Steam on release - "this will never take off"

I didn't like Steam when HL2 was shiny and new. The subliminal advertising in the HL2 loading screens did the trick though.

I LOVE STEAM. ALL OTHER DELIVERY PLATFORMS SUCK. THERE WAS NO SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING. GABE NEWELL FOR KING OF THE WORLD
 
Yeah lot of people didn't like Steam on release, it had its issues but also had its haters. Only bit about it I didn't really like was that for a long time it had a bad habit of randomly chewing CPU in the early days wasn't uncommon to be playing a game and suddenly it because all laggy and bringing up task manager showed the steam process using the entire time on one core.
 
Skeeter said:
I can remember Steam being hated when it was new.
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As I said, I think the major reason it was hated was not because of DRM and digital download haters but the fact that when it launched there was nothing on it, it continually crashed, kicked people out of games and the friends list never worked.
 
Skyfall said:
As I said, I think the major reason it was hated was not because of DRM and digital download haters but the fact that when it launched there was nothing on it, it continually crashed, kicked people out of games and the friends list never worked.
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Yeah I can remember most of the conversations I had about it being that it just didn't work.

I do remember HL2 launch being interesting at Uni as Steam wouldnt connect through the halls internet so everyone bought it and couldn't play. People started taking their PC's to peoples houses just to connect and authenticate the game and then take it back again. Arguably that's more of an issue with the Uni internet than Steam, but still showed the potential issue of online activation.
 
Skyfall said:
I prefer downloading 34gb or bf3 in a few hours to fiddling about with disks.
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Yes, because having your whole bandwidth being consumed for several hours is much more easily than messing around with 1 Terabyte USB drives where you have all the update files stored. :rolleyes:

And for the likes of me and some other member who posted in this thread. 34Gb is about 3 days worth of download time. Unacceptable!

ChrisJSY said:
The problem is you, not the software.
You seem to have missed the neat trick of being able to backup files, or never having to delete them in the first place, if you're going to store all the patches anyway then you can save space.
The update system is great, you don't have to do anything, the old ways of doing it is archaic bad.
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If I have 'missed' the neat trick of backing up my BF3 files so that I don't have to download the entire package all over again, then it hasn#t been for the want of searching.

From what I have made out from internet forums and the EA support guys, I could certainly 'try' and save my installed BF3 files and 'try' to use them to update a freshly installed game, but in EA's own words;
"No guarantees that it will work and we cannot offer support for any problems encountered"

Crappy crappy system.
 
My first experience with Steam was with HL2, and it was truly awful back then. Having to laboriously install the game from 5 CDs, only to then have Steam need to 'decrypt' the files which took forever, not helped by South Africa (where I was living at the time) not having any local Steam servers.

Then there was the ridiculous CPU utilisation, and the intermittent hanging. It really didn't seem like a promising system at the time.
 
MatTheCat said:
Yes, because having your whole bandwidth being consumed for several hours is much more easily than messing around with 1 Terabyte USB drives where you have all the update files stored. :rolleyes
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Never had a problem with steam taking all of my bandwidth... It's horses for courses really you have slow internet so back up I don't so don't bother with backing up.
 
I definitely hated it. I bumped into it against my will when I bought The Ship physical copy. I have to make an account?! With some crappy software that has slowed my computers start up to a crawl because I don't understand about startup programs yet?! I wasn't happy. I never got round to playing it. This was 2006 I think. I made a proper steam account in 2009 or so. I completely forgot about the Ship...
 
You are correct mostly no-one liked it or the idea behind it and it was heavily knocked in the gaming press as tantamount to opening Pandora's Box.
 
I was an early adopter of Steam, signing up just 2 days after release - my UserID is in the 400xxx range - I can't recollect having many issues with Steam early on - I've never wanted it for the community side of things, so the lack of working friends list wasn't high on my priority list.

I played CS quite a bit at the time, and Steam was a requirement to play 1.6, hence signing up.

When HL2 was released, I had no issues pre-loading and activating the game - I seem to remember being amongst the first to post up screenshots on a forum I was on (possibly this one?), getting a couple of screenshots up at ~8:05 before having to go to dive out to work!

There's probably been a few occasions when Steam hasn't connected for some reason, but hey, it's not the end of the world. They'll sort it out quickly. And whilst it's down, we can moan about it on a forum, that's as fun as playing the game... amiright? ;)
 
I recall many people ripping the hell out of Steam but I never had any huge issues with it personally. Teething stuff but it was not the pile of turd many made it out to be. 9 year user since Oct 2003, literally just after initial release.
 
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My first memory of Steam was when trying to play CS, I believe it was 1.5 and then 1.6 coincided with Steam being released and so trying to play 1.6 not on Steam was a task in itself.

Like anything, though, they gradually improved it and now I find it is pretty decent, especially having all of the games in one place so it is easy to do a quick backup if a system re-install is needed.

On the flip-side, I have deliberately stayed away from BF3 due to all of the horror stories surrounding Origin. In time, like Steam, I may start using it but at the moment I have far too many other games I could be playing than getting yet another one in BF3.
 
As far as I’m concerned people still bashing on Steam are simply playing devil’s advocate. Sure, it had so many issues on release it was damn near impossible to keep track of them all. But you know what? EA once published System Shock 2... Some companies get better with time, some get worse.
Even now I sometimes have issues with steam. But the introduction of Greenlight and its ability to promote incredible amounts of indie content and the fact I can purchase software more than makes up for the occasional internet slowdown or whatever.
 
Yep steam was turd, although I used to love being able to browse servers out of the game on CS, can you do that anymore and it just isn't as obvious?
 
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