Steam on release - "this will never take off"

House

House

House

Soldato
Joined
16 Jun 2005
Posts
3,158
Location
Back in the UK
I was having a chat with someone from my planetside 2 outfit last night while we were waiting for a cap to go through and he was doing his ends about origin and DRM saying he only buys game on steam.

When I said people hated steam when it was first released and everyone thought it would die in no time he basically called me a moron and said I didn't know what I was talking about.

Now he's 18 years old so he was about 8 when steam came out (I have a 9 year badge and I only jumped on with HL2 (which I got with a 9800XT I bought from OCUK back in the day) cause I didn't play CS1.6).

Now its hard to Find some Nerco thread about steam being the devils spawn its almost as if Gabe has purged the internet of them all.

But I am right about this aren't I? Did steam have an offline mode on release (I cant remember one?), what other things that are held up as "this is how drm should be done" didn't steam have to start with? I remember it folding on HL2s release, activations failing and the DL speeds being slow as hell. I don't remember the friends system working and im sure for a long time (even still) it was allot more expensive than other places.
 
Many people had issues with steam on launch. Some folks wore tin foil hats, the rest of us were more annoyed at the fact most of the features were down all the time which caused the need for programs like xfire.
 
I was actually looking at a forum I used to go to a decade ago, viewing discussions about steam. Most people liked it, issues were usually offline mode and such, but it worked. My posts were nothing but positive.

Everyone has their own experiences of what others thought, mine was that it was alright.
 
spoffle said:
You're semi-right I think. I think people's issues with Origin are often about it being EA rather than a competing platform.
Click to expand...

I was absolutely outraged when I first bought a game from a retail store and discovered that I needed to install a 3rd party program (STEAM) and activate it online in order to be able to play it. I took the game straight back to the store (GAME) for a refund and when the manager refused, I snapped the game disk in half and threw it in his face.

Since then I had always staunchly avoided any game that forced me to use some DRM platform in order to play. If there was ever a game that I really wanted to play that came bundled with Steam, then I would just get the 'Skidrow' version.

The allure of BF3 online multiplayer however, marked a softening of approach. It meant install Origin, or dont play. So I installed Origin and any EA game that I have since bought, also obviously works through Origin. I now also have STEAM and since Far Cry 3, Uplay also.

This however doesn't mean that I like them cos I fkn hate them. Aside from providing yet another layer of potential compatibilty issues that get in the way of my gaming, I particularly loathe the way in which these platforms handle updates. For example, I own a BF2 disk. I also have the complete update files on my PC right up to patch 1.5, which is about 4Gb in size. If BF2 was only available on Origin/Steam, then whenever I was in a situation where BF2 needed to be reinstalled (clean OS, system upgrade etc), then the only way for me to get the game installed and up to date would be by redownloading the whole 4Gb worth of updates all over again. Now considering that with BF3, it is more like 34Gb worth of update files to be downloaded, this state of affairs is completely un-fkn-acceptable.

If the majority of people were like me at the inception point of these DRM platform things, then they would have all failed just as Ubisofts 'always on' online DRM system failed, as no business can afford to push something that is being rejected en masse by the end consumer. Because the majority of people accepted these DRM platforms however (albeit grudgingly), they have become the norm, are here to stay, are set to become ever more instrusive, but one must either accept them or just pretty much forget about PC gaming.
 
MatTheCat said:
I was absolutely outraged when I first bought a game from a retail store and discovered that I needed to install a 3rd party program (STEAM) and activate it online in order to be able to play it. I took the game straight back to the store (GAME) for a refund and when the manager refused, I snapped the game disk in half and threw it in his face.
Click to expand...

lol! :eek:
 
Steam was awful on release and people were baffled as to why it moved away from WON to a shoddy piece of software that was flawed beyond belief. Now look at it - they certainly made some right changes along the way!
 
MatTheCat said:
Now considering that with BF3, it is more like 34Gb worth of update files to be downloaded, this state of affairs is completely un-fkn-acceptable.
Click to expand...
You should probably tone down the shortened swearies you have in most of your posts, the mods don't like that, it's also unnecessary.

I prefer downloading 34gb or bf3 in a few hours to fiddling about with disks.
 
MatTheCat said:
This however doesn't mean that I like them cos I *** hate them. Aside from providing yet another layer of potential compatibilty issues that get in the way of my gaming, I particularly loathe the way in which these platforms handle updates. For example, I own a BF2 disk. I also have the complete update files on my PC right up to patch 1.5, which is about 4Gb in size. If BF2 was only available on Origin/Steam, then whenever I was in a situation where BF2 needed to be reinstalled (clean OS, system upgrade etc), then the only way for me to get the game installed and up to date would be by redownloading the whole 4Gb worth of updates all over again. Now considering that with BF3, it is more like 34Gb worth of update files to be downloaded, this state of affairs is completely un-***-acceptable.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Last edited:
Skyfall said:
You should probably tone down the shortened swearies you have in most of your posts, the mods don't like that, it's also unnecessary.

I prefer downloading 34gb or bf3 in a few hours to fiddling about with disks.
Click to expand...

If only we all had this opportunity. 34GBs is 3 days of downloading for me.

Even now the infrastructure isn't there to support a fully digital games industry. I love Steam, but my net means I still buy a lot of stuff on disk just to speed up the install.

I can remember Steam being hated when it was new.
 
Last edited:
Steam was around before HL2, wasn't it? I can remember talking about it while at 6th form, which was the year before HL2 came out?

Edit: yeah, it was 2002/2003, but HL2 was the first game that required it and also required online activation. The auto updates software existed for a year or so in the public before HL2.
 
Last edited:
ZombieFan said:
Here's a BBC article of the Half Life 2 launch (which was also the launch of Steam) - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4019095.stm
Click to expand...

My favourite paragraph from the article:

The good news for gamers is that the title does not seem to need an awesomely powerful machine to run on. Early reports suggested that many players would have to upgrade their machine to cope with its graphical demands.
Click to expand...

Oh how this seems so silly looking back on it.
 
Skeeter said:
Steam was around before HL2, wasn't it? I can remember talking about it while at 6th form, which was the year before HL2 came out?
Click to expand...

Ah yea, my mistake. It looks like Steam was released the year before, but Half Life 2 was the first game which required Steam authentication in order to play. Oddly enough, one of the jewels in the PC gaming crown was one of the first to contain online DRM ;) [edit] too slow :)
 
MatTheCat said:
I was absolutely outraged when I first bought a game from a retail store and discovered that I needed to install a 3rd party program (STEAM) and activate it online in order to be able to play it. I took the game straight back to the store (GAME) for a refund and when the manager refused, I snapped the game disk in half and threw it in his face.

Since then I had always staunchly avoided any game that forced me to use some DRM platform in order to play. If there was ever a game that I really wanted to play that came bundled with Steam, then I would just get the 'Skidrow' version.

The allure of BF3 online multiplayer however, marked a softening of approach. It meant install Origin, or dont play. So I installed Origin and any EA game that I have since bought, also obviously works through Origin. I now also have STEAM and since Far Cry 3, Uplay also.

This however doesn't mean that I like them cos I fkn hate them. Aside from providing yet another layer of potential compatibilty issues that get in the way of my gaming, I particularly loathe the way in which these platforms handle updates. For example, I own a BF2 disk. I also have the complete update files on my PC right up to patch 1.5, which is about 4Gb in size. If BF2 was only available on Origin/Steam, then whenever I was in a situation where BF2 needed to be reinstalled (clean OS, system upgrade etc), then the only way for me to get the game installed and up to date would be by redownloading the whole 4Gb worth of updates all over again. Now considering that with BF3, it is more like 34Gb worth of update files to be downloaded, this state of affairs is completely un-fkn-acceptable.

If the majority of people were like me at the inception point of these DRM platform things, then they would have all failed just as Ubisofts 'always on' online DRM system failed, as no business can afford to push something that is being rejected en masse by the end consumer. Because the majority of people accepted these DRM platforms however (albeit grudgingly), they have become the norm, are here to stay, are set to become ever more instrusive, but one must either accept them or just pretty much forget about PC gaming.
Click to expand...

If you think reacting like this to things that you don't like is appropriate, well, it's all your own issue there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom