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Steam turns 20 today: “We had to try a lot of different things over the years”
- incomingpain 3y agoI have 19 years of service after joining in dec 2003. Happy Birthday Steam! Keep up the great work for linux gaming!
- Klaster_1 3y agoFor me, joining the Steam coincided with the start of my adult life - I started uni in 2007, exactly when Orange Box and Witcher 1 were released. After careful deliberation on what to spend my first student stipend on, I went with Orange Box. The 16 years since then Steam didn't let me down, I can't imagine Steam disappearing in another 20 years.
- incomingpain 3y agoI was "cyberathlete" competing in counterstrike 1.5 and if i recall correctly counterstrike 1.6 was steam exclusive so I joined steam rather quickly. Kind of wish I could change my login/email as I havent used said yahoo account in decades.
- srj 3y agoValve released the server binary one day before the client launch, and you could use that to register with steam. I knew someone with a two digit steam id from that.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoYou should be able to.
- delecti 3y agoYou can change the contact email associated with the account (where correspondance goes), but I'm pretty sure you can't change the email address that was initially used to register the account. You can set a public-facing display-name, so in practice it's only used as a login username, but it also shows up in the UI in a few places.
- elthran 3y agoAh The Orange Box - probably one of the best gaming purchases I ever made. Bought just so I could play Portal, then ended up trying this random game I'd never heard of called Team Fortress 2 - and happily losing over 1500 hours of my life to it. Eventually called it a day when the loot crates and cosmetics got too out of hand.
- Kolja 3y agoI think it's pretty amazing that Valve managed to create something of this type (a store/launcher/software platform), targeted at an easily annoyed[citation needed] group of people (gamers), running for this long, that is mostly used by choice and not universally hated. That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.
- kaesar14 3y agoReally no major complaints, it's an amazing platform and always has been. Imagine if we'd been stuck with a solution made by Microsoft or something.
- infinitezest 3y agoBig fan of Steam here but I wouldn't say it was _always_ amazing. In the beginning, it was a friends network that was almost always down and a launcher for games I already owned and played without a launcher for years. I hated it for a long time but it is a great platform right now.
- MrGilbert 3y agoI remember that, in the beginning, there were some concerns: - "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!" - "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?" I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
- Kolja 3y agoI remember having those concerns. And Steam performance did take a few months to solidify if I remember correctly, so not everything was unfounded. Before it, only MMOs had login screens separating gamers from gaming ;-) Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.
- birracerveza 3y ago>And the latter also lost importance, I guess? It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales. But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.
- tokai 3y agoI remember first time I tried Steam. I asked a mate "what is this steam thing?" to which he answered "its the piece of crap you need to install to play counter strike". They have come a long way since then.
- Zetobal 3y agoI want my WAN Servers back... it was a pain the first few months with steam.
- Entwickler 3y agoWhile it's amazing they've got as big as they have, I have to say I'm utterly disappointed with the quality of the steam interface. Trying to watch friend's streams breaks half the time, files often get corrupted for downloads, and feels like every other week they change the UI layout.
- Semaphor 3y agoI don’t care about streaming, I never had a corrupted download and have been using steam pretty much since it existed, and the recent UI change (not a fan, though, it’s now slower than before) was the first big one in years.
- Entwickler 3y agoYou've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Wow, you must be lucky - 3-4 of the friends I play with have to do that quite often. Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.
- Semaphor 3y ago> You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Sure, whenever I fucked around with mods too much or when migrating between windows installs. Never from something I cleanly installed with Steam.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoThat is fascinating to me! It challenges my assumption based on personal experience - I think I had to repair a game once in more than a decade (dirt rally 2, and it's possible I did something to muck it up). I did have to reinstall cyberpunk 2077 on GoG multiple times but that was largely because I tried some mods. But steam on any of my PC's, laptops and now steam deck has never failed me. sorry to hear about your experience and Thx for sharing!
- overcast 3y agoFirst Valve single-handedly saves PC gaming, then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years. Their work on Proton, and integrating into the Steam client is incredible.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>then advances Linux gaming further than anyone has done in 30 years. I guess if people count "throwing a Windows runtime environment into Linux" as "Linux gaming", then so be it. It's not the direction I'd hope for Linux to go but I'm not surprised that our continued reliance on proprietary technology seeps even into Linux itself.
- belthesar 3y agoI used to weigh into arguments with positions like this, or that "Game Devs should just make Linux/Mac builds of their games" before I got into the industry. Targeting a platform, even when you have an off-the-shelf engine that does the lions share of the work for you, is not easy work. Microsoft puts in zounds of dev time to make the wild west of hardware that is the PC landscape work, and in many ways, has to hold hardware manufacturer's feet to the fire in order to make that possible. Sony, Microsoft for XBOX, and Nintendo, all have much more significantly simplified architectures to support, and put in zounds of hours of work to make that work smoothly for their respective platforms. The amount of effort to make a comparable API that game devs could target as a platform just... doesn't exist in the F/OSS world. I'm not trying to minimize the work that folks like the SDL team do in order to make this as possible as they can, as they do spend significant efforts to try and do this. It's also not like there aren't reasonably good F/OSS engines like O3DE, based on the Lumberyard source, which was in turn forked from a version of Crytek, which would keep this kind of support close at heart. For the largest titles however, the ones with the highest likelihood of creating a striking experience for gamers, they are already facing incredibly difficult challenges in pulling off exactly what they're trying to pull off today. Their focus is on making a great game, for whatever benchmark they've set that defines it as great. It feels pretty rock-meet-hard-place to expect an ecosystem like Linux, one that embraces diversity as hard as it does to provide the level of stability and commonality that a large scale game project needs. Altruistically, yes, I wish there was a fantastic community supported platform target that game developers could use that provide the same level of stability and commonality that DirectX does. The adages about the chicken-and-egg problem of "nobody plays games on Linux, so no one is really interested in making a solid development target for games on Linux" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the very least, if folks like Valve working with CodeWeavers and the greater WINE community are making games on Linux a mainstream notion with growing support, then the likelihood of Desktop Linux getting enough community traction to make native targeting feasible becomes a real possibility.
- willyyr 3y agoMy Steam account is turning 20 today at 4:58pm (CET) and I cannot help but feel a bit old for the very first time. I still remember all my friends hating it so much in the beginning because it would slow our PCs down and cost us valuable FPS in Counter-Strike. It's amazing what Valve has achieved with Steam since then. Happy Birthday Steam!
- hospitalJail 3y agoSteam has killed any reason to be a console gamer, thank you Steam. Its been cool to see casual gamers move over to PC as well.
- lawn 3y agoAnd if you still want to have a Switch-like experience, the Steam Deck is completely amazing.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoI'm still a bit overwhelmed that I don't really own any of my games anymore. I can't lend them to a friend or relative. It makes me so sad that when I die, so much of what I bought will just stop being useful; I can give my account to someone yes, but the odds of having someone who likes all the games I liked seems slim. The technological unwinding of first-sale doctrine is a huge blow to me, one that I feel so regularly, and which makes every purchase more than just a little bit sad. So far the upside of Steam has been incredible. Installing, removing, & keeping games updated is incredibly easy. Saves go to what has so far been a reliable cloud. Matchmaking & lobbies don't die after a couple years, when games use the Steam SDK. The fancy controller mapping built-in is great. Steam Remote Play is a (mostly: please, better support killing unresponsive games Steam) just-works delight. There's so much I'm thankful for. But it still is so shocking to me how much less flexibility & capability I have. I resisted buying Steam for many many years, but it has over time become my primary gaming experience & I've accrued many hundreds of games. And that has always made me a bit sad. Now it seems like a huge number of games require either Steam or something like it; we no longer seem to even have a choice about Steam or it's ilk. It's a sad fate for such an open ended freeing thing, gaming, that we've all been ensnared in.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoI'll admit, many years ago I was a lot more skeptical. I didn't like the idea of not physically owning my games, being able to install them whenever and however I wanted without some middle man who could deny me what I paid for. And what if Steam went belly-up? Would I lose everything I paid for? What if a game was removed and I lost access to it? What if the internet was slow? But years have passed and I've softened on it. Steam has been - overall - a great service. It does everything I need and never gets in the way. Is it perfect? No. I would love a better game recommendation algorithm for starters. But it's served me well and I have hundreds of games in it, so it's work out well for both me and them.
- Barrin92 3y ago>Would I lose everything I paid for? I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time. Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.
- david422 3y agoBack when I first got an xbox, I got the Halo remastered collection or something like that on DVD. Wanted to fire it up again ... no idea where the disc is. Wish I had just gotten digital at this point.
- ranger207 3y agoSteam is the ultimate example that piracy is a service problem
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYes and no. People don't pirate PS5 games not because Sony's service is so good, but because the device is so secure that piracy is virtually impossible on it, so getting games the legal way is also the only way. The PC was and still is, way too open for that to be achievable, though they have tried with various malware DRM, including Sony. With the PC being so open, it became a battleground to competition, which led to prices being so low.
- junon 3y agoEhhhh I don't think DRM is why Steam is succeeding. By that logic, GoG should have taken over. I think Gabe's original assessment is mostly correct - making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Ehhhh I don't think DRM is why Steam is succeeding. I never claimed that DRM was the only reason. >making things easily obtainable is more important than making them free No, it's because of competition. The PC being so open and not locked down to a single entity who can engage in rent-seeking like the console vendors, means not just piracy but an unlimited ways and sources you can get media on the device which means competition, which drives down prices.
- robertlagrant 3y agoRent-seeking seems a silly term here. If you just mean "charging a fortune" then there are other consoles to buy. And consoles are luxury goods, so if they get too expensive people just won't buy them in the first place.
- jakobson14 3y agoEver since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest, I've been working to re-buy my entire library on GoG. Haven't regretted it since. Steam has always been DRM from the start. People forget about the early protests, which VALVe quashed by holding Half Life 2 hostage.
- mvdtnz 3y agoYou're going to need to bring some receipts if you're throwing around accusations like that.
- m463 3y agoJust one data point I remember - I believe the GTA games had music tracks removed.
- Pannoniae 3y ago"locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest" Can you please elaborate? Is it like the publishers permabanning people from games then denying a refund? Or how does it look like?
- mrguyorama 3y ago>Ever since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest Name the game that you mean. Activision pulled "Transformers Devastation" from steam some time ago. It is not in the store, it is not for sale, and in my library it doesn't even have the background image, because it was pulled before that functionality existed. However, I bought it before it was pulled. It is still in my library, I can still download it, and can play it whenever I want. So again, provide a link to this story or don't spread rumors.
- jakobson14 3y agoRather than provide my intial example, here's a more recent and well known one instead :) https://www.pcgamesn.com/only-up/steam-removed https://www.pcgamesn.com/only-up/steam-removed You might have heard of this little indie game, streamed by only a few tens of thousands of people on twitch and youtube.
- jakobson14 3y agoEver since steam started pulling games and locking out people's ability to play them at publishers' behest, I've been working to re-buy my entire library on GoG. Haven't regretted it since. Steam has always been DRM from the start. People forget about the early protests, which VALVe quashed by holding Half Life 2 hostage.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoI have seen Steam turn into videogame Facebook over the years. Not my scene but there are people who care a lot about their "profile". Valve is genius.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI'm not on any of the social media apps or sites so it's fun for me to occasionally scroll community pages to see what goofy things people are producing. Todd Howard or Commander Shepard memes never get old.
- lewsid 3y agoAnd doesn't look a day over 6!
- ggregoire 3y agoUsing the opportunity of this thread to share a neat trick I discovered lately. If you have a gaming Windows desktop and a MacOS laptop, you can get any game to be playable on your Mac by installing the game via Steam on your Windows then use a program called Steam Link [1] to stream it on your Mac. I've been playing BG3 from my bed with this method and it works surprisingly well! [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/steam-link/id1246969117 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/steam-link/id1246969117
- hugocbp 3y agoOh nice! I didn't know about that and I was thinking about this exact use case.
- crtasm 3y agoSteam will stream between any combination of Windows/Mac/Linux, I believe! At least between Linux <-> Windows here, using the main Steam client on both machines. I haven't tried the Link app.
- koshergweilo 3y agoSteam link is great, one of the best reasons to buy a game on steam. It even works on your phone pretty seamlessly
- WithinReason 3y agoI've found Moonlight to work better than Steam Link
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoIt was the beginning of the end of pure, complete offline software ownership. They normalized it so thoroughly that a whole younger generation no longer really understands what's been lost.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThat would have happened regardless because of companies like Adobe. There are way too many non-game-related services that were going to become online-only or even also subscription-only very quickly as the internet improved. And honestly...what does it matter? I get the philosophical argument, but in all practicality you're playing the same games either way. Steam (at least in my experience) has never prevented me from playing something I wanted to.
- m463 3y agolook at gog - though not as many titles, games purchased there run offline without drm.
- erulabs 3y agoAh steam. I remember getting into the beta and playing some of the first games on Steam instead of WON [1]. I suppose I was in on the first day, it says my account was created Sept 12, 2003! I've used this piece of software from 14 to 34. Time flies! Remember the old UI? https://i.imgur.com/rIMceA6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rIMceA6.jpg 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Opponent_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Opponent_Network
- camdenlock 3y agoLove Steam. Member since 2004. This writing style is really grating, though. Not sure what to call it. Manic forum poster? Hmm.
- AI52487963 3y agoI remember Steam launching with counter-strike 1.6 and I was livid at the time as an avid 1.5 player. I straight up refused to play counter-strike until Source launched when I got it with the Orange Box. Those early days of Steam were still rough but getting better over time. I think Valve still isn't perfect, but the options for a PC leader could be a lot worse (and absolutely were). It always amazes me that features that Steam has figured out still haven't found their way to other digital game storefronts. It's not a perfect platform, but it's likely the best we got for now. Just glad that there are other places to go if Steam isn't your jam.
- Arrath 3y agoI first learned to cover my internet tracks when my mom asked what "FuckSteam.com" was and why it was in the web browser history. I quickly came to have an appreciation for Steam, as pausing/resuming downloads on my 56k dialup was very, very unreliable. Steam's client was my first exposure to reliable download pausing so they found my soft spot.
- Mordisquitos 3y agoI'm on the same boat as you. I despised the very idea of Steam when it first launched, and was a firm believer in owning games outright without depending on a platform on which one had to log into (well, technically I still do believe in it, but I am resigned to reality). However, I have to say that Steam and its prophet St. Gabe Newell have truly stood the test of time and been a force for good in the PC games industry (all the more so as a Linux user). In fact, Valve is a great representative of a conclusion I reached a while ago (not original by any means), which is that privately owned businesses whose owners give a shit about the value they create are of much greater social value than the paperclip-maximising entities that often result from publicly traded corporations. Another example, though defunct, was OKCupid when it was still owned privately by its founders before it was sold off to the Borg of Match.com. When Adam Smith said that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” it was a description of reality, not a prescription to be maximised through layer upon layer of purely financial self-interest. Doing things for pure profit optimises the market and society benefits only as a side-effect. Doing things for profit, while actually caring for what you make, may not be market-optimal but can be much better for society.
- sylens 3y agoMy Steam account predates my Gmail account. I think it's the account that has been around the longest for me that I still use. It's funny to think back and remember the days of waiting in queues at FilePlanet to download a patch for Counter-Strike
- gabereiser 3y agoHeh, Steam for me was first just a new UI to Half-Life and my beloved CS. I hated the design but I liked where they were going with it. Being able to find mods, install mods, “shop around for mods” made steam what it is today. That, and beloved CS. Also, if you can find it, in the Counter-Strike Beta, a lot of the levels had hidden community graffiti tags by the authors. It was awesome to see so many people. I miss the days of people coming together like that, building something they themselves want to play. Now everything is “how do I get rich off this?” loot boxes and shallow rewards for dopamine’s sake.
- Arrath 3y ago> I hated the design That original olive drab and grey color scheme was a special breed of awful, wasn't it?
- gabereiser 3y agoDisjointed UX when the original text-sprite menu with the HL activate sound was killer. It was like Quake or Doom's "thunk". Which makes sense since it's all built on Quake2.
- tarboreus 3y ago20 years, more or less a monopoly in the space (GoG is a pretty decent service but only a marginal rival), and they still can't fix their accessibility issues, even as more games for the visually impaired, etc. are coming out. The Steam app is a jumped-up web app, just fix it already.
- nerdix 3y agoMy account is roughly 19 years old. Registered for Half-Life 2. I bought it on disc but a steam account was required play. It was a very controversial move on those days.
- ecliptik 3y agoI still have a steaminstall_cs.exe in my game directory from 10/23/2003 and remember signing up for the beta when it was required to play Counter-Strike. Wish I still had access to the original account I created in 2003. Back then I wouldn't have guessed Steam would stick around this long and missed my opportunity for a completely useless "20 year" badge on my profile.