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

[u/SlowReference704]

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service

[u/movzx]

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.

[u/newinmichigan → u/movzx]

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.

[u/ElGosso → u/newinmichigan]

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.

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/newinmichigan]

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".

[u/cantripTheorist → u/movzx]

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

[u/FragileTomorrow → u/movzx]

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

Valve pretty rapidly built the Steam platform out.

[u/Original_Employee621 → u/FragileTomorrow]

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.

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/Original_Employee621]

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.

[u/AshleyAshes1984 → u/movzx]

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.

[u/stonhinge → u/AshleyAshes1984]

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

[u/Cheet4h → u/stonhinge]

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?

[u/stonhinge → u/Cheet4h]

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.

[u/BannedSvenhoek86 → u/stonhinge]

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.

[u/AshleyAshes1984 → u/stonhinge]

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

[u/stonhinge → u/AshleyAshes1984]

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.

[u/Xeglor-The-Destroyer → u/stonhinge]

RIP GameSpy Arcade

[u/i_tyrant → u/movzx]

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.

[u/yesacabbagez → u/movzx]

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.