Steam on release - "this will never take off"

HangTime said:
Steam was annoying for a few reasons:

-No UK pricing i.e. all in dollars
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That was the best thing about steam and in part probably what made it so popular in the UK with us getting ~$2 per £ in exchange rates around 2006. $30 game for us £15 and no VAT - bonus.
 
I remember hating Steam at first, as I bought the boxed version of HL2, and had to go online to activate it. I remember being so annoyed that I legally bought the game, had the box in front of me, yet still couldn't play it until I signed up to Steam. I was only on a 56k modem then as well (shared flat), which made it all the more painful. I pretty much just left it alone until a couple of years ago, when a sale dragged me back in. I'm impressed with how well it all works now, and I own close to 60 games I think too (bloody Steam sales!).
 
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When Steam very first came out I was on 56k and did not do much online gaming. I had a mate who was on ISDN but couldn't afford games. My first encounter with it was that I could not register my HL1 disk with it in order to casually play CS one day. Turned out that my mate who had borrowed my disk had registered it a week or two earlier (he spending much more time online) and I was left unable to play - I was fuming to say the least, equally with him and steam.

However I quickly got over it and loved it even on 56k as it meant even though he had ISDN he would have to start paying for his games in future rather than always borrowing mine ;)
 
I was a bit oblivious to Steam for a while initially, by simply not happening to play anything that required it. But I used to play a lot of Unreal Tournament 2004 and bought a retail copy of UT3 when it came out (I guess this must have been 2005/2006 ish).

Shortly after this UT3 was added to Steam (the devs wanted to do this for ease of patching etc.) and there was a bit of a push on the official forums to follow a guide to "Upgrade your retail copy to a Steam copy"... The backlash that this seemed to get from absolutely everyone (myself included)... "Why would I want to take my perfectly good retail copy and use it through THAT THING?!"... "How dare they FORCE us to use some piece of bloatware instead of making patches available to download like normal" etc. Of course mostly without giving Steam a chance

A little while later I got the Orange Box which was really my introduction to Steam proper (I'd forgotten about the UT3 stuff mostly by then) and found it to be fine - it's not changed much between then and now so I must have missed the poorer early days of Steam. I also remembered the UT3 thing recently and stuck my product key from the retail box into Steam XD
 
I don't remember any problems with steam when you needed it for 1.6 apart from the fact that the friends list didn't work properly for years.

I wonder if they are going to do anything special for the 10 year anniversary.
 
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I loved the idea of steam , but in the early days found the variable download speeds a bit annoying. Also they should update the skin and the way in which new games are presented, its a bit dull and doesnt do titles the presentation they might deserve. Its pretty reliable, quick and the groups and buddy system are great.
 
i too will be the owner of a 9 year steam badge this year thousands of hours wasted on CSS best free game I ever got!
 
Steam was horrible at launch, but excusing Origin because of that is really stupid.
Origin has existed for many years too, as EA Downloader and some other incarnations too.
EA has had years and has incredible amount of money and people to make it the best game client possible, but they are just too shortsighted/incompetent to do it.
 
Paul_cz said:
Steam was horrible at launch, but excusing Origin because of that is really stupid.
Origin has existed for many years too, as EA Downloader and some other incarnations too.
EA has had years and has incredible amount of money and people to make it the best game client possible, but they are just too shortsighted/incompetent to do it.
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Indeed this dual browser nonsense is just retarded too. Why do you have to open battle log? why can't that be in origin. Why did I have to invite my friends on origin and then again on battle log Sure they fixed that but they fixed it 9 months too late IMO. Main reason I stopped playing BF3 is the defunct fashion in which I have to update every time I play it. Steam it just quietly gets on with it.

With the sort of money EA have it's an absolute mind**** how they screwed it up.
 
Paul_cz said:
Steam was horrible at launch, but excusing Origin because of that is really stupid.
Origin has existed for many years too, as EA Downloader and some other incarnations too.
EA has had years and has incredible amount of money and people to make it the best game client possible, but they are just too shortsighted/incompetent to do it.
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Not to mention that the infrastructure was much better than what was available when Steam first came out.
 
Agree with all the points above about Origin, but does anyone agree that somehow uPlay actually seems, well, not that bad, by comparison if nothing else... I rolled my eyes at having to install it for Far Cry 3 but was very surprised when I first booted it up that it was fairly lightweight (from what I could tell), okay interface, but most importantly how well it just stayed out of the way... It doesn't even seem to load itself into the taskbar to be "always there" running in the background; you quit Far Cry 3 and close uPlay and it's just gone...

(On a side note I think uPlay's idea of having certain in-game actions earn you "points" in the client which you can spend to unlock bits of DLC and stuff in other games on uPlay is an interesting idea - combines those Xbox/GFWL "gamerpoints" with achievements in a way that has some form of real reward)
 
i remember getting steam with HL2, installed it and the prices were insane and all in dollars!
another thing was, i think i had just got broadband then too, which was 128 so downloading stuff was quite slow even with the hugely reduced sized games.

given that and shops still having a decent selection i didnt think steam was much good but it was mainly due to the silly pricing tbh.
 
uncle_rufus said:
Agree with all the points above about Origin, but does anyone agree that somehow uPlay actually seems, well, not that bad, by comparison if nothing else... I rolled my eyes at having to install it for Far Cry 3 but was very surprised when I first booted it up that it was fairly lightweight (from what I could tell), okay interface, but most importantly how well it just stayed out of the way... It doesn't even seem to load itself into the taskbar to be "always there" running in the background; you quit Far Cry 3 and close uPlay and it's just gone...

(On a side note I think uPlay's idea of having certain in-game actions earn you "points" in the client which you can spend to unlock bits of DLC and stuff in other games on uPlay is an interesting idea - combines those Xbox/GFWL "gamerpoints" with achievements in a way that has some form of real reward)
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I've had the same experience of FC3 - Uplay just not as bad as I thought. I assume a large part of that is I have a slow yet reliable internet connection, so don't have to deal with disconnects.

I like the idea of ingame points opening up things, though of course I'm wary of it leading to "take this section out and it's now day 1 DLC for X gamer points" - especially if it gets to the point where you can have the 'free' DLC for 500 gamer points, and you can only get 80 points by completing all the achievements in the game...
 
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this made me laugh from the bbc article,

'The game occupies 4.5 GB of hard disk space and the sheer size of it may have contributed to this second delay.'

games being up to 40gb+ now makes HL2 seem titchy :D
 
Indeed, I've been on Steam for about 8 years now officially and I remember the hatred in the old days. As people stated it crashed a lot, features kept going down, some of the prices seemed insane, and it just didn't sell itself well in the early days.

By comparison nowadays (thankfully) it works pretty well, the only thing I wish they'd do is put a download throttle/speed control in it, as it seems to sap all the download speed it can, then crash itself because it cant communicate properly because of the download taking all available space.

Ironic...
 
It was junk at the time.

In my case I thought HL2 was junk as well, so for a good few years after that I wouldnt touch anything Valve or steam related.
 
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