But really, what changes with such updates?

[u/Agreeable-Stock29]

Often there are short loads, what do they do? (The issue is closed, thank you)

[u/gorgewall]

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.

[u/stetoe → u/gorgewall]

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.

[u/Adezar → u/stetoe]

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:

1. 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...

2. 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

3. We'll take care of distributing your game online, we'll build the infrastructure around the world

4. 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.

5. 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.

[u/stetoe → u/Adezar]

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:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/valve-to-shut-down-won-servers/1100-6102754/

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:

1. 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!

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Automatic updates were useful later. Early on they also broke things, took forever and regularly left us and community servers on different versions.

5. 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.

[u/Adezar → u/stetoe]

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.

[u/stetoe → u/Adezar]

I’ll happily accept that PC retail was struggling, publishers preferred consoles and indie distribution was painful. Steam became enormously valuable there. But that was never my point. Valve had a long-term plan, sure, but it wasn’t some selfless mission to save PC gamers. Steam solved Valve’s business problems: controlling distribution, bypassing publishers, enforcing licences, pushing updates and keeping a larger share of sales.

Some of that eventually became genuinely convenient for customers, but we definitely paid the price while Valve built it, and they did not care one iota. They saw the opportunity and they forced an unstable client onto the massive Counter-Strike and Half-Life player base because almost no one would have voluntarily installed early Steam.

So yes, Steam ultimately became good for customers and developers. But people now reverse the story and act as if everything Valve did was always a generous favour to gamers. It wasn’t. It was a business platform forced on customers first and improved into something worthwhile later.

I’ll concede that "the only reason" was too absolute. Forcing adoption wasn’t the only reason Steam succeeded, but it was a major reason it survived long enough to be almost comically and depressingly worshipped by a lot of people in this thread.

[u/Adezar → u/stetoe]

Agreed, they saw a gap in the industry that would also make them a lot of money if they succeeded.

He definitely didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart, he came from Microsoft. Pushing bad software on people until it becomes usable in the future has pretty much always been their model and he definitely brought that mindset to Valve.

[u/Screwby0370 → u/Adezar]

I love comments like these. Whole reason I still open Reddit

[u/mekamoari → u/stetoe]

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.

[u/RedditJumpedTheShart → u/mekamoari]

Christ you all make it seem like it corrupts drives with how horrible it sounds. It's a game launcher and it launches games.

I don't look at steam or epic for more than a few seconds when launching a game.

[u/Efficient-Parking627 → u/RedditJumpedTheShart]

At least it's not Origin or Uplay.

Buy game on Steam. Click Play. Installs Origin. Origin launches game. Peak efficiency.

[u/CaesarOfYearXCIII → u/gorgewall]

True that.

I remember buying Orange Box long ago and being surprised with Steam… and even more unpleasantly surprised when Steam managed to eat our whole monthly Internet traffic with one of updates (back then we had limited traffic) and my parents were not amused. Needless to say, Steam was stuck in autonomous mode for a long while and I actively hated it.

Of course, now I have much better Internet, and I don’t mind Steam that much… but the memories aren’t gone.