Nah, Steam has been around a loooooong time, tho I'm guessing most of the early userbase actually jumped onboard for the release of Half-Life 2 in late 2004.
How did I not know about this? I did not learn of Steam until early 2008. I was at least 14 if we're talking summer or late 2003.
I've been on it for 16 years, its wide launch was with Half Life 2 but there were earlier versions of it. I would assume for match making or something or just beta testing before Half Life 2.
Probably because Steam as a platform didn't really take off until around 2007. Also because in its first few years, it sucked.
It wasn't till like 2007 2008 that bigger publishers started using steam as a distribution platform. Before then there were some indie games and such, but nothing big that wasn't released by Valve.
I dived in the day after my birthday in 2005. Jesus I feel so old looking at that. Which makes sense because that was when I started really getting into the LAN Faming scene. Before Broadband and XboxLive ruined everything
That's around the first time I heard of it. That and the Orange Box made me install it to play the game(I think. Some valve game made me install Steam).
It probably would have been the Orange Box if it was around that time. Valve made it mandatory for their games with the release of Half Life 2.
Oh man, you probably know this too, but early Steam was godawful. First couple years it was pretty much a glorified downloader and matchmaking tool for Valve games. Not even a good one either. Next couple years were only marginally better. Servers frequently went down, buying games was a pain, no search function, no community features, slow download speeds, and so on. Basically none of the basic functionality we now take for granted was around yet.
Yeah, it was basically just Steam's own in-house publishing/distributing arm and platform. I played CS:S like crazy back then, so was on Steam a thoroughly unhealthy proportion of my free time - although I recall very few occasions I had many problems with it. You can say it was crummy compared to now (and of course in a sense it would be), but my perception at the time was that it was absolutely fine - contextually, of course, to what the internet generally was like in that era.
My memories of the early days weren't so rosy. Maybe I was just unlucky to be playing whenever things went on the fritz, but the first year or so was rough. Perhaps understandably so, digital distribution was in its infancy, after all.
Also, requiring an internet connection to play your games, and having to download everything. Broadband wasn't all that common yet back then.
Well, to be fair, there wasn't much on the steam store in the early days either. It was really just a matchmaker/updater/drm scheme/chat program. You don't need much of a search when there are only like 10 games on your platform. And since then Valve has build almost an entire internet backbone for its users, its been a long time since a major new release caused a huge issue with their service.
If you really want to support a "vibrant and competitive market" then support gog, not egs. Gog is the most consumer focused of the larger online stores and they are dedicated to not having DRM in their games. Egs is trying to force itself in to the market using monopolistic tactics, gog is trying to get more of the market by being consumer focused.
Good to know. I will try to shop there some more. I have a few games from them that just don't work (Unless I do crazy stuff like shut off 1/2 the cores on my CPU... yikes!) but some do. And I've gotten a few free games there as well. Just have to be careful with what I buy.
Problem with GOG for me personally is its chock full of shit I'm just not interested in. This doesn't make it a bad service or platform - I do own stuff on it - but its my back up after Steam and Origin.
