6 ms·

Steam got so much flak when it first came out because it supported DRM, facilitated the death of physical media, and was generally kind of clunky and buggy. How

Steam got so much flak when it first came out because it supported DRM, facilitated the death of physical media, and was generally kind of clunky and buggy. However, looking back, I'm thankful. I think Gabe did truly care about gamers/gaming and was worried about Microsoft's growing interest in gaming. I think he knew that that the transition to digital distribution was inevitable and made it his mission to get a platform out there before Microsoft did, because they would ultimately create something that was not gamer friendly. Perhaps this is all wishful thinking, but history has proven that Valve was perhaps the best steward we could have asked for in supporting the transition to online distribution. If we look at the alternatives be it Microsoft, Epic, or even GOG, no one has done it better. And, when tested, Valve continues to show they strive to do the right thing. For example look at returns. I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. On top of this, when the policy doesn't work (e.g. games which are broken outside of the return window), Valve again does the right thing and creates exceptions.

blibble 3y ago
steam was terrible when it came out however it was still miles better than "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it
- dcdc123 3y ago
  Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.
  - blibble 3y ago
    probably about the same time they managed to get the Friends service to work
  - dspillett 3y ago
    Giving GFWL less excuse for being as bad as it was. They'd witnessed Steam's early problems, yet repeated them (and added more besides).
- Insanity 3y ago
  I remember using Steam for the games library and using Xfire for the ingame chat features. At some point steam because the only survivor there.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    Xfire is something that died a sad death. Used it to chat with many people I met playing Star Wars Galaxies and Empire at War - think it was actually bundled with that one. The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too. Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      Don't forget GameSpy. Many, many rounds of multiplayer C&C: Renegade played through that back in the day.
- waymon 3y ago
  > steam was terrible when it came out Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever thought steam the application was a bad.
  - blibble 3y ago
    the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these days, but on dialup... yeah) the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o
    - waymon 3y ago
      ha, im just forgetful. thank you.
    - jonatron 3y ago
      I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!
  - wredue 3y ago
    Internet and DRM back then were absolutely shit. So a company coming along and embracing DRM in a consumer friendly way during a time where DRM was rightfully a major topic of contention put a lot of negativity out there. Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time, and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill gaming.
- mpixel 3y ago
  Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007. Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam. It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004. It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware? And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    It's odd seeing Counterstrike because I haven't really done gaming (and certainly not FPS) since Counterstrike was a free mod to Half Life. Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or two
    - internet101010 3y ago
      It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its professional players were born. It is truly a timeless game.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      One nice thing about Steam (back then, maybe still now?) was after the mod status left. One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many copies as the whole thing. I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically granted a new Half Life license and cloned the derivatives
      - gabereiser 3y ago
- pradn 3y ago
  It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-responsive.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    I have heard nothing but good things about skype for business!
    - stonogo 3y ago
      Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that product!
      - gabereiser 3y ago
        suppose no news is good news, I think I see the mouth moving but the picture froze.
- elesiuta 3y ago
  > "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it If it's even still possible to install/activate them. Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would rebuy them there just for the convenience.
- the_biot 3y ago
  The Steam client was always, and is still, a gigantic pile of shit. The massive CPU usage when idle, the crazy game start delays, it's all plain and obvious to anyone who installs it. But for some reason people will insist on ignoring those problems, or instead compare it to some earlier experience with standalone games or some Microsoft pile of garbage, and will defend Steam in places like this. Valve's Steam service is super nice for consumers (though developers get squeezed terribly), but the client is just horrible.
  - deelowe 3y ago
    Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles better than any other client out there.
  - Kuraj 3y ago
    I wonder if it's going to become even more web based but it has also accomplished things like a sorta unified desktop/web/mobile experience and the steam deck. So there's that.
  - vunderba 3y ago
    When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was collapsed to the system tray and wasn't downloading game updates in the background. I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    Wait, how do developers get squeezed? As a developer I need to know if I’m standing in quicksand. Having access to so many gamers, at once, without me having to setup a storefront, and pci compliance, and credit card data, is actually good for me. If you live in part of the world where there isn’t a tax treaty with the United States, that’s not exactly Valves fault. Blame your government for the squeeze.
  - dpkonofa 3y ago
    I disagree wholeheartedly here. The Steam client has its problems but it's not shit. I use Big Picture mode exclusively on my gaming PC that's hooked up to my TV and I never have problems with Steam unless some other garbage launcher (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft) crashes and doesn't return focus. That's it. Other than that, all my games stay updated, the client updates on restart, and I never have to mess with it. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.
have_faith 3y ago
> was generally kind of clunky and buggy Steam is by far the jankiest program I have installed on my machine. It's TSAB (time to seeing a bug, I just made it up) is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. I know they're raking in money for being what is mostly a very large FTP server (I kid...), but please spend some of it on the basic experience.
- happymellon 3y ago
  Strange, Steam is quite stable for me. On both my SteamDeck, my couch PC on the main TV, and my laptop. A lot more stable than Tim Sweeneys ego.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  I have only seen one Steam bug once in the last 6 years and that was a game that restarted its download from scratch, followed by the client crashing. Never happened again, never saw another bug either. Used it on hard drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  Of all the "app store" type programs that I have to interact with, Steam is somehow the least painful one. And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.
  - subtra3t 3y ago
    Maybe its just my bad system (integrated graphics, 4 GB ram, i3 8th gen processor) but Steam actually performs far worse than MS store, Gnome Store, and the Google Play Store (though thats on my phone and not my laptop).
    - jstarfish 3y ago
lolinder 3y ago
> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no questions asked—they're pretty strict about the 2 hour playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they also can't tell the difference between actual play time and time in the menu while you're doing something else. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no questions asked.
- ragestorm 3y ago
  The frequency of the returns probably plays a part. Anecdotally, I've returned a couple of games over the 2h limit and they have refunded, no questions asked.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    My only experience with hitting the limit was also the only time I've ever tried to return a game. I'm sure it mostly depends on the service rep handling your claim and how many bogus returns they've seen so far that day.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    Was that 2 hours since purchase, or 2 hours play time? The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as you've played the game for less than 2 hours.
    - ragestorm 3y ago
      Hours played. Can’t remember the purchase timeframe. Could of been the difference.
- pseg134 3y ago
  It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn’t meant to be a demo system which is what you seem to want.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 3y ago
Steam continues to be the best platform because it shares per-game and per-user cross-game transactional data with everyone. It's kind of hard to explain why this is so important, but it is unique to Steam, compared to all pay-to-play and subscription media as far as I know. Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they participate in voluntarily.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Valve will never say “You know what, we are going to go this direction, market be damned. Follow us if you want to be cool” and proceed to introduce a new graphics API. Don’t get me wrong, we needed one, but the current state of graphics “drivers” sucks. Here comes Valve: “Hey bro, I heard graphics apis suck and are bifurcated by platform, here’s a wrapper that wraps them all into an API you probably already use.” (Initial version of their DX9->OpenGL bridge). Years later, Valve again: “You know, we just kept going on that thing we told you about, here’s a full fledged x86 win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to patch the kernel but they were receptive.” Who does this? No one. Not a single company does this. They all have ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is patching to make things better for the sake of making “the ecosystem” better. Apple: “We have the best products” yet those products aren’t helping the compute ecosystem. Microsoft: “We have AI” yet those products are still being worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much every creative out there. Valve: “We just want to play, make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to make better games, and not write more code than we have to. Our business is games, not code”.
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    I might get some flak for this, but Meta is pretty big contributor to open source projects. The amount of bugs and features that they work on that are not used in their own products is quite staggering. Their open source projects are very embracing of the community. Google on the other hand...
grumbel 3y ago
> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. That was however not Valve's idea, but only came in response to EA Origin offering a return policy in 2013, Valve follow up in 2015 with their own. One of the very rare cases where the competition was a little ahead for once.
- TAForObvReasons 3y ago
  Valve's 2 hour refund option came in direct response to a 2014 lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission[1]. Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's original no-refund stance broke Australian law. > Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a product or a service has a right to a refund if the product doesn’t work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair. Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law [1] https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-were-suing-valve/ https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-w...
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  UK Consumer Rights Act gives you two weeks for no fuss return of items bought remotely. IME, Steam do not adhere to the law here.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Digital items too?
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Yes, see eg https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 section 34.
    - angus-prune 3y ago
      No, GP is incorrect. Digital goods are treated differently under the act.
semi 3y ago
For some context on the early days of steam, I remember the Friends network having reliability issues presumably due to scaling as everyone adopted steam. But by reliability issues I don't mean it occasionally failed. It did, but that was early on. I assume they just killed the backend and never pushed a client update to remove it because I remember what was at least months if not a full year of the friends UI just saying it failed to connect to the Friends network. The actual matchmaking never had any real issues that I remember, but the login servers definitely did, and deleting clientregistry.blob and restarting steam was just a routine thing you did to get steam working again. None of this is really that surprising though, steam was originally a tool just for beta testers, while the live game used WON for matchmaking. WON was shutting down and Valve had to rush steams public release.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
It got flak when it came out because it was released at the same time as HL2 and steam was the _only_ way to get HL2. If you wanted HL2 then you were installing steam, even if you weren't interested in it.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Steam came out before that. You missed the HL1 mod era.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I was around before HL1 existed, I didn't miss anything. I wasn't trying to imply they were released on literally the same day, of course steam was out before HL2, but HL2 is what drove its popularity because people were forced to install steam to get access to HL2. And most people resented them for it. At that time, store purchases was still the common way to get at PC games.
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
      I resent them now for the same reason but on another game: Civ 5. I even bought that one in a box from a store.
      - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        and still had to install steam? ouch, yeah, that would irritate the crap out of me too.
        Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
        Yes. DVD was pointless. Online steam was required. Worse still it happened to be down that day. The worst possible first impression.

blibble 3y ago

steam was terrible when it came out however it was still miles better than "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it

dcdc123 3y ago
Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.
- blibble 3y ago
  probably about the same time they managed to get the Friends service to work
- dspillett 3y ago
  Giving GFWL less excuse for being as bad as it was. They'd witnessed Steam's early problems, yet repeated them (and added more besides).
Insanity 3y ago
I remember using Steam for the games library and using Xfire for the ingame chat features. At some point steam because the only survivor there.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Xfire is something that died a sad death. Used it to chat with many people I met playing Star Wars Galaxies and Empire at War - think it was actually bundled with that one. The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too. Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.
  - Arrath 3y ago
    Don't forget GameSpy. Many, many rounds of multiplayer C&C: Renegade played through that back in the day.
waymon 3y ago
> steam was terrible when it came out Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever thought steam the application was a bad.
- blibble 3y ago
  the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these days, but on dialup... yeah) the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o
  - waymon 3y ago
    ha, im just forgetful. thank you.
  - jonatron 3y ago
    I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!
- wredue 3y ago
  Internet and DRM back then were absolutely shit. So a company coming along and embracing DRM in a consumer friendly way during a time where DRM was rightfully a major topic of contention put a lot of negativity out there. Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time, and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill gaming.
mpixel 3y ago
Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007. Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam. It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004. It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware? And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.
- ta1243 3y ago
  It's odd seeing Counterstrike because I haven't really done gaming (and certainly not FPS) since Counterstrike was a free mod to Half Life. Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or two
  - internet101010 3y ago
    It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its professional players were born. It is truly a timeless game.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    One nice thing about Steam (back then, maybe still now?) was after the mod status left. One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many copies as the whole thing. I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically granted a new Half Life license and cloned the derivatives
    - gabereiser 3y ago
pradn 3y ago
It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-responsive.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I have heard nothing but good things about skype for business!
  - stonogo 3y ago
    Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that product!
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      suppose no news is good news, I think I see the mouth moving but the picture froze.
elesiuta 3y ago
> "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it If it's even still possible to install/activate them. Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would rebuy them there just for the convenience.
the_biot 3y ago
The Steam client was always, and is still, a gigantic pile of shit. The massive CPU usage when idle, the crazy game start delays, it's all plain and obvious to anyone who installs it. But for some reason people will insist on ignoring those problems, or instead compare it to some earlier experience with standalone games or some Microsoft pile of garbage, and will defend Steam in places like this. Valve's Steam service is super nice for consumers (though developers get squeezed terribly), but the client is just horrible.
- deelowe 3y ago
  Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles better than any other client out there.
- Kuraj 3y ago
  I wonder if it's going to become even more web based but it has also accomplished things like a sorta unified desktop/web/mobile experience and the steam deck. So there's that.
- vunderba 3y ago
  When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was collapsed to the system tray and wasn't downloading game updates in the background. I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.
- reactordev 3y ago
  Wait, how do developers get squeezed? As a developer I need to know if I’m standing in quicksand. Having access to so many gamers, at once, without me having to setup a storefront, and pci compliance, and credit card data, is actually good for me. If you live in part of the world where there isn’t a tax treaty with the United States, that’s not exactly Valves fault. Blame your government for the squeeze.
- dpkonofa 3y ago
  I disagree wholeheartedly here. The Steam client has its problems but it's not shit. I use Big Picture mode exclusively on my gaming PC that's hooked up to my TV and I never have problems with Steam unless some other garbage launcher (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft) crashes and doesn't return focus. That's it. Other than that, all my games stay updated, the client updates on restart, and I never have to mess with it. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.

have_faith 3y ago

> was generally kind of clunky and buggy Steam is by far the jankiest program I have installed on my machine. It's TSAB (time to seeing a bug, I just made it up) is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. I know they're raking in money for being what is mostly a very large FTP server (I kid...), but please spend some of it on the basic experience.

happymellon 3y ago
Strange, Steam is quite stable for me. On both my SteamDeck, my couch PC on the main TV, and my laptop. A lot more stable than Tim Sweeneys ego.
pdimitar 3y ago
I have only seen one Steam bug once in the last 6 years and that was a game that restarted its download from scratch, followed by the client crashing. Never happened again, never saw another bug either. Used it on hard drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.
ElectricalUnion 3y ago
Of all the "app store" type programs that I have to interact with, Steam is somehow the least painful one. And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  Maybe its just my bad system (integrated graphics, 4 GB ram, i3 8th gen processor) but Steam actually performs far worse than MS store, Gnome Store, and the Google Play Store (though thats on my phone and not my laptop).
  - jstarfish 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago

> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no questions asked—they're pretty strict about the 2 hour playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they also can't tell the difference between actual play time and time in the menu while you're doing something else. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no questions asked.

ragestorm 3y ago
The frequency of the returns probably plays a part. Anecdotally, I've returned a couple of games over the 2h limit and they have refunded, no questions asked.
- lolinder 3y ago
  My only experience with hitting the limit was also the only time I've ever tried to return a game. I'm sure it mostly depends on the service rep handling your claim and how many bogus returns they've seen so far that day.
- dspillett 3y ago
  Was that 2 hours since purchase, or 2 hours play time? The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as you've played the game for less than 2 hours.
  - ragestorm 3y ago
    Hours played. Can’t remember the purchase timeframe. Could of been the difference.
pseg134 3y ago
It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn’t meant to be a demo system which is what you seem to want.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss 3y ago

Steam continues to be the best platform because it shares per-game and per-user cross-game transactional data with everyone. It's kind of hard to explain why this is so important, but it is unique to Steam, compared to all pay-to-play and subscription media as far as I know. Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they participate in voluntarily.

gabereiser 3y ago
Valve will never say “You know what, we are going to go this direction, market be damned. Follow us if you want to be cool” and proceed to introduce a new graphics API. Don’t get me wrong, we needed one, but the current state of graphics “drivers” sucks. Here comes Valve: “Hey bro, I heard graphics apis suck and are bifurcated by platform, here’s a wrapper that wraps them all into an API you probably already use.” (Initial version of their DX9->OpenGL bridge). Years later, Valve again: “You know, we just kept going on that thing we told you about, here’s a full fledged x86 win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to patch the kernel but they were receptive.” Who does this? No one. Not a single company does this. They all have ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is patching to make things better for the sake of making “the ecosystem” better. Apple: “We have the best products” yet those products aren’t helping the compute ecosystem. Microsoft: “We have AI” yet those products are still being worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much every creative out there. Valve: “We just want to play, make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to make better games, and not write more code than we have to. Our business is games, not code”.
- DanielHB 3y ago
  I might get some flak for this, but Meta is pretty big contributor to open source projects. The amount of bugs and features that they work on that are not used in their own products is quite staggering. Their open source projects are very embracing of the community. Google on the other hand...

grumbel 3y ago

> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. That was however not Valve's idea, but only came in response to EA Origin offering a return policy in 2013, Valve follow up in 2015 with their own. One of the very rare cases where the competition was a little ahead for once.

TAForObvReasons 3y ago
Valve's 2 hour refund option came in direct response to a 2014 lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission[1]. Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's original no-refund stance broke Australian law. > Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a product or a service has a right to a refund if the product doesn’t work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair. Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law [1] https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-were-suing-valve/ https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-w...
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
UK Consumer Rights Act gives you two weeks for no fuss return of items bought remotely. IME, Steam do not adhere to the law here.
- solardev 3y ago
  Digital items too?
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Yes, see eg https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 section 34.
  - angus-prune 3y ago
    No, GP is incorrect. Digital goods are treated differently under the act.

semi 3y ago

For some context on the early days of steam, I remember the Friends network having reliability issues presumably due to scaling as everyone adopted steam. But by reliability issues I don't mean it occasionally failed. It did, but that was early on. I assume they just killed the backend and never pushed a client update to remove it because I remember what was at least months if not a full year of the friends UI just saying it failed to connect to the Friends network. The actual matchmaking never had any real issues that I remember, but the login servers definitely did, and deleting clientregistry.blob and restarting steam was just a routine thing you did to get steam working again. None of this is really that surprising though, steam was originally a tool just for beta testers, while the live game used WON for matchmaking. WON was shutting down and Valve had to rush steams public release.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

It got flak when it came out because it was released at the same time as HL2 and steam was the _only_ way to get HL2. If you wanted HL2 then you were installing steam, even if you weren't interested in it.

gabereiser 3y ago
Steam came out before that. You missed the HL1 mod era.
- deleted 3y ago
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- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I was around before HL1 existed, I didn't miss anything. I wasn't trying to imply they were released on literally the same day, of course steam was out before HL2, but HL2 is what drove its popularity because people were forced to install steam to get access to HL2. And most people resented them for it. At that time, store purchases was still the common way to get at PC games.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
    I resent them now for the same reason but on another game: Civ 5. I even bought that one in a box from a store.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      and still had to install steam? ouch, yeah, that would irritate the crap out of me too.
      - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
        Yes. DVD was pointless. Online steam was required. Worse still it happened to be down that day. The worst possible first impression.