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

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.

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

It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its professional players were born. It is truly a timeless game.

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 Force, 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

I still have my 6 (7?) digit ID from those days as my steamID. It got rolled into a larger one but still kept the old digits. Pretty cool of them.

You get a special badge now too. I waited a month or 2 from release to install Steam because I only cared about Half-Life 2 and that was the first game from Valve that required Steam. You didn't even get a CD in the box, just a Steam redemption code.

There was also a separate release of counterstrike called condition zero that included a single player campaign and a tweaked version of counterstrike multiplayer.

That was not included as part of that bundle.. but if you used the dedicated server tool to download the czero mod and copied it to your halflife folder you could play both the single player and multiplayer version on steam

This was how my brother played it. He was too dumb to know the difference because the box art literally looked like CS’s splash screen. CS != CZ but nevertheless, a steam account was a steam account, and technically CZ was HL so he downloaded CS off FilePlanet and was getting destroyed by me and my friends for weeks until he learned the strafe-run hack.

>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?

My understanding was they were solving the update problem:

Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.

This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.

Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.

And downloading patches often meant waiting in a queue at places like FilePlanet for an hour or two, then downloading it at a snails pace

Haha I totally forgot about that aspect of the Internet

Yep. That's essentially why "the cloud" became a thing.

And then manually applying them. If the game was old enough you might need to apply multiple patches, something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve was going with this was the future.

Oh god! Fileplanet. That also reminds me of "Download managers". They were literally apps that would search for the same file from multiple places so that it could try to part the download up and then combine the file at the end. It was like BitTorrent before BitTorrent.

I absolutely do not miss "download button roulette" on cnet or whatever site it was where it you had the joy of playing "which of these 3 banners saying 'DOWNLOAD NOW' is actually the download button and not a sketchy ad that will ruin your day"

I remember getting game patches from CDs that came with the game magazines.

At the expense of Valve exerting more control over what CS version that server admins and players run

This was it 100%. I lived through this and that was exactly why Steam continued to be used in our LAN groups. Even for LAN parties, it made it super easy for everyone to make sure they were on the same version of everything. Extending that to online play is the reason it persisted to this day.

Do you remember before Steam won, there was also Stardock. They're still around now because they make Galactic Civilizations, but back in the day, they were also one of the early innovators in having their own store launcher for distributing their and others' games.

I still use stardock fences on my windows pc.

I also... Fondly?... Recall the time everybody was excited to have Xmas or star trek themes desktop with windowblinds.... Funny how not just fashion changes, but even need for fashion - virtually nobody customizes their windows desktop anymore :)

I remember that. It was a really good store, the first of its kind IIRC. Every so often I think about what happened to the games I owned on there?

Oh child, Stardock was originally a windows shell… Dressing to be modded like your Winamp skins.

It's kinda funny that there's a company out there that does both game publishing and popular desktop utilities

Before steam won there was also _WON_, and I'm still grumpy about losing their nice UI ;).

This is giving me a flashback to the time when I was still on dialup (the off-campus dorm I lived at had a shitty shared cable connection that was often slower or less reliable than dialup) and spent about three days downloading Half Life 2 on launch.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized I could take my laptop to campus, download it over their incredibly fast WiFi, and then transfer the files to my desktop that had a decent GPU.

It wasn’t just CS, Team Fortress had a huge player base. Natural-Selection as well. There were like 7 or 8 mods for HL1 that were “on-par” with the quality of HL1, which says something about Hammer Editor and the toolkit they had at the time. GTkRadiant is great but Hammer Editor (formerly WorldCraft) was excellent.

The popularity of the mods, CS included, is what drove Steam to become the store that it is.

I still maintain that GldSrc was the golden age of game modding.

We are, admittedly, in a pretty sweet spot right now with games running the genre gamut from Rimworld to Minecraft to Cities: Skylines to Starsector to the Bethesda RPGs having vibrant mod scenes but man, I have serious nostalgia for CS, NS, and DoD, oh and Tribes.

Tribes! The OG of “yeah, we’re gonna open source this”. Torque Engine was awesome.

It did feel unnecessary at the time, but I was obsessed with all things half-life so I was there mashing the refresh button the night when it launched. The launch itself was kind of a shit show, but IIRC it didn’t take more than a few months for everyone to realize that it was massively improved compared to the old ways of distribution.

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.

I have heard nothing but good things about skype for business!

Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that product!

suppose no news is good news, I think I see the mouth moving but the picture froze.

> "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.

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.

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.

Don't forget GameSpy. Many, many rounds of multiplayer C&C: Renegade played through that back in the day.

> 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.

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

ha, im just forgetful. thank you.

I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!

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.

Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.

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).

probably about the same time they managed to get the Friends service to work

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.

Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles better than any other client out there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was shit for a very long time, but it's actually been improving, slowly but steadily, for years. It's honestly pretty good these days.

> 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.

IIRC, the refund window used to be longer, but was abused.

It still is abused for short indie games, with people buying them with the intention of speed-running through and refunding.

The refund policy is intended more for “crashed repeatedly”, “far too slow despite my machine matching the stated specs”, and “simply wouldn't run”, type problems, rather than not liking the game. There isn't much a service like Steam can do about that, that won't be abused, other than offer demos (enough for you to try out those core mechanics) which is really down to the game creators and out of their power. Other than that you just have to not be first in line, and wait for reviews from sources you trust.

Right, I get that. I've added a note to my comment above clarifying that I'm not critiquing the policy, just trying to clarify that "no questions asked" isn't a good characterization of it. It's a very good return policy for the industry and medium Steam operates in, but it has hard limits that are worth being aware of.

I wish more devs offered shareware/demo releases. Not doing so was unthinkable in the hardware hell of the 90s.

Too much shovelware on Steam these days, and the user has to pay retail price to even try it.

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.

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.

Hours played. Can’t remember the purchase timeframe. Could of been the difference.

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.

It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn’t meant to be a demo system which is what you seem to want.

No, there's a single question asked: how long have you had the game open on your computer?

Costco has a no-questions-asked return policy, and demo-ing your purchase is absolutely part of the expectation for how people will use said policy. Steam even explicitly includes "it wasn't fun" as a valid return option, as long as you reached that conclusion quickly enough.

To be clear, I'm not saying the policy is wrong, it's clearly designed to prevent abuse, I'm just saying that it's not no-questions-asked.

People have returns returns from Costco denied and have their memberships cancelled for abusing the system.

https://bestlifeonline.com/costcos-return-policy-membership-...

You sound like the type of person who has a problem with Dropbox offering unlimited storage and then reneging when people upload 17 petabytes of anime.

Yeah I always considered something used to make sure the game will run correctly on my system and I feel like 2 hours is generous enough for that use case. I suppose it doesn't preclude game breaking bugs later in the experience but nothing is perfect.

Valve is there to facilitate the sale of the game, not guarantee the game is good.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Your system is either old or a Chromebook heh. Same problem here.

Try disabling the options that preload and refresh all the store/community "stuff" behind the scenes. Maybe auto-updates too.

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.

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”.

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...

Meta is doing things for Meta. Yes, it helps the greater ecosystem but they have problems no one else has outside of Google and Amazon and a few foreign players. Presto, React, etc are things they needed and decided to open source. Valve needed something at went TO the source. There’s a huge difference. The few tools Meta has released for Linux were things that were important to them at that scale. btrfs, etc. While one could argue Valve did it for Valve, the sheer impact it has on small to medium sized studios is undeniable. Not having to rewrite your engine and just compile with a -lproton is wizardry. SteamOS forced graphics card manufacturers to start including drivers. GNU community being what it is, they reverse engineered it and upgraded Mesa. I’d love to see Facebook include something like making Oculus open source. React isn’t a fair comparison either because it’s a singular path architecture. There’s really only one way, the React way. If they wanted to be serious about improving the web, they would have brought the legacy along and made jsx a web standard for browsers to support natively.

Google, isn’t the same Google. Eric Schmidt is from my area of the world but advertising poisoned the company (one would argue, gave it a monetary value). Like Napster, Google was designed with good intentions in the beginning. That’s why it beat Excite, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Bing, AskJeeves, etc was because its usefulness at searching AND ranking.

All the FAANGs contribute to open source. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m saying Valve does it not just for them but for everyone. With the only hope that Gabe can get HL3 running on a CoreBoot Linux Handheld because console royalties suck.

My main point is that Meta works on issues to support the community much more than other companies, especially Google. Even when those issues don't directly contribute to Meta products itself.

Sure it is self-serving in the sense that they do get a lot out of the community as well, but I don't feel that super min-maxing of resource allocation on their open source projects.

There is no good company, they are all just profit-maximizing paperclip machines - they just put different weights behind the public opinion on them. E.g. Nike will put up a BLM logo not because they care, but because based on their calculations, it brings in more money. Some oil or logistics company won’t, because the average Joe doesn’t even know about them, and another company looking to minimize costs in general don’t decide on their partners based on that.

In Valve’s case, it pays them to have this “good guy” look - some other stores try different strategies, but overall we really should never put personalities behind companies. They all are lawnmowers.

People need to understand this I buy several ETFs. I dont give a crap about the companies each etf is composed of. And I care less about how good or bad the company is with their environment, society or whatnot.

The only thing I care about my set of ETFs is how profitable they are. If one of them stops giving me profits, I'll sell it, contributing to de downward trend of the etf and its underlying stocks.

Social, environmental or other aspects do not play in capitalism.

Valve operates quite differently from publicly traded companies that must see infinite growth to appease the investors.

It is important to take these things into account when deciding who to buy things from because we need to put pressure on them to do good things

> 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.

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-w...

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.

Digital items too?

No, GP is incorrect. Digital goods are treated differently under the act.

full form of GP?

Grandparent [comment].

Last I looked they were specifically included. Can you maybe cite it as you're the opposing party.

This quote supports my position.

Digital goods are treated differently by the act to other goods(hence them being mentioned specifically in this section).

Purchasing non-digital goods online provides a greater right to return them even if they are not faulty. Digital goods, as your quoted section points out, can be returned if they are not of (objectively) satisfactory quality.

The two week mandatory, no-fuss return you mentioned originally only applies to non-digital goods/services bought remotely.

Yes, see eg https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 section 34.

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.

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.

Steam came out before that. You missed the HL1 mod era.

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.

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.

and still had to install steam? ouch, yeah, that would irritate the crap out of me too.

Yes. DVD was pointless. Online steam was required. Worse still it happened to be down that day. The worst possible first impression.

Ultima Online launch day had a similar feel. Servers melted under the load of 1500 (maybe 2,000). After a weekend of reading the booklet and studying the map, I was able to login. Only to find that cave on the map I wanted to explore was between me and a dozen Ogres and Ratmen. Good times.

Steam was the first “online required” for offline play I think. Others like EA and Ubisoft followed shortly after but didn’t have their own stores until many many years later.

I'm in this crowd. I initially resented them but now love Steam and HL2 was what got me to install it. I have a 7-digit steam ID but my account is still 20 years old (it might be 19, I'm not sure).

Steam came out with the CSS beta, and for a week or two it worked fine, after the proper release of Steam... It went to the doghouse for a few months.