I don’t see a situation where digital distribution of games would have led to a space where games having no DRM would have been mainstream. Even with DRM companies continue to associate PC with piracy.
There was also the whole Sony rootkit after all with music CDs, so I’m just not seeing this whole argument of this space could have been different if it weren’t for valve. Not even sure PC gaming would have been as big as it is now if it weren’t for Valve and it really would have been a situation of PC gaming being dead and for niche titles as opposed to just some clickbait headline.
But those things can be true at the same time. Yes, PC gaming was in a rough spot before Steam solved DRM and digital distribution. Absolutely physical PC games were struggling with no alternative and Microsoft sure wasn’t figuring that out.
But Steam’s success was to transition PC gaming to an all-DRM-all-the-time quasi monopoly built around removing PC game ownership from the table altogether.
I’m just as fine with both of those statements. In the real world things rarely are complete positives or negatives, despite our cultural need to take sides on stuff. This entire thread started with a tongue-in-cheek joke about how controversial Steam was at launch, which is an undeniable fact. People get weirdly defensive about it, though.
The biggest difference between Steam and others is that people tend to recognize Apple’s weirdness about the App Store or the downsides of Spotify or Netflix, all of which pulled off similar moves. Steam, though, still manages to present itself as a bit of a plucky upstart that is with you on this thing against the big bad publishers, which is kind of nuts.
I just don’t see the level of influence as you do when it comes to DRM. DRM is something that was going to be in place and had been in the works, and if it wasn’t it would be due to the market not existing to begin with. Epic or any other company deciding to not bother to try to enter digital distribution on a massive scale rivaling consoles for decades is a reflection of how little value companies saw in the PC space despite progress in digital distribution. One even music and movies were quicker to recognize.
But your timeline is wrong there. DRM already existed, it was all over the place on PC games. Digital distribution was barely there.
Steam’s innovation was to wrap the DRM into a full-on digital distribution platform. This is a good couple of years before Microsoft put one of those on the Xbox 360, and many years before they made full price games available on it. It’s before the Apple App Store. Before World of Warcraft (although in fairness after EverQuest). Before Netflix. Before Spotify. It’s before anybody was tying your digital “purchases” to a persistent account.
There’s no reflection of PC value on other publishers not having their own take on Steam, Valve simply came first, before anybody else on any market or any platform. They were not the first to point out that curbing rampant piracy was as much about making the commercial alternative more convenient as well as more secure, but they were the first ones to implement it (poorly) and to improve fast enough to actually realize that idea.
They invented games as a service. Ground up. Day one. They are the prototype for digital distribution worldwide.
At least it’s digital rights control now instead of your rights depending on a fragile piece of plastic and aluminum.
What good is legally owning a game if I lose access to it just because it physically broke? I’d still have to buy it again (or pirate it) if anything happened to the disk, so IMO, it’s a wash.
We give up legal rights in exchange for extra short term safety and convenience. And if Steam or the developer ever takes it away from me, I can always just go pirate it to get it back.
If I punched you in the dick, would you say, “At least you didn’t kick me in the dick (with shoes!)”?
What good is legally “owning” a game if you can never sell it, and what good is games never breaking if you can’t buy and run them from a yard sale for a quarter?
Owning over a 1000 copies of physical games sounds like a nightmare in managing the space and searching for titles to me. And when I look at the market prices of old retro games and then the counterfeits I’m not too upset about the move towards digital.
Well maybe 1000 games is too many.
Tell you what, we used to have 6 games and we were happy.
And when I look at the market prices of old retro games and then the counterfeits
I’m with you there, but maybe the prices are going up because new physical games aren’t being released any more, so I can contort my way to blame that on digital gaming, too.
As for 3rd party repros I like those; they fill a niche. Heck, someone should make …pros of games that never got physical releases.
Tell you what, we used to have 6 games and we were happy.
I am happy with the much wider variety of titles I have available. Only area where I still liked physical was consoles, but it was only because I was only buying it for exclusives which ended up being like maybe 10 over the lifetime.
But, if it were my main I’d go for digital too, but with console releases on PC I don’t even bother with consoles anymore.
I’m with you there, but maybe the prices are going up because new physical games aren’t being released any more, so I can contort my way to blame that on digital gaming, too.
I guess you can go ask consoles why they stopped making games after each new generation, and why Nintendo limited their supply of physical games even before digital compared to Sony to keep their prices from dropping.
For me games have been the cheapest they’ve been with stuff like humble bundles and being able to buy old games through direct channels as opposed to used sellers a decade later. Being able to buy something like KOTOR or system shock is cool to me over having to buy some used copy sold by a reseller that might not even be legit.
My point is that owning games was never any good because there was always some severe limitation on your legal rights since the game itself is a piece of software and there’s no universal way to guarantee your ownership of a piece of software.
The disk could always break. If there was any online component, they could always take down the servers. Or if the game was broken from the start or became broken at any point, they could always just never provide the necessary update to make it playable.
I’ve never really been one to sell my games because I’m always wanting to go back and play them later, so I can’t really offer any input on that fact.
I just prefer the system that gives me at least a paper thin guarantee over the one that’s less convenient and has absolutely no guarantee.
The disk could always break.
That’s what backups are for.
If there was any online component, they could always take down the servers. Or if the game was broken from the start or became broken at any point, they could always just never provide the necessary update to make it playable.
Digital only just makes those problems apply to all games.
I’ve never really been one to sell my games because I’m always wanting to go back and play them later, so I can’t really offer any input on that fact.
I like playing a collection too, and I was able to acquire it because other people where able to sell/give away theirs
I just prefer the system that gives me at least a paper thin guarantee over the one that’s less convenient and has absolutely no guarantee.
Being able to physically hold everything needed to play the game was our guarantee.
A guarantee the publisher would never ever be able to take what we had just paid $60 (or less, secondhand) away from us.
Took me awhile to look it up, but just saw I’ve had my account since December 31, 2003. I’m just about at 20 years.
Mine’s 15 now, but back in the day I used those bootlegged Steam clients that allowed me to run Garry’s Mod for free. Those were the hackey, piratey times of 700MB aXXo DVD rips that took 1 hour to download.
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I think I made mine in 2009 for some sweet sweet TF2.
The orange box was such a good deal
