I remember hating the idea, during the age when games came in boxes. Now i support Steam with the tremendous support they’ve given the Linux platform. Most games i have are games on Steam, but i do have a bunch on GoG, as well as Itch.io. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket, but have to admit the Steam basket is humongous.
GOG is pretty good but they have zero Linux support that I’m aware of. Had to return a game I bought off there last year. Bought it through Steam and it worked seamlessly.
Some of their games have Linux support but also it seems very much that they do not care about going out of their way for Linux so it gets forgotten about for most titles
In GOG’s defense, they don’t have the resources that Steam does but it’s still pretty annoying. I have no plans to personally seriously use Windows ever again for personal use but Linux desktop usage is low and not something I’d expect a company that’s GOGs size to spend much time on yet. Steam can and does. I respect that a lot.
Companies can choose to be a part of the solution, or a part of the problem. And i can choose to spend my money on the solution. I would love some redundancy on the linux gaming store front tho, just valve seams a bit fragile. And afaik gog or anyone else can also use proton or???
GOG actually has a relatively good selection of Linux games.
Relatively is the key word. I haven’t had a serious issue with anything running on Proton and the way Steam implements it. I’ve had one issue out of one trying to play a game on GOG. Don’t get me wrong, I think GOG is great though.
it’s time to learn how to install umu and use it in heroic then, my GoG games run with proton through heroic, no problem.
I still have a bulk of those CD’s (not the boxes anymore). I keep them in a binder with the CD holder sleeves. Same for my drivers, and operating systems. I have disks of going back to NT, 95b, and 98. I only started in to PC’ in 1998/9. I wish i had my original Voodoo3 driver disk. I remember buying that card in my way back from school one afternoon. I was so excited to install it.
I was skeptical of Steam when it launched as well. It has proven to be a good service.
Beware bit rot.
Granted most of those are going to be archived anyway but I wouldn’t count on them being useable indefinately.
Good news is that disc rot doesn’t happen as quickly for stamped CDs as it does in CD-Rs.
But that’s just a happy little accident. Gabe is too much of a good guy, so he actually built a good distribution platform that also pushes for improvements for the whole ecosystem (like the Linux thing).
When he’s gone, capitalism dictates that enshitification must ensue in order to squeeze out every single cent of short term profit, and we’ll be screwed.
Depends on what happens to the company. Maybe he has children that can inherit his company shares and maybe they don’t want it to change.
Maybe they set up a trust or something that can take ownership.
I really hope valve never gets sold.
I remember hating the idea, during the age when games came in boxes. Most games i have are games on Steam
If they are yours can you send me a copy as proof that they are actually yours?
You can easily zip up a steam game and send it yes. And if the game developer did not implement any drm, You can play it as well. It would be piracy tho… so i support that ;)
I know you’re just trying to prove a point about physical disks, but if you actually wanted to borrow a copy of someone’s game, Steam will let you do it
You know it’s also illegal to send a copy of a physical game right?
He’s right. Everyone hated the idea of any always online DRM to play the disc you bought in a store. Steam backed off with options for a game to sometimes work offline and a pinky promise to free your games if Gaben died and the new owner decided you own nothing.
It’s weird, people hate the current DRM system for games and love Steam. Yet it was Steam that pioneered it. If Steam failed, there’s a chance we would still own games instead of them being tied to online DRM verification.
Steam is the benevolent dictator but that’s not going to last forever.
This is revisionist history. Steam was not the origination of DRM or even online DRM.
I remember, buy game. Enter CD key “key already taken” Return game “sorry, box is open we don’t take media returns” Rage.
“Actually this disc is defective. I’d like to exchange it for a new one.”
This trick will be useful if you ever go back to 1999.
Maybe from a game store. Not with the $30 you got for Xmas on a Walmart gift card.
He didn’t say valve created DRM he said that steam pioneered it. Don’t revision people comments.
Had to google “pinoneered”, but it say: “developed or be the first to use or apply” and i do not think valve did either.
They have an easy way for developers to implemet drm by require steam services tho.
But in my opinion it is better there are few well understood methods instead of a million uniqe ones. Incase there is a world this have to be reverse engeneered.I used pioneered because it has the context of one of many.
A pioneer is the name you give to people who go out and explore new things.
Apple was a pioneer in home computers. That doesn’t mean they invented the first home computer. It means they were one of the first.
Edit: since you disagree, name a single player game from before 2004 with online DRM. When HL2 came out, you could not play it without it checking online each time ( they later relaxed the always online DRM). It wasn’t registration where you enter a key once and you were fine forever.
That’s what pioneered means.
I referenced DRM in the context of online DRM.
American pioneers didn’t discover that America existed. They went out with maps from earlier explorers and settled.
Can you name any online DRM single player game that came out before HL2 and was as popular as Half Life 2? I played fps’s and rts’s in 2004 and none of them required online DRM.
The Steam hate was huge on forums I frequented. (Arstechnica, Slashdot, Usenet)
To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.
The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.
who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it.
Exactly. They didn’t discover it. They settled it after discovery.
single player
That’s a critical qualifier because of course if it’s an online game, it requires you to be online.
So saying EverQuest checked to see if you were online when you went online to play doesn’t make a point.
I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify
If you can find it, then name it?
Combine that with how lucrative MMOs
Of course if you are playing an online game it knows that you are online!
Sure we would have ended up with Steam, but maybe not as quickly. The massive success of Steam is what caused all other large shops to copy Steam. Which is how we ended up with so many different launchers
They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That’s what they were pioneers of.
There are tons of online games that don’t require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it’s providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.
And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic’s Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.
No, that’s what consumers like you are thinking in hindsight and unrelated.
The context Gabe is talking about is when he was approaching publishers. They were just being anti tech and believing in traditional brick and mortar. They were definently pro-DRM. They just couldn’t fathom a digital marketplace.
steam drm is the bare minimum license check and its not mandatory for anyone to implement in their game
Games used stuff like cd keys and even pieces of paper that deciphered codes as DRM. DRM was always something sought after by companies. Just take a look at Sony rootkit scandal for music CDs.
I referenced Online DRM. Can you name a single player game from before 2004 that required online DRM to play? (Not register. You needed to verify online almost every time before playing.si gle player HL2. )
Steam is undoubtedly convenient.
But if any game you care about keeping is on GOG, it’s a good idea to buy a copy on there, and then squirreling away the offline installer files/extracted game files somewhere safe.
Steam is undoubtedly inconvenient. Imagine a third party proprietary launcher filled with ads was required to use your browser.
You can use steam without ever seeing an ad. Due to low internet bandwidth I just turned off the couple of popups and I currently see 0 ads if I don’t specifically go to the store part. Steam boots into library, so no ads, none in downloads. I don’t use the rest unless I’m actually looking for a new game.
The only “ad” steam pushes into your face is the startup pop-up, which can be disabled in settings.
Without that, you can use whatever you like to launch your games. Valve doesn’t care. You can have a desktop shortcut for every one of your games and never see steam open, or use something like PlayNite to aggregate the games from several services into one library.
Most people call that “Windows.”
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What a load of fucking shit. My “everyone” loved the fact that we didn’t have to keep track of stupid garbage fucking DVDs and keep track of some license key.
Steam pioneered always on drm? Do you have a source? I thougt that was ubisoft and maxis primarily. That developers use steam services to implement their always on drm is something else. But it is the developers that have to click that checkbox.
Ubisoft? They didn’t start their online DRM UB Play until 2009. That’s 5 years after Steam.
Neither did Maxis. I never played Sims or SimCity 3000 but Google says as late as 2013, Sims 4 didn’t have online DRM for single player mode.
So are we just going to get an article from every other line in the hl2 documentary?
No, we stop at the second
I sent them an angry email when I bought my first house. I had purchased a physical copy of a game because I was waiting for my Internet to get turned on. I wasn’t able to play because it required an internet connection to complete the registration. I was so mad. I told them I would never buy another thing from Valve. That turned out to be the lie of the century. I was super wrong and Valve has been a company you can be proud of for decades. I often think about what a jackass I was for sending that email.
I don’t think you were a jackass. You purchased a physical copy and thus shouldn’t need an internet connection to start your game (unless it’s multiplayer only). It’s crazy how easy it is for people to get used to new normals when it comes to things like this.
Yup. Valve rocks, but they’re not perfect. When I buy a game from Nintendo, I expect it to just work without updates, and they do. I don’t understand why other companies get a pass.
This is why I don’t but games on release anymore (except Nintendo first party), and why I’m largely okay with PC being digital only. Reward the behavior you want to see.
Valve has been a company you can be proud of for decades.
So proud of a company whos ceo built a billion dollar fleet of mega yachts abducting kids into gambling.
I love how you spam the same copy pasted stupidity everywhere steam is mentioned without knowing what abducted means.
Especially since the most expensive ones are - an experimental fishing vessel designed as a test platform for better eco-stewardship in the fishing industry, a mobile hospital that travels to places that can’t afford hospitals, or are experiencing a major catastrophe that has left their medical facilities overwhelmed, one of the most advanced scientific vessels when it was built, and more plans for boats with purposes like these.
Yes, there are luxury ones, but, as far as billionaire’s production of super yachts go, Gabe is still the least worst billionaire I personally know of.
I like that even without real competition on the market, they keep on improving and innovating the platform.
It’s a company that want’s to make money but they way they do it, giving the customers the best most experience possible, wishes me for other companies would take notice of. And i don’t only distribution platforms.
That’s the difference between a private company and a publicly-traded one.
The competition might not be real right now, but they’re smart enough to know it’ll eventually catch up if they don’t stay one step ahead.
That tracks, everyone still owned their games back then. At least Gaben got his 8 yatchs though.
Even the launch version of HL1 was a great game but gosh, were Valve a crappy company back then. HL1 shipped with a bunch of trailers, so far, so good. But update patches contained mandatory new trailers. That was dialup era and downloading the updates cost much more money because of those stupid trailers. Then came Steam and made it worse. Imagine the pushback to ads in Windows 10 but add to the annoyance the fact that the annoyances also cost money. Broadband was still just getting started. My family certainly couldn’t afford it and they could even less so afford me being online on dialup all the time. So my more wealthy friend passed me CDs with the last non-Steam updates, mods like Counter Strike. Me having been a dumb kid would have ruined my family’s livelihood otherwise.
So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model but then [Steam]
Wow it could have been so much worse
Yeah I am old enough to remember it being just a launcher (ala Ubisoft or EA games) for Half life 2 and a way to counter-strike with no mods. TBH I thought it was gonna fail hard and then after a decade of success, even I was stuck on steam. Also to add originally they only sold valve games as literally no third party was willing to give them a cent and they were short on IP.
i’m pretty confused why people here understandably hate DRM, monopolies, and billionares, but are fine with steam and Gaben
Companies still fear piracy so DRM isn’t going anywhere, and companies are still reluctant to release games on PC.
Hate of monopolies is one I have when a company uses their position to make products worse than it was before like Sony and Nintendo moving to charging for multiplayer. And it’s a monopoly on a platform they don’t control. There’s no regulatory body preventing launchers from popping up like broadband expansion being blocked by government lobbying like traditional monopolies.
When steam shifts in bad direction I’ll complain too. For now I haven’t found reason to complain about Steam. I like the product Steam offers simple as that. I don’t care about the personalities of the CEO or how much money it makes. It’s not some checkmark of X is Y so must hate.
There’s no regulatory body preventing launchers from popping up like broadband expansion being blocked by government lobbying like traditional monopolies
Sorry I can’t figure out this sentence. What did you mean by launchers here
Even huge companies like Google have encountered roadblocks trying to expand broadband services because of regulations.
PC launchers though is one that can be started even by you on Windows or Linux with the difficulty being getting customers as opposed to whether you are even allowed to make a launcher in the first place.
If I buy something, decide I don’t want it anymore, I can refund it within 2 hours of playtime or 24 hours of purchase (I might have the exact numbers wrong, but whatever). I’ve only ever used this a couple of times, but this is a reasonable expectation if you think of a video game as a product that you purchase much like any other product. I’ve never had problems with refunds, ever.
One time I bought a game on nintendo switch, and discovered that I couldn’t play it because it required joycons and I didn’t have any of those. I attempted to refund the game, but nintendo won’t let you refund a game if you’ve downloaded it.
I still buy games on steam. My switch though, I gave that away.
Reminder that at $9.5 billion in net worth, Gabe Newell would be part of the ultra wealthy class that would be eaten first whenever we get organized enough to overthrow the wealthy.
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