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."
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
News are slow. The milkman has to do work.
No, we stop at the second
Guess nobody remembers when Steam first started out and had enough bugs and compatibility issues that they spurred a lot of hatred evinced by the pump icon shoving into and out of a user's butt. Can't seem to find a graphic of it anywhere these days but it was funny back then
I remember Green Steam on dialup. The steam loading bar frolicking across the screen, left AND sometimes right. No "offline" mode. And, of course, being the only way to play Half Life 2.
Yeah seriously, Steam was universally hated at the time. Anyone else remember this gif?
(Sorry for the imgur link BTW, but Voyager uses the default Android upload dialog and it's AWFUL. Half the time the picture I want to upload isn't there, even if I directly navigate to the folder it's in.)
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.
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.
even without real competition on the market,
Which is the effect of
giving the customers the best most experience possible
I mean, if even Steam would have stopped 5 years ago with adding and innovating and just maintaining everything to work smoot, they still would be better than any other platform. Just sit and count money.
Look at epic, I happily claim every week the game they give away, but where is the motivation to even consider them over steam. They had all this time and money to just copy things steam did right or add new things themselves .
Almost nothing happens.
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.
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
That tracks, everyone still owned their games back then. At least Gaben got his 8 yatchs though.
Remember when you could sell games you'd never play again and people less fortunate than you could have their fun with them for a much lower price?
Yeah, but now at least the games still go on sale for a cheaper price and there isn't a rare game that you can't find anymore and if you do it's $130.
Fun fact: if you want Harvest Moon for snes the game will cost you about $400. Good condition with the box and papers will go over a grand. Snes Aero Fighters is $1,500 for an ok cartridge.
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.
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.
i'm pretty confused why people here understandably hate DRM, monopolies, and billionares, but are fine with steam and Gaben
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.
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.
