I was one of them. But I mean, back then most people either didn't have Internet or at least didn't have broadband. I had dial-up until like a month after it released.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn't trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.
Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.
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 😅
Same. I think Civ 5 was my gateway game.
That's if Steam was even able to connect so you could enter the key.
I remember the uproar when CS 1.6 required steam. It was huge and everyone was angry. It took a lot of pull that CS didn't die because of steam, a lot of players stayed on 1.5 for a long time. But HL2 was too big of an argument to stay off steam.
It was Garry's mod that got me personally. I saw it somewhere and my jaw dropped, I had to have it. Steam didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time, but the thought of a physics sandbox was practically unheard of before that.
I was finally convinced when steam sales were incredibly favorable.
I could either go to Gamespot and buy a used game for $20 + tax and have to deal with some sweat giving me shit about my gaming choices. Or buy that same game digitally for $10.
Around 2011, I remember not buying consoles anymore and continuing to grow my PC collection.
Around 2017, my pirating dropped significantly. I think I had like 1000+ steam games from buying so many bundles.
By 2020, I didn't pirate a single PC game, the games I bought 10 years ago still work, and I bought a game from the Microsoft Store, only to rebuy it on Steam.
You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game... which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called "dumping."
I'd be less blunt if people could admit it's a monopoly. 'Oh I never even consider other stores.' Uh-huh. 'I mean there's competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can't make theirs relevant.' You don't say. 'Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!' Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. 'How dare you.'
I think most ppl agree that it's a monopoly, it's just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I'm not sure if that's worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.
I don't agree that being the best at a thing is a monopoly. Being the literal only thing is a monopoly.
No monopoly has ever been literally the only thing.
SiriusXM is that kind of monopoly right fucking now. They are the only provider of satellite radio and have no direct competition after XM and Sirius were allowed to merge.
Wow, hopefully we'll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.
But y'know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.
Yours still was too.
Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.
AT&T did have all the phone lines in a given area. They still do. Just like cable. The market isn't always as broad as the entire world, the entire country, or even an entire state. Comcast has a monopoly in many places by being the only provider of cable service in a lot of places, just as AT&T was the only provider of phone service to a lot of places.
And if a single house in the county has DirecTV, it doesn't count. Right?
AT&T tended to have abundant small competitors, since the 19th century, they just kept suing them out of existence or buying them.
All of which is really missing the fucking point - absolute monopoly is rare and weird. Most monopolies have competitors. They're still monopolies. They command overwhelming market share, which lets them single-handedly shape the market. Having that power is what makes them a monopoly - abusing that power would make them a trust.
I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly
I mean.... It was a gamble. Internet was still young. Speeds weren't keeping up with game sizes outside a few major cities. I was mailed a few large files because it was quicker than downloading them. Not to mention the desire for physical copies over a digital thing you can lose with a bad hard drive was at an all time high.
Then people realized the internet wasn't just nerd shit, ISPs slowly ramped up their DL speeds and suddenly the thing people mocked for not being feasible is doing well because of how convenient it became.
Gabe even admits he had doubts for awhile.
I wonder where gaming would be if he had listened to the doubters. There's no denying valve has had a major impact on modern gaming
