A new lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the UK that alleges Valve, owner of Steam, has been overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK.
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.
You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.
There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
Steam hasn’t been popular for 20 years, my dude. 20 years ago, Steam was LOATHED. I’m not gonna google it because I’m at work, but you can find a gif of the Steam logo performing anal on a bent-over dude.
10-15 years ago it was still fairly common to avoid Steam on purpose. I personally started using it actively maybe 6-7 years ago, but I’ve been gaming for just a bit over 20.
I think we’re talking past each other. By ‘popular’ I do not mean ‘well liked’. Just that it was used by a lot of people. 2004, in my opinion, was when steam took off and the downloading updates from random websites phase of pc gaming died. There was a transition, to be sure, but the writing was on the wall. We just didn’t know it at the time.
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
It was awful.
That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.
You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.
There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
Steam hasn’t been popular for 20 years, my dude. 20 years ago, Steam was LOATHED. I’m not gonna google it because I’m at work, but you can find a gif of the Steam logo performing anal on a bent-over dude.
10-15 years ago it was still fairly common to avoid Steam on purpose. I personally started using it actively maybe 6-7 years ago, but I’ve been gaming for just a bit over 20.
We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.
I believe that was the time it was hated the most because it was forced on people
I think we’re talking past each other. By ‘popular’ I do not mean ‘well liked’. Just that it was used by a lot of people. 2004, in my opinion, was when steam took off and the downloading updates from random websites phase of pc gaming died. There was a transition, to be sure, but the writing was on the wall. We just didn’t know it at the time.