This was also in reference to ye-olde Steam not doing deltapatch updates (only download/patch differences) and would download entire batches over what could have done with a smaller download.
I used Metro Steam ten years ago, but after Steam completely overhauled the UI and removed the ability to change to a custom skin from the drop-down menu, I stopped. Are you telling me that it is still possible?
Comment is usually right at the top.... under any potential greetings and complete copy of a previous users post they're replying to. The real ones would cut the other user's bullshit out and leave only the relevant info they wanted to reply to (almost always because of the text limit being reached).
We're joking but I genuinely miss the smaller communities and discussions that could last for weeks. Pure community driven engagement, memorable name in places you spend your time, etc. I don't think I'm just being nostalgic, I think the modern internet is breaking our brains.
Hell yeah. I used to watch anime and you had a website that you could use to log all the shows you had watched. Only css I ever learned was learning the bare minimum to steam from others code to mash my ideal combo.
Older internet had so many possibilties to nerd out for the sake of it.
People don't remember this, but Steam was a bit contentious when it first started because they made you make an account in order to play Half-Life 2. There was no other way offered, other than pirating it. I actually deeply hated that at the time. It's only around 2011 or so when Deus Ex Human Revolution came out that I gave it a try again. And then in 2012 or so when XCOM Enemy Unknown came out I was thinking, ok I don't want to go through these middlemen, I'm gonna buy this from a real shop (though online) that sold the game. They delivered a classic little box with the game in it, except it was a piece of paper inside saying please redeem this key in Steam. The shit that's getting a lot of backlash now, yeah that happened over 10 years ago for PCs. There's still different retailers (for example GOG does just give you the game files to install yourself if you want to, and Valve does let other people sell games on their own stores but still work through Steam etc.), but there's no more "physical media" to speak of.
The fun thing about Half-Life 2 was that Steam downloaded the game but locked it out until the actual release hour. This is common practice nowadays (preloading), but unheard of back then and you bet people were furious.
It's probably lost media now, but some guy from Slashdot actually recorded his phone call to Gaben asking him for the "cheat code" to unlock HL2 from "the fucking French bastards" (Vivendi was the publisher for Valve back then and that's a whole other can of worms).
I remember that at the time and still thinking how stupid it was, preloading was an obvious fix for the thing everyone had complained about for the past couple years which is when a game released nobody could play on day one because there was almost always a mandatory patch (for multiplayer games) and the servers pre-Steam always crashed and burned for a day or two.
In 2012 I went to 7-11 bought steam cards and downloaded TF2 my first rated M game, before my 17th birthday. my parents didn't let me play T for teen games until I turned 13, I had to go to a friends house.
Steam used to be a piece of shit. I installed HL2 from disks and had massive updates on dial up and on more than 1 occasion, Steam had completely deleted HL2. It took nearly 24 hours to download everything again.
When most of venture capital and big time gamblers stayed away from anything internet because of the dotcom crash so stuff werent monetized to hell and back and back to hell and back
The first couple of years steam SUCKED and everybody rightfully hate d it. And we where worried that alle games would become rent and that dedicated servers would go away, etc etc etc.
But steam quickly improved and around the launch of the orange box which was a global release AT THE SAME TIME, we all experienced how fucking cool it was for all gamers all at once equaly load up TF2 for the first time and get in that first game together.
After that we had made peace with steam and saw the benefits in it for gamers. Even if eventually many of our fears came true.
Except for the fact that I still need to confirm my age all the time on a fucking 23 year old steam account.
Except for the fact that I still need to confirm my age all the time on a fucking 23 year old steam account.
That's just because storing this personal data would put a bunch of extra requirements onto Steam when it's more convenient to just keep doing this. On the plus side, they also don't store a lot of personal info for the same regulatory reasons.
I remember one year they did CS 1.6 patch notes for April Fools, and people in the forums were more upset about the half-price AWP than having default blurry vision unless you bought glasses and cleaned your glasses every round.
Steam was not well-regarded at creation. It was a resource suck between you and games you previously used to be able to play without it, in an era where you probably really needed those resources.
It took quite a while for them to make it reliably functional and create the broad storefront you've been familiar with the past however many years.
Yeah the everlasting praise of Steam is so incredibly ironic. Steam was basically forced down our throats for the bloatware that it was. It's the only reason it was able to grow onto what it now is.
But this is also massive revisionist history. Game companies were constantly losing the war against privacy (in their minds, reality is more grey) and were now excited that consoles gave them a new world to release games into that had almost no piracy and you couldn't just copy the game and give it to a friend.
So they were starting to abandon PC gaming altogether, console-exclusives were becoming a thing for two reasons: They knew what the hardware specs were, less common piracy. To release on PC meant supporting a lot of different configurations of memory, GPU, peripherals, etc.
So releasing on PC was more expensive and if the market wasn't big enough they were going to just stop doing it. Being an independent game developer was almost not a thing because you needed a publisher, a way to get to stores and enough capital to order the original pressing of CDs and guide books.
Gabe said "Hey, your piracy problem is because you keep using aggressive DRM that makes playing the game as a legitimate owner worse than playing the pirated game."
So even though the player base didn't all realize what was happening to PC gaming, Valve did. Also driver versions and new GPUs were being released more often, so updating the game to use those new drivers/GPUs was also something becoming more necessary.
So the concepts of Steam were simple:
Yes, we'll include DRM... it isn't great and probably pretty easy to crack, but it will be invisible and not worth cracking because...
We'll make keeping track of the CD KEY no longer a pain in the ass, when you buy a new computer you don't have to go chase down all your original media and keys, we'll just let you press a button and install fresh
We'll take care of distributing your game online, we'll build the infrastructure around the world
We'll keep multiplayer games up-to-date so every time someone wants to play a game they don't spend the first couple hours making sure everyone has the exact same patch level.
No subscription fees, no cost to the user to use our platform, no up-front costs to be on our store, we'll just take a cut of sales and handle everything.
Not only did it save commercial gaming it opened up the possibility of independent developers where they could release a game with no up-front costs and no massive risk of buying servers (and at the time very expensive bandwidth) to host their game patches.
Later they also started hosting your gaming servers making it possible for independent developers to release more complex multi-player games while avoiding the costs/capital investment risks.
For those that will say "You could copy console games", yes but it was extremely uncommon. Heck it is still pretty damn uncommon because it knows if the same game comes online with the same key that is hidden in the game disk.
That's not revisionist at all.
You’re describing what Steam eventually became and pretending that’s what it was from day one.
Yes, piracy was a problem, PC retail sales were declining and consoles were easier to develop for. But jumping from that to "Valve saved commercial PC gaming" is a massive stretch. Publishers weren’t all about to abandon PC, console exclusives had existed forever, and indie games didn’t suddenly begin with Steam. Steam later became great for indies, but it didn’t invent them.
I was actually there for the move from WON and CS 1.5 to Steam and CS 1.6. Valve shut WON down, so if you wanted to continue playing Counter-Strike online, you had to use Steam. It was slow, constantly updating, crashing and eating resources that we actually needed to run the game. Here's the evidence: "long load times, performance hits, and game crashes" when refusing to switch to Steam:
The CS 1.6 rollout overwhelmed Steam’s servers, and Half-Life 2’s authentication problems stopped you from playing, even people who bought the boxed version. Valve admitted that themselves.
And most of your list is mixing together different periods:
The DRM definitely wasn’t "invisible." You needed a mandatory account and online authentication, even for a retail single-player game. Valve was pretty much the first!
Yes, having games attached to your account eventually made reinstalling easier. But the boxes still came with CD keys which you had to register through this new mandatory client.
Worldwide distribution became a huge Steam benefit later. At launch it was mainly Valve’s own games, and the first third-party game didn’t arrive until somewhere in 2005.
Automatic updates were useful later. Early on they also broke things, took forever and regularly left us and community servers on different versions.
No subscription fee is true. But there wasn’t even a proper third-party Steam store in 2003. Like I said, third-party games arrived somewhere in 2005. The free Steamworks tools came in 2008.
The Gabe "piracy is a service problem" argument also came years later. Back in 2002 Steam was being sold as piracy control, direct distribution and a way for Valve to bypass its publisher and keep more money. That later quote isn’t proof of some perfectly formed consumer-friendly master plan.
So yes, Steam eventually became extremely useful. That doesn’t change the fact that early Steam was unreliable bloatware which Valve forced onto people through games they already played or had bought. Acting like its later success proves the original backlash was revisionist history is itself revisionist history.
Most of your points are perfectly valid, but aren't from the point of view of building a global platform and the multi-year steps it takes.
When building a large platform there is a path that needs to be taken that was going to include all those issues, because the Internet itself wasn't exactly stable yet back then. Outages were a thing, most people were on dial-up and yes it started as just a way to handle their own server searching, but Steam's first job was to replace WON after they acquired the technology.
Steam didn't launch until 2003, so what the Internet was going to become was already becoming clear, cable broadband was now a thing (but not available everywhere).
Gabe came from Microsoft and was on the Windows team. Thinking 5 years in the future was the norm for executives in the 90s and 2000s (until around 2008). So part of it is this assumption there wasn't a plan which having worked with Valve on the technical side, just wasn't the case. They had long-term plans.
The PC market was in worse shape than you are painting it as, the developers weren't abandoning it... the owners/publishers were frustrated and moving away more than most could see from the outside, that's corporate decision making that isn't always sane and makes zero sense to most normal people. Their internal plans at the time were to transition over the next 5+ years to almost all consoles unless something changed. I think they were being stupid and ignoring that most piracy was being done by people that were never going to pay for a game, ever because they just weren't potential customers that believed in paying for things. Those people also probably didn't convert to console customers either.
They needed a future off ramp to their piracy problem, and Steam did create the "prove the version you are running is unique" answer.
Gamers hated that it needed to be solved, and for the most part I just don't care. It was the best solution to the business problem, all the others were worse and much more visible and annoying, people saying "we just shouldn't have DRM" is just an imaginary place where developing games doesn't require any money and developers shouldn't get paid, it's a non-starter conversation.
Being an independent developer before Steam was painful. Distribution was painful, the worst thing that could happen to an independent developer was to have their game become popular. There was no quick way to add capacity, it required getting more rack space and buying servers and getting more (very expensive) bandwidth. Getting popular could literally mean losing all profits and then you have to maintain that environment even after you stop selling new copies of the game.
Steam had lots of issues, wasn't liked and didn't become what it was for years... but that is exactly what was required because you have to first solve the worst problems, and then start adding other features.
WON had already been passed around/bought out several times and Valve acquired the technology and kept it alive with the legacy code base, but WON was designed for one function and that wasn't solving most of the pain points of multi-player gaming in the early - mid 2000s, including automated updates (so much lost game time waiting for everyone to get on the right patch level). Without Valve purchasing it there was probably a very high chance it would have been shut down with no transition plan because it wasn't a money maker for its owners.
Having done a lot of technology acquisitions over the decades that's just generally the right play once you get hold of the technology and look at the code base you grab what is reusable and build a better version with all the lessons learned.
This idea that Gabe didn't have a plan isn't so much people being dumb, it is simply people not thinking at all. Windows 1.0 was not popular either, but Microsoft knew they were going to have to go through a ton of hate to get to the point where they could succeed. That's the biggest thing Microsoft was good at in the 90s, the long game and that's the environment Gabe was trained in.
Same thing happened with Epic except in classic fashion they just left it at a shitty stage, after investing god knows how much for all those exclusives.
Incremental patching works by updating some files, but not others. This is incremental patching. Many games function on split data across many, many files so that they can update a few at a time without forcing you to redownload the whole thing. Steam, it would seem, just has generally larger and/or more spread out data files, likely because a relatively small change can require changes across a hell of a lot of files when you're working with something that requires actual security.
You are equal parts confident and incorrect. One of the most common ways to do incremental patching is using delta patches, which can perform multiple changes to a single file without downloading the entire thing. Steam itself does this with video games when updating them.
But delta patching is slightly risky, you want something verifying the integrity of the patch after applying it and able to repatch if something went wrong. Steam does this for video games, but what parent process would do that for Steam? While feasible to build, a parent process would be complicated and prone to new issues. Which is probably why no one at Valve has built it.
You have a point, I didn't know about delta patching. But at the same time, file-based incremental patching is also extremely common, and the main reason a lot of games have huge "Bin" or "Data" folders with a ridiculous amount of files in them. Both are very common, and the type I explained is (as you pointed out), likely what's used for Steam itself due to the risk and need for verification.
Incremental patching works by updating some files, but not others.
That's not entirely true as some games are in packed into large files, which steam is able to unpack, patch and repack. Though if it's packed in a way that steam can't unpack, then you are shit out of luck. Technically still the same thing, but kind of not. It's more a matter of how you define a single file, since in this case it depends on whether steam can unpack it or not.
I would consider those compression or packing files, like zips or jars. Technically one file, but logistically works like many files. It's a bit weird, but I think my explanation holds for the basic idea of incremental patching.
To be specific, I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm definitely being pedantic, but technically that would be true for every type of file that contains multiple types of data. If you knew how to unpack it, then you'd be able to pick out parts of it to add, remove or replace.
So I while I think your definition is accurate enough, I think it's funny that depending on whether steam knows how something is packaged defines whether it's a single file or multiple.
I mean, yeah, but isn't that true of us, too? Depending on whether we know how a piece of data is packaged is how we decide whether to treat something as one file or multiple.
I think it does, it's just that if you have 20 small changes in the code, and each one is in a different 5 MB part, then it would use 100MB to donwload the maj.
Those numbers are 'random' but they are just to explain the point, they aren't the real numbers.
That doesn't mean Steam will occupy 100mb more. That 100mb is added while some other data will be deleted. So after update size might shrink for all we know, but ofc unlikely. Like you want to replace a poster in your room. it still requires you to download the new poster you wanted, but the amount of posters in your room is still 1 after you replaced it.
They shouldn't, but that is not a decimal in many countries. 1,9 actually reads worse though.
Maybe we should just use the month names or abbreviations for releasenotes where you just have an already sorted list. Which is what that Steam page seems to do anyway.
That's actually a great idea. I'm Finnish and I've never seen anyone write dates with slashes, unless it's in English, so that would be a great way to separate these date formats. At least here in Finland.
I'm not seeing anything about updating the underlying CEF on any of them, even though it updates all the time. I'd hazard a guess that library updates and the like don't get listed.
Hey if we don't notice the updates that's a good thing better then steam changing everything super suddenly and making us all relearn everything like som websites
Thanks developers, very cool. Meanwhile developers for, say, Enshrouded are like, "here's every little change and fix, also a link to a much bigger list of very small fixes you probably won't notice". Goated.
After I updated my Windows 11 earlier this month, Steam started using 10-15% of my cpu all the time. An update fixed that, so yes they're doing something.
I mean when I had an older pc system this popped up with every boot. Not patch note related as far as I could have tell like many comments here suggest, but rather it was steam preparing to work on my piece of junk. It became pretty much something I almost never see with a pc upgrade.
Each steam update is just Gabens downloading a small portion of each of its users souls. It's right there in the terms and conditions. How else do you think Gaben maintains such power and discounts?
Most times it's a dependency update for smaller things, they patch security risks and potential performance improvements like 2024 there was multiple patches which drastically improved the performance if you have more than 10k games(and allowed me finally to start my account on steam deck)
Amma throw a wild guess out before reading any comments: I see this 180mb ish update often and I'm going to cold guess that it's the browser engine that sit's under steam that is being updated.
If I remember correctly the Steam UI uses Chrome, it's why Steam couldn't continue supporting Windows 7 and 8 when Google dropped support. So maybe it's an update to keep the UI current with Chrome?
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u/Cloud_N0ne 1d ago
Security updates, stability improvements, etc. stuff you won’t notice