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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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.
I remember taping over the square hole.
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.
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.
Maybe you weren't old enough to remember it, but people were pissed and swore they would forever boycott Steam when it released
I indeed was one of them. Managed to boycott until left4dead2. Then i caved in. The war was lost anyway. And now i have easily put 5 figures into steam and own nothing.
But it's not what the quote is talking about. It's just correlating different things.
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 drm is the bare minimum license check and its not mandatory for anyone to implement in their game
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.
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.
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.
Most people call that "Windows."
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.
It could last a very long time, though. It's a privately owned company, so if they keep it that way, there's no board to satisfy with big payouts and stock holders to appeas. There's a lot less bullshit to deal with when you're a private company.
Also, drm and online registering is way older than steam.
The best drm was back on floppy drives. You needed a piece of tape to cover the square hole so you could copy the game for your buddy. Lol.
There were some very elaborate copy-protection schemes. Like, "go to page 12 in the manual and enter the word at the bottom of the page". Of course, people could just share what the word was, so some games did stuff like having a fucking codewheel in the manual, instead. So you had to take the code the game gave you, turn the wheel to the correct spot, and then enter the result the wheel gave you.
One of the most famous moments of Metal Gear Solid is an anti-piracy measure.
You talking about the radio frequency to contact Marrow? Not much for anti piracy, really. If you called Colonel Campbell three times total, her frequency was added to your saved frequency list.
Ah, I never knew that. But even that was a callback to them using a very similar trick in the old MSX games as anti-piracy. (Meryl, btw.)
Yeah. In metal gear 2 it was like a requirement that you had the instruction book. But I really don't think it was a piracy thing. I believe they just wanted to be a bit clever with their gameplay. MGS is really just MG2 with a bigger budget.
Split the wheel and copied it on the school copier. ;) much easier the copying the whole manual that was sometimes needed
Can you name a big single player game from before 2004 that required online DRM?
Because you originally couldn't play single player HL2 without internet. They slowly backed off the DRM but it wasn't like you needed to register once and could play forever. You needed Internet to play single player.
I don't remember needing a constant internet connection to play hl2. I just remember needing it after the initial install. 20 years was a long time ago, so I don't remember if it was the first single player game that had to be activated online first to run or not. I remember a lot of cd keys and ban type stuff for multi-player games pre hl2, but I don't recall any single player ones.
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.
