Gabe Newell says no-one in the industry thought Steam would work as a distribution platform—'I'm not talking about 1 or 2 people, I mean like 99%'
Gabe Newell says no-one in the industry thought Steam would work as a distribution platform—'I'm not talking about 1 or 2 people, I mean like 99%'
"It was a very weird time."
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I remember Steam's launch and understand completely.
I hated Steam for a long time because of Half-life 2.
I mean yeah.
I had to install some program and connect online to PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME? I have the CD already and entered my CD key. Why does it need validation?
This is surely the death of PC gaming.
- me in 2005
Oh MAN. I forgot about those times, hand typing in a 36 character CD key that was spat out by a dot matrix printer with questionable typeset legibility…
And importing foreign copies because they sold for cheaper in other countries. I still have a Korean box copy of Call of Duty 2. After buying one, my household needed a second so that I could play at the same time as my sibling, and didn't want to spend a whole $50 for the privilege. They would even send you a copy of the key in email while you waited on the physical box to show up, because the importers knew what they were doing.
I also may have had a Malaysian CD key or two in my time 😅
That's if Steam was even able to connect so you could enter the key.
This nightmare of the server being down on day 1 (and sometimes the whole week) is what trained me to never buy a game on release.
It still happens! To this day!
To be fair, 2005-2009 felt like a Death of PC Gaming since people stopped making PC Ports of games out of fears that that just invited piracy.
RIP games with no Steam release like Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and Enchanted Arms
Hope ports happen some day.
It’s ironic cause that’s when I ascended.
Seeing the ps3 as a quasi computer made me see the writing on the wall.
Same. I think Civ 5 was my gateway game.
TF2 here, when Microsoft laughed at the idea of continously updating one game instead of doing sequels or paid expansions, ya know because that used to be unusual, and shit-canned all updates for the Console verison I moved to PC... and... then switched back to playing the console version because my PC couldn't play online games worth a damn back then.
Then I abandoned my Steam account to rot... until Portal 2 came out and paying full retail price for a Portal sequel felt silly, so I just got the Steam version since if I recall that was not only cheaper but came with a bunch of other games in this thing called a potato pack that also gave me Super Meat Boy.
Then I realized that playing on consoles, paying for Xbox Live, and risking my physical media getting lost or damaged.. was kinda silly.