HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
When HL2 came out we were forced to install Steam whether we liked it or not. I hated it at the time because I bought the game on DVD (as was usual at the time) and just wanted to play it. I was on 56k dial-up and didn't want to be forced to download updates. I remember thinking they must have been completely crazy to do this.
It was about a year before always-on broadband became widespread for everyone. Then it all made sense. It seemed to me Valve wasn't just riding the wave but actively driving it.
Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though.
I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start.
On the other hand, we can see what the success has caused down the line. Now every publisher wants to replicate it with their own proprietary launchers, undoing all of the cleanliness and centralization that made Steam awesome in the first place.
If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.
I suppose the total Steam hegemony was always going to be a temporary thing.
> Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though.
It did but it still had problems. You did indeed have to be online initially to "activate" the game but the main problem is whenever it detected there were updates available you were forced to wait for them to completely download before you could play. This led to me being very careful about when I would allow Steam to have internet access. If you weren't careful you could go online and then not be allowed to play HL2 until you spent hours downloading an update (which you couldn't always do until night time because of tying up the phone line). It was incredibly frustrating.
Steam wouldn't have happened if Windows had a proper package manager (and if Valve hadn't been screwed over by Sierra).
I'm wondering about what cleanliness you are talking about, after all Steam (thankfully) never got a 100% market share (Games For Windows Live, Stardock's Impulse, GamersGate, Matrix/Slitherine, Blizzard games, Good Old Games, Ubisoft's horrible launchers, various boxes-only games, indies...) - if anything it has killed indie gaming that was briefly freed from having to have a full blown publisher and physical distributor - these days smaller developers have a hard time to sell from their own website and sometimes even to just forego from using Steamworks-only services (which make non-Steam versions second class citizens) like multiplayer matchmaking and mod Workshop.
(And some other programs like Xfire have tried to centralize game libraries too, also offering other services like chat, matchmaking, game hour counts, video recording and upload...)
I'm sure there are some significant downsides to Steam being a dominant platform, as is always the case. That being said, I think Steam has been pretty decent for Indie devs in other ways. The Greenlight program seems pretty successful, and the barrier for entry into the Steam catalog isn't too steep. However, you are right in that you are pretty much forcing indie devs to come in under the Steam umbrella to get exposure, and that's of course questionable.
As for pure practicality as a gamer, Steam was unbeatable in the 10's. There were a lot of other offerings like you mentioned, but none were really competing on a large scale. The push of every publisher to restrict their games to their own Steam clones is a thing that seems to really have ramped up during the last ten years or so. Some were early though, Blizzard being a prime example.
That's quite the take. I'd say Valve did more good for indie gaming than anyone else with the introduction of early access. Almost all the indie gaming being done in my social circles is through Steam's early access program. Before that people just didn't play indie games.
Indie means independant. (Activision-)Blizzard (which owns their distribution platform) is more indie than the small developers that would have gone bankrupt if Steam kicked them out (or shadowbanned them), and were forced to pay a ~30% tax.
And I'm pretty sure people did play (small developer) indie games before - just flash games alone...
It was pretty terrible. I had dial up at the time and so used offline mode a lot. It was a regular thing where the game would get to 100% ready, I'd launch it online to see that it worked, switch to offline and disconnect and it no longer worked. So you'd repeat this about 6 times and maybe it would stick. There was NO avoiding being online for the first install. I had to spend 2 nights connected to dial up to get HL2:Episode 1 playable and I bought that from a DVD. I played HL2 on Xbox just to avoid Steam.
> If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.
I've been using Playnite to consolidate my games list across launchers. It works pretty well once it's set up, except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher
> except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher
That's just comedy. I know this happens for a lot of Ubisoft games in my Steam library. I guess they want to keep the cake and eat it to. Exposure on Steam, walled garden in Connect.
I'll definitely check out Playnite. Thanks for the tip!
A lot of us predicted horrible things would come from Steam. Ads everywhere, forced updates, forced removal of games for all kinds of bullshit reasons, etc. Basically all the same arguments you get today about digital ownership and platforms. Fortunately for us, Valve has actually been a pretty good gaming-community citizen with Steam so we can happily say we were wrong.
Forced updates did happen (only way to play the game if Steam was aware there was one available - and God forbid you had a slow/flaky connection - no gaming for you today, not even through Offline Mode !).
Combined in at least one instance with the new version not being able to load the old multi-hours save, and no rollbacks, so hopefully you manually backed up the whole game !
(At least the devs fixed it in a patch after some days...)
I'd say if I have one big complaint about Steam, it's that it's update control needs work. I don't know if it's intentional or not but rolling back to an old version is...impossible? I'm vaguely aware there is an option to maintain the version you already have but I believe it's quite buried.
I've had updates completely change game balance, making character load outs I'd grinded up not work the way they did before. I've also had new linux versions break compatibility. This is understandable in multiplayer games, but I was playing these games single player.
Probably more due to Half-Life, TFC, and CS. The enormous player bases were forced to adopt Steam. And then Valve continued to put a few more good games.
Honestly CS:S was a bit of a miss—largely considered a failure by the 1.6 community—but it didn’t matter because TF2 came out and was a smash hit.
Loaded up the Ubisoft app recently. Pure trash, apps / syncing wouldn’t work till I accepted all cookies, things wouldn’t download in the background while playing single player, etc.
I tried playing an old Ubisoft title recently, Farcry Blood Dragon. But it wants to connect to a long dead ubisoft server EVERY time I his Esc to go to the menu and takes 30 seconds to time out. Every time! I decided I just won't buy anymore Ubisoft games after that.
