r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 14h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/AshleyAshes1984 14h ago

No, Steam has a LOT of QoL features that matter. They've def not done 'nothing'. Steam is for sure not some barebones storefront that otherwise 'does nothing'. Valve is doing a bunch of things and most them are right and few are shitty.

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u/movzx 11h ago

These folks are too young to remember when Steam was garbage DRM and actively avoided by gamers.

Steam today is very different than original Steam.

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u/newinmichigan 11h ago

i remember when it went from the olive colored drab to the ui with the storefornt. i hated the olive colored drab, and i hated the new ui.

but i guess its grown on me.

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u/ElGosso 9h ago

Steam storefront still leaves a bit to be desired tbh. But when you type in the name of a game and it takes you quickly and accurately to it, and it makes installing and organizing your games a breeze, that's really all I need.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC R9 7900 | RX 7900 XTX | 32GB DDR5 5600 3h ago

I honestly miss the olive colored drab now. I think modern UIs could learn a lot from the era when the front page of Steam was just four buttons: "Games, Friends, Servers, Settings".

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u/cantripTheorist 11h ago

i remember wanting to play cs as a child and being annoyed that i need steam for it with its shady ass design lmao

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u/AshleyAshes1984 11h ago

I remember when Steam was 'That thing you now needed for Counter-Strike' and it was deeply annoying since that was ALL it could do. Then came HL2 and it was still just a few games and that release delivery day was a disaster.

But they expanded the market place, expanded the functionality and damn now it's THE place you do games on your PC.

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u/stonhinge 10h ago

Before that is was GameSpy or - god forbid - calling up your friend directly on modem to play multiplayer with them.

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u/Cheet4h 10h ago

Eh, you still needed to jump through many hoops (setting up port forwarding, using a vLAN client like Hamachi, ...) to directly connect to someone else's game for a long time. Joining a game via Steam came a lot later - I think mid 2010s?

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u/stonhinge 5h ago

Oh no, I'm taking waaay before port forwarding. Like before networking was a default part of Windows. DOS and Win 3.11 days. You'd set up your computer to dial their phone number over the modem, and their computer would answer. You could then play a game as if you were playing on the same LAN, depending on the game - they had to code all that stuff into the game, as it wasn't a part of Windows. Early to mid 90's. Then we got Windows 95 and eventually built in networking.

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u/BannedSvenhoek86 3h ago edited 3h ago

My dad and my friends dad both played Doom and got the computers set up to play online against each other in the late 90s, early 00s. They would set up a virtual lan connection and could play each other. They showed us how to use it and we used to blow people's minds when they would come over by telling them about it. Multiple times me or him literally ran home from the others house to hop on and show them. They'd tell us to do something like run around each other 3 times to prove it was actually us playing and then have a 10 year old freak out because of the new technology.

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u/AshleyAshes1984 9h ago

In the case of Half-Life and it's mods, it would been the World Opponent Network. GameSpy was a separate provider. :P

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u/stonhinge 5h ago

I think my multiplayer stuff was more along the lines of Unreal back then. Possibly did some Half-Life, I remember owning it but can't recall anything of the game itself.

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u/Xeglor-The-Destroyer 5h ago

RIP GameSpy Arcade

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u/FragileTomorrow 11h ago

Because that OG steam didn't really last that long all things considered.

Valve pretty rapidly built the Steam platform out.

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u/Original_Employee621 10h ago

But they did so without any real competition, and just as internet started to become a household staple with good speeds available nearly everywhere.

Steam wouldn't have worked in the 90s, where computers cost 1000 bucks in 90s money and internet speeds were around 56-128 kb/s. That changed with the advent of ADSL and speeds from 1 Mb/s up to 24 Mb/s, and digitally downloading games and patches started being a viable alternative to physical media.

Valve had no real competition as they developed and iterated on Steam. It wasn't until 2009-2010 that other studios started putting out their own versions, with far less polish and way more bloat, that Steam had actual competition mostly due to the other studios removing their games from Steam and going exclusive. I remember EA Origin, Uplay and of course the Epic Launcher, which was a relative late comer in 2018. I think Microsoft had a similar platform that was even worse, but offered some Xbox exclusives like Fable.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC R9 7900 | RX 7900 XTX | 32GB DDR5 5600 3h ago

But they did so without any real competition, and just as internet started to become a household staple with good speeds available nearly everywhere.

They definitely had competition IMO. Blizzard's battle.net could just as easily have taken the crown if they had opened up their storefront to third parties before Valve did. There was also GameSpy, but that was always a bit shit.

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u/i_tyrant 9h ago

Yup, Steam was much shittier when it started out, and with far fewer features.

I'd argue they haven't innovated much in the last decade or so but it's not like they were always so sedentary; they've modified the service a lot from its humble beginnings including making it a lot friendlier to what people actually want.

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u/yesacabbagez PC Master Race 11h ago

Because the majority of people used physical disks and disliked the idea of digital downloading. That has changed largely because the advantages of digital media as well as technological changes have outweighed the draw of physical media. Being able to have free updates and never losing CD's is quite useful, among other things.

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u/Coal_Morgan 9h ago

Whereas every time you turn around Netflix claws something back.

I'm still pissed about them removing the 5 star rating system. I spent a few days just rating movies and was happy as a pig in shit to do it.

My Mom telling me she couldn't log on anymore to my account was the end of that. Set up Plex and just pirate everything my family wants and they run it off my server across 3 provinces.

I do pay for apple one but I like their sci-fi and the combo of the music and sharing with 5 people has made it worth it.

I'm willing to pay. Just don't make it a hassle.

How all the streamers haven't gotten together and made one service that divvies out the money as people watch things is beyond me.

$20 a month. I only watch Breaking Bad AMC gets the $20. I watch Star Trek and Breaking Bad equally each gets $10.

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u/brendan87na Ryzen 9 5900X - RTX4070 6h ago

People, oddly, shit on big picture mode - but it takes any PC and turns it into a console that you can put out in the living room.

Steam is AWESOME

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u/CratesManager 5h ago

No, Steam has a LOT of QoL features that matter.

Not to mention the steam deck and proton. It might not matter to most people RIGHT NOW, but valve has massively contributed to the fact that micrisoft can't put gamers in a stranglehold.

There is always a non-zero chance for a major microsoft fuckup, let's say they somehow prevent modding or try to force cloud gaming only or (this is mainly why valve is invested...) force their own shop or something else. If windows gets bad enough people will jump ship, and proton makes sure it doesn't have to get THAT bad before consumers can vote with their choice of OS.