I was one of the haters when it first launched because I was on dialup at the time and physical discs I bought were forcing me to install steam AND THEN install a massive patch that did not work on dialup. My first day playthrough of Skyrim was ruined because of that. Took a week for that shit to download even though I went physically to a store.

But now Steam is the last man standing between us and corporate greed.

People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.

Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.

The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.

It basically didn't add any value to the experience. We just wanted to play CS, and steam just got in the way.

It happened to me (with blizzard)...and it will happen to you!

I just paid $20 for a physical copy Counter Strike, and I find out I need to install an additional launcher and make an account to play the game I just installed. It's the principle of the thing!

I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn't know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.

Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don't recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.

Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it's just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn't feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it's the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.

because most people got exposed to steam's launch on HL2's launch. Where they bought the physical game, came home, installed it off like 5 CDs.. then had to run steam to decrypt it and download more files because the fucking install was encrypted, and the goddamn fucking decryption took like 8 hours if you didnt have the worlds greatest computer.

Nope, I'm still totally not salty about not being able to play the game I fucking bought until the day after cause bullshit encryption fuckery, why would you ever think that.

I still have that goddamn box somewhere.. i need to dig it up and see what release retail HL2 is like compared to HL2 you'd downlaod today from steam..

They have good PR and fanboy propaganda. They’re every bit as evil as every game company out there. Steam fans just got tricked into thinking Gabe was THEIR billionaire and steam is THEIR billionaire corporation, and they can do no wrong. No other game platform has a fan base as aggressive and hostile when you point it out