3 ms·

I think Steam competitor idea is interesting, but forcing it on your playerbase is generally quite a bad idea (see Origin or Uplay). I'd love to see more compet

by Joona 12y ago

I think Steam competitor idea is interesting, but forcing it on your playerbase is generally quite a bad idea (see Origin or Uplay). I'd love to see more competition though.

Monk_NT 12y ago
Steam was originally forced on users IIRC
- rlu 12y ago
  Yep. HL2 was the first game to require it. You would buy the game at best buy and then you'd need to go download this strange program and tie the game to your account. A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)
  - nilved 12y ago
    Yeah, I love DRM!
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      Games have always tried to implement DRM, whether it was requiring a game disk to be inserted or a funny graph to be consulted or a word on a specific page from the manual to be entered. You know what happened when you lost any of those physical assets before the rise of the Internet? Go buy a new game. As someone who feels that it is a moral imperative to pay for creative works or forgo them, Steam is just fine by me.
    - squeaky-clean 12y ago
      Steam didn't bring about DRM in games. Games not listed on Steam still have DRM, and generally have much more restrictive DRM than Steam. DRM isn't even a requirement for selling on Steam. Some games (though not many, I know Bastion is one example) will run without Steam, and Steam is just used for updates and achievements.
- Fuzzwah 12y ago
  And was universally hated.
  - MartinCron 12y ago
    Until it was nearly universally loved. You can take away a bunch of different lessons from the Steam story.
squeaky-clean 12y ago
Forcing it on your playerbase is definitely going to upset people, but that doesn't always make it a bad idea. A good enough product can cause an ecosystem like that to actually gain the mass of users it needs to succeed. Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam. I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.

by Joona 12y ago

I think Steam competitor idea is interesting, but forcing it on your playerbase is generally quite a bad idea (see Origin or Uplay). I'd love to see more competition though.

Monk_NT 12y ago

Steam was originally forced on users IIRC

rlu 12y ago
Yep. HL2 was the first game to require it. You would buy the game at best buy and then you'd need to go download this strange program and tie the game to your account. A lot of people were super pissed. Gabe Newell said "I know, I know, but trust me: this is going to be AWESOME in the future" - boy was he right :)
- nilved 12y ago
  Yeah, I love DRM!
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    Games have always tried to implement DRM, whether it was requiring a game disk to be inserted or a funny graph to be consulted or a word on a specific page from the manual to be entered. You know what happened when you lost any of those physical assets before the rise of the Internet? Go buy a new game. As someone who feels that it is a moral imperative to pay for creative works or forgo them, Steam is just fine by me.
  - squeaky-clean 12y ago
    Steam didn't bring about DRM in games. Games not listed on Steam still have DRM, and generally have much more restrictive DRM than Steam. DRM isn't even a requirement for selling on Steam. Some games (though not many, I know Bastion is one example) will run without Steam, and Steam is just used for updates and achievements.
Fuzzwah 12y ago
And was universally hated.
- MartinCron 12y ago
  Until it was nearly universally loved. You can take away a bunch of different lessons from the Steam story.

squeaky-clean 12y ago

Forcing it on your playerbase is definitely going to upset people, but that doesn't always make it a bad idea. A good enough product can cause an ecosystem like that to actually gain the mass of users it needs to succeed. Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam. I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.