When they made it a digital storefront instead of a glorified updater program for Counter-Strike. Josh is correct, that in that iteration, Steam was dumb. People hated it when it first released.
Because in 2002, it was. Maybe 50% of all households even *had* internet, so tying the sales of your games to that market that then would have had to install it on the 512K connections of the time was ludicrous; sure, nowadays it seems so normal that it'd be weird to imagine a world without it, but the only reason that's the case now is because Valve already had the sort of cultural pushing power combined with pre-existing upward momentum in internet subscriptions, so they could afford to stick to their guns on it.
@@davidwebster4457 One of the biggest, buzziest games of 2004 as an exclusive, before people were utterly sick to their stomachs of things like that, on top of Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Mostly Counter-Strike though, since the venn diagram of Counter-Strike players and people with internet connections was a circle. Plus, by 2004, the number of households online rose to 64%, 67% by 2005. Also, don't forget everyone hated it until like 2009.
Maybe not if you are planning long term, expecting the internet would grow and that we would have faster connections. And Steam wasn't only for digital downloads, having a community and an easy way to play online games was a huge deal too.
A lot of people don’t remember that Steam was once universally hated when it was introduced. It was just this weird copyright protection and anticheat program that caused more problems than it was worth. It wasn’t until they started selling non-valve games months (years?) later that the tide started to turn. The original steamUI lives on today as part of the settings menu for HL2 and the server selection menu in TF2.
Never hated it, it was just a bit weird. I was sure it was the future right away but I never would have guessed it would reach the near monopole it has had.
Almost universally hated! Can’t speak for everyone but there was lots of counter strike players who enjoyed the ease of updating and connecting. It was like «ah nice it fixes CS automatically! Oh ew I can’t start HL2 offline??»
The only reason I got steam back in the days was because you could play the beta of CS 1.6. For anticheat there was punkbuster, which worked better. That's why stan was not liked.
I had such a hard time downloading CS patches on my dialup connection, steam was amazing for being able to get updates and not worry about someone picking up the phone cuz it could auto resume
Compare to the current years launcher like Battlenet or EGS. All of them have same quality, it just that Steam release was like literally 20 years ago.
@@Aibadenshi except EGS who manages to be endlessly annoying and useless somehow, whats that you got RAM? wel' use it more than we need for no reason given and also our store literally does nothing besides selling games and sometimes giving it to you for free, even tho its just a psyop bribing blackmail scheme and everyone knows it.
Steam was just clunky online DRM and forced updates at the beginning, at a time most people didn't have good broadband. Back then, I got the HL2 demo from a disc bundled with a magazine. It installed Steam, which had to update itself and decided to re-download the entire demo for some reason. The whole process took over three hours and made me hate Steam for years.
Remember buying some game back in 2008 as a kid. Was going to grandmas house with pc but no internet and couldn't play it because of steam. Made me hate it with passion for quite a while
Not to mention their server capacity couldn't handle any release day demand and would routinely just stop working, requiring you to redownload the clientregistry.blob
Not to mention the fact that basic features were completely broken for a long time. The Friends feature was glitched to hell and IIRC would list friends you've added as garbled text, and was stuck like that for YEARS.
The thing is that valve through steam pretty much pioneered the online gaming market, at a time where internet access itself was pretty novel to begin with. Then you have current day storefronts like uplay and epic game store that have pretty much all the hard work already done for them by their predecessors, yet still manage to suck complete ass.
I mean, do you think valve is sharing with them what problem they encountered and what are their solution to these problems ? Just because someone did it before doesn't mean you suddenly know how to do it. You pretty much still have to try and fail at it long enough until you succeed. It's not like steam's server are open source...
I remember when Steam first came out and everyone I knew was irritated they had to download this stupid green-metal program. Now everyone is in love with Steam and rightfully so. What a turn around.
The only feature I think would be nice is a feature that allows you to sell off your digital games with a 15% cut for valve and the devs (if it is listed) that can be adjusted.
I remember hearing about it and most gamers on budget pc's were like 'why do I want some game launcher hogging my precious resources'. Win xp had it's limitations and some were still on 98.
@@tehjamerz Maybe wherever you were was different. Steam was a slow resource hog with slow games. Quake and UT let you run with batch functions to end windows tasks to free resources. Something you don't have to do at all anymore.
I had my first steam game in Win7 which FAR better OS And I loves it from back then Back in the day, i was still easily amused and entertained by mc. excel animated mascot in my winXP
It was like a half a dozen dudes that worked on l4d2 decided to leverage their participation and marketed thamselves aa spiritual successor with B4B. If you look at l4d2 credits, there were hundreds of people participating and working on it. B4B devs never had a chance with a workforce their size. It was impossible to match all the features and workload with their staff. The thing was a PR hack in the end.
As somebody who originally downloaded the first publicly available version of steam which was a broken, laggy, crash-ridden pile of mess I will also confirm I thought it was stupid.
I can definitely attest that STEAM was a pile of dogshit when it first came out. That was back when the majority of computer users were running on Windows 98, which was *notorious* for crashing at the drop of a hat. You could only realistically run *one* program at a time with any inkling of stability, with games being the most unstable thing you could run. And here STEAM was, demanding that you run an entire program *ontop* of your game.. It was buggy, it crashed your game all the time.. The promise of keeping your games up to date only applied to Valve's vanilla, 1st party games for the longest time. And even as not-so-1st-party games started to trickle in (which was many years later) like Portal and Day of Defeat, it just felt like what many of the other non-STEAM game stores feel like today- Useless bloat that's just there to try to collect your personal data and take away control from your gaming experience. There was even some debacle where STEAM was logging your browsing history. But no one remembers that because it was pre-HL2. And all of this was happening when the vast, sweeping majority of Internet users at the time still had 56k dial-up modem connections to the Internet. But even though it was shit, and everyone hated it.. Valve kept chipping away at making STEAM better. It became one of the first places that indie game devs could easily sell their games, and have them sitting next to AAA titles. 3rd party games became able to use STEAM to push out updates. Operating Systems became more capable of actual multi-tasking, and running multiple programs at once, even while you have a hardware intensive game running. Eventually it just became more convenient to buy games off STEAM than to buy them anywhere else. I've moved around a lot, and lost a lot of my physical consoles and games as a result. But everything I had on STEAM is still their. My STEAM account turns 20 in January.
I really like that even thought they have different ideas, they didn't try to undermined each other or sabotage each other. It's really why they are able to get really big. They focus on their own things and all of them succeed.
In the original Portal 1 ending (WARNING, SPOILERS) no robot came to the crash site to take you back. That was supposed to be the end: you killed the bad robot and get to live your life. Also, they retroactively added all those radios you find randomly though the game (the ones emitting static noise) for the community to find and analyze said static noise (they turned out to be weird pictures related to portal 2 and a website if I can recall)
@@Linkale_ The "noise" is actually SSTV (slow-scan television) which is used to transmit images over radio. All radios emit their own signal after completing the game, but only at certain locations of the level. Also, not all radios spawn initially, most of them spawn after you completed the game at least once. (Also, if I remember correctly, not all of them were SSTV, but most of them were)
Considering what a piece of shit the software was in the for those first few difficult years, I guess that makes sense. I assume Valve isn't stupid, and wasn't stupid back then, but the platform was truly terrible at launch.
It's funny how origin launcher eventually tried to do this play is you download idea. Last I remember it download a demo of the game and then download the actual game so that was useless
I've been using Steam since 2004 and always loved it, even when it was new. EA Play/uPlay/Epic Games are all horrible in compare and I avoid them like the plague. If a game I want is released on any of those other platforms, then I will gladly wait 1-2 years for the Steam-release lol.
@@SINfromPL Never understood why anytime someone says they don't like Epic someone comes defending it extremely pissed about it lmao Tim Sweeney aint gonna fuck you bro.
It is funny how the original seed of Steam was streaming downloading, and now PC is really the only platform without streaming downloading because it just never came to Steam.
Well, "downloading a game as you play it" is not something Steam does right now, so it must have been a pretty dumb idea after all. It's everything else Steam does that's the moneymaker....
its not a dumb idea, its just hard to do for a developer standpoint, battlenet used to (idk if it still does) have this back in atleast 2015-2016 and it was honestly really good, its just it requires a lot more work from the developer, which isn't so good if your platform appeals to every developer ever, whereas for battlenet the only people selling games on that were blizzard
Guild Wars 1 did this back in the day. The initial install downloaded the starting zone and the rest of the game would download as needed as you played.
I don't think it was a dumb idea, it just wasn't an impactful one, for how hard to implement it would be (especially because every dev of every game would have to do the legwork to define what files should be downloaded in what order for it to all work). It only changes the experience with the game for the first hour or 2, and does absolutely nothing for the rest of time. And even less as higher speed internet became more widespread.
i hope one day i can work at a company that sounds half as adventurous as these companies in there starting days, gets me so pumped to work but than i remember my job sucks lmao.
Didn't know steam was originally about progressive downloads for games. That makes a lot of sense. I know lots of multi-player FPS games were like that, in principle at least with you downloading maps and models off the server. But it's surprising to me still that guild wars is pretty much the only game to do this for real. Installer was single digit megabytes and it just booted.
I remember when I got HL2 DVD from a physical store and brought it home only to find out that I had to download some strange program (steam) to download the game first. I was so annoyed and thought steam was a stupid idea. Boy was I wrong.
This shows you not everyone has it to make it big, some people will think you are stupid for trying something but give it a go anyway, you may be trailblazing.
I remember so many gamers were so actively opposed to Steam because of digital ownership that people were hording WON accounts left and right when it came out. They were so right in the long term, that digital ownership has become a trap. But short term, Steam is great. As long as Gaben runs the company we're fine.. when he retires..
I think the discounts made steam what it is today. Some games get bought and never played. Like I just spent 100 bucks since the last steam sale and I've played like two of the games
These comments would have me thinking I'm the only one that ever enjoyed steam when it released. Prior to it I remember SO many corrupt update installs for half lfe, Day of Defeat, CS, and Team Fortress. Yes it had its fair share of issues, but so did doing things like running janky servers via hamachi and relying on IRC for keeping up to date with things.
Gamers thought steam was a bad idea at first too. First year or so, gamers constantly used to say "I crashed again, thanks steam". People even developed a "WON 2" set of servers so they could avoid steam completely. This always happens with good ideas. People hate anything that's too different. Then they realize how much they needed it in the first place.
still is since you can't disable updates to games. no i don't care about balance changes in a game i play by myself, have to constantly curse out devs that seem to force their way into ruining any game you buy
I love how to every gayben fanboy, anyone who doesn't worship valve and doesn't go every Sunday to steam church is automatically epic boy. Is that your biggest arch nemesis? Wow. You guys are actually afraid to have competition.
@@SINfromPL it took Epic several years to get a shopping kart and in the meantime they deleted every game they had made except for Fortnite. Paragon is gone and so is the entire Unreal Tournament series. You can no longer buy Unreal Tournament anywhere.
@@sharoyveduchi Paragon assets became free to use in Unreal Engine. UT was also published as sample project. Noone is perfect, and arguably Epic is the only company even fighting the establishment. You really want to give away 30% of profit just for hosting files? You do not want alternative app stores on your iphone? Do you hate free to use, hyper powerful game engines in the hands of the people? I don't know why you even mention all those things. Steam isn't doing anything anymore, they are comfortable with their monopoly position. It's laughable how everyone don't want to hear anything bad about valve lol.
i absolutely hated steam when it launched. i despised it above anything else. it was only teamfortress 2 that finally convinced me to make an account. honestly, still not that big a fan. it's DRM, and i don't think DRM is ever good. steam is just the lesser of all evils in here.
@@flamestoyershadowkillso steam features that no developer can even pay for to use on other platforms like Xbox? Basically make your game steam exclusive, or other ports won't have the same functionality. Genius.
@soliduszor no you can't. There is no steam workshop on Xbox or ps3, there is no workshop if you buy the same hand from epic. That's why workshop is dying and more developers are moving to open mod platforms like modio
What are you talking about? You couldn't "own" a game in steam right from the beginning. It's just a stupid eu law forced steam to make it clear. And now you start yapping
@@spookyscarygraviton5944 lol "stupid" law sure. its important that people know they don't own said games. not everyone that has steam knows that fact.
If it wasn't steam it was going to be someone else. Some exec would have seen what netflix was doing and would have done the same thing. I'm just happy that valve got to it first.
Well your physical disc also starts the process of decaying the day it gets produced. DRM is tricky and i much prefer what GOG is doing but Steam is just such an amazing platform that i sometimes buy games on Steam i already own on other platforms just for the sake of convenience.
@@emilflarsen2 Lets not forget that if you buy a game and the dev later blocks it for purchase, you can still download and play it. So glad I got War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron.
Because it is. People should have boycotted it. But people are stupid too. xD I mean - We don't even own our games anymore there. It's so stupid and yet it works only because steam already got huge inertia.
I don't think anyone thought steam was a bad idea. It just makes it seem like a better story if they say that. How is a virtual marketplace to sell games and software a bad idea? If anyone actually thought it was a bad idea, I'd question their intelligence.
I'd have less a problem with digital if it was digital OWNERSHIP and not a license. I've been a bit upset since finding out you can't leave a Steam account in a will which is ridiculous.
@@BlazingOwnager physical media, ESPECIALLY discs, dies eventually. you only have a license for the duration of the lifetime of the physical media. if you're backing that up, you are legally indistinct from dling cracks for digital copies and storing them. optical. media. sucks.
Honestly? I wouldn't have it any other way. If anyone is to be in charge of the monopoly of video game distribution I want it to be Valve. If I could, I would have had them in charge of micro transactions.
I used to be a big fan of Valve when they were "Valve Software". Not a big fan of "Valve Corporation". Unfortunately being "too big to fail" has proven to be a bad thing for consumers and fans. I wish this weird reddit obsession with valve who can do no wrong and "gaben" being some sort of holy figure never happened so that valve would actually have to take accountability for their bullshit and perhaps continue to innovate rather than stagnate.
Why do people always do this? Why do people always come towards videos like this to complain about stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the subject being talked about? Nothing in your comment is about how they develop their games or manage their platforms, it is only a rant about Valve without any input on their games' philosophy, you're ignoring the very topic of this clip.
@@dan-con8713 Why do people always do this? Why do people always come to the rescue for valve whenever someone criticizes them in a video about valve devs criticizing company decisions? Nothing in your comment shows you're not a valve fanboy coming to their rescue for maybe 5 cents (wallet deposit) it's only showing how upset you are that someone talked negatively about your beloved game developer who barely develops games anymore. I gave you a thumbs up, we need more comment police officers on youtube, thank you for your service and as stated previously, 5 cents have been deposited to your steam wallet.
@@sony_mdr7506 steam deck is an interesting concept that has yet to be executed properly, alyx was only made to bundle with their 1500 dollar headset (hence why no official non-vr version ever released), the index, much like the steamdeck isn't innovative at all and just an opportunity to cash in on an existing trend, linux gaming support is built off wine which has existed for years and isn't really valves idea. Try harder valve fanboy, they still wont value you as a fan or customer.
@@e2m8Nothing in my comment implies I was defending anything about Valve, I was defending the channel's owner who doesn't upload just for people like you to spout details unrelated to his uploads. Nothing in your comment talks about this 3 minute discussion. Nothing of what you said disproves my point, there are many videos out there where you can go and complain about Valve all you want. The only reason you say this here is because you wouldn't have the courage to say it to Weier's face. You only do it here because it's a lot easier to type this in a youtube comment than to do it in person. You're going everywhere on this channel calling people fanboys, I guess it's fair to tell you the opposite then, you have a hate boner.
@@Ricewarrior01 it got popular not in the first place but in a long run with TONS of QOL features and other important things, like steam market, family sharing, remote play together. +steam is loyal to you as customer and can issue refunds, something others launchers and companies avoid like wildfire
you're right lets sacrifice user reviews, a refund system, the workshop, the unmatched library, family sharing, remote play, proper community features, the implemented game/community ban systems, user made guides, lack of censorship, the ability to play the games that you bought after they were delisted by the developers, the community market, and many other features. im sure id have a better time on epic games or uhhh.... xbox game pass because these 30% fees for developers are very anti consumer and i cant support that
steam isn't a monopoly. if they feel like a monopoly it's because they're the best option available. i'm willing to pay that 30% because they have proven to me for over a decade that they have the best service. i don't care how many free games epic offers me, i'm still sticking with steam. valve has earned my trust
@@ea09 there is nothing cool about valve, it's a file hosting service and they good games comes from before steam success. Rich fat man as cancer to entire world, hamstering global wealth. But people like kiwi can't even imagine in their head saying anything half bad about valve.
Your comment is hilarious; I laughed out loud it really made my day by how ridiculous it is, so thanks for giving me a good chuckle. I have interviewed over 100 game devs with 8 of them being Valve devs, so I dont know how I am obsessed. In fact I have done way more Retro Studios content than Valve content. Secondly these are clips from the devs themselves, I am not saying anything, they say whatever they want to say and then I make clips of stuff that I think will be of interest to people, so you don't even know what my opinion is of Valve because I have never spoken publicly about anything they have done. lol Once again thanks for the laugh. lol
@@KIWITALKZ that's cool, thanks for featuring me on your twitter! you got so upset by that you had to let the entire internet know, that's just another confirmation. you are literally talking about how "awesome" valve games are, what valve has and has not at the company. it's obvious how _you_ feel about valve, probably even would love to work for them given the chance. how are you even? it seems like a "nobody" with a camera. you aren't a game developer, you are not a programmer, you call yourself "game developer interviewer" so that's it? you ask a basic-level question and let the guests talk, what's your input in here? who cares you made more retro? your channel is filled with valve related stuff. 5 years ago probably nobody even related to valve would even reply to your email.
it later turned out that steam was their ticket to the infinite money glitch
Amazon, Steam, GTA Online, Fortnite Battle Royale. Literal infinite money makers
@@adamcookie26my dad
@@ihatetomatoees fortnite is this guy's dad
When they made it a digital storefront instead of a glorified updater program for Counter-Strike. Josh is correct, that in that iteration, Steam was dumb. People hated it when it first released.
@@daniwolfplayz3599 👏👏👏Absolute Cinema🎬
Because in 2002, it was. Maybe 50% of all households even *had* internet, so tying the sales of your games to that market that then would have had to install it on the 512K connections of the time was ludicrous; sure, nowadays it seems so normal that it'd be weird to imagine a world without it, but the only reason that's the case now is because Valve already had the sort of cultural pushing power combined with pre-existing upward momentum in internet subscriptions, so they could afford to stick to their guns on it.
but many other similar attempts, by your own description, failed. Right? So what was specifically unique to steam?
@@davidwebster4457 One of the biggest, buzziest games of 2004 as an exclusive, before people were utterly sick to their stomachs of things like that, on top of Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Mostly Counter-Strike though, since the venn diagram of Counter-Strike players and people with internet connections was a circle.
Plus, by 2004, the number of households online rose to 64%, 67% by 2005.
Also, don't forget everyone hated it until like 2009.
Maybe not if you are planning long term, expecting the internet would grow and that we would have faster connections. And Steam wasn't only for digital downloads, having a community and an easy way to play online games was a huge deal too.
@@vinny-g6s Not in 2002 it wasn't. Steam was basically just a game launcher for all of Valve's Goldsource games at that point.
@@davidwebster4457 Half Life 2.
A lot of people don’t remember that Steam was once universally hated when it was introduced. It was just this weird copyright protection and anticheat program that caused more problems than it was worth. It wasn’t until they started selling non-valve games months (years?) later that the tide started to turn.
The original steamUI lives on today as part of the settings menu for HL2 and the server selection menu in TF2.
There were some very early non-Valve games on the platform, but even then I think it was at least a year? Might not have been year*s* plural.
I remember Steam got popular when The Orange Box released. Around 2007.
Never hated it, it was just a bit weird. I was sure it was the future right away but I never would have guessed it would reach the near monopole it has had.
Almost universally hated! Can’t speak for everyone but there was lots of counter strike players who enjoyed the ease of updating and connecting. It was like «ah nice it fixes CS automatically! Oh ew I can’t start HL2 offline??»
The only reason I got steam back in the days was because you could play the beta of CS 1.6.
For anticheat there was punkbuster, which worked better. That's why stan was not liked.
To be fair, Steam was a pile of shit when it came out.
Ssshh, only toxic positivity is allowed! All hail Lord Gayben!
I had such a hard time downloading CS patches on my dialup connection, steam was amazing for being able to get updates and not worry about someone picking up the phone cuz it could auto resume
Compare to the current years launcher like Battlenet or EGS.
All of them have same quality, it just that Steam release was like literally 20 years ago.
lmao, i remember hating it, piece of shit that it was
@@Aibadenshi except EGS who manages to be endlessly annoying and useless somehow, whats that you got RAM? wel' use it more than we need for no reason given and also our store literally does nothing besides selling games and sometimes giving it to you for free, even tho its just a psyop bribing blackmail scheme and everyone knows it.
Steam was just clunky online DRM and forced updates at the beginning, at a time most people didn't have good broadband.
Back then, I got the HL2 demo from a disc bundled with a magazine. It installed Steam, which had to update itself and decided to re-download the entire demo for some reason. The whole process took over three hours and made me hate Steam for years.
Remember buying some game back in 2008 as a kid. Was going to grandmas house with pc but no internet and couldn't play it because of steam. Made me hate it with passion for quite a while
Not to mention their server capacity couldn't handle any release day demand and would routinely just stop working, requiring you to redownload the clientregistry.blob
Not to mention the fact that basic features were completely broken for a long time. The Friends feature was glitched to hell and IIRC would list friends you've added as garbled text, and was stuck like that for YEARS.
The DRM is still stupid.
oh god you made me remember it when i tried HL oneeee damm those times
The thing is that valve through steam pretty much pioneered the online gaming market, at a time where internet access itself was pretty novel to begin with. Then you have current day storefronts like uplay and epic game store that have pretty much all the hard work already done for them by their predecessors, yet still manage to suck complete ass.
I mean, do you think valve is sharing with them what problem they encountered and what are their solution to these problems ?
Just because someone did it before doesn't mean you suddenly know how to do it. You pretty much still have to try and fail at it long enough until you succeed.
It's not like steam's server are open source...
I remember when Steam first came out and everyone I knew was irritated they had to download this stupid green-metal program. Now everyone is in love with Steam and rightfully so. What a turn around.
True, I thought steam was annoying at first as well, but I have come to like it over the last decade or so.
The only feature I think would be nice is a feature that allows you to sell off your digital games with a 15% cut for valve and the devs (if it is listed) that can be adjusted.
@@flamestoyershadowkillI don’t know what you mean
@@WhatIsTheHeat basically selling preowned digital games
@@flamestoyershadowkill That would be really poggers
I remember hearing about it and most gamers on budget pc's were like 'why do I want some game launcher hogging my precious resources'. Win xp had it's limitations and some were still on 98.
Wrong
@@tehjamerz Maybe wherever you were was different. Steam was a slow resource hog with slow games. Quake and UT let you run with batch functions to end windows tasks to free resources. Something you don't have to do at all anymore.
I had my first steam game in Win7 which FAR better OS
And I loves it from back then
Back in the day, i was still easily amused and entertained by mc. excel animated mascot in my winXP
"dang I got ICQ/Messanger/Whatever ontop of mIRC running on the background I don't have the RAM to spare for steam!!!"
Also, a "budget" PC woulda just been the Xbox 1 or PS2.
And it turned out to become one of the most lucrative products in the history of the games industry. Crazy crazy shit.
another reason why gabe is a genius. Remember how turtle rock failed with B4B and not L4D2 when gabe was in charge?
It was like a half a dozen dudes that worked on l4d2 decided to leverage their participation and marketed thamselves aa spiritual successor with B4B.
If you look at l4d2 credits, there were hundreds of people participating and working on it.
B4B devs never had a chance with a workforce their size. It was impossible to match all the features and workload with their staff.
The thing was a PR hack in the end.
Did you watch the Crowbcat video on Back4blood ? :D
back4blood was really fun
As somebody who originally downloaded the first publicly available version of steam which was a broken, laggy, crash-ridden pile of mess I will also confirm I thought it was stupid.
I can definitely attest that STEAM was a pile of dogshit when it first came out. That was back when the majority of computer users were running on Windows 98, which was *notorious* for crashing at the drop of a hat. You could only realistically run *one* program at a time with any inkling of stability, with games being the most unstable thing you could run. And here STEAM was, demanding that you run an entire program *ontop* of your game.. It was buggy, it crashed your game all the time.. The promise of keeping your games up to date only applied to Valve's vanilla, 1st party games for the longest time. And even as not-so-1st-party games started to trickle in (which was many years later) like Portal and Day of Defeat, it just felt like what many of the other non-STEAM game stores feel like today- Useless bloat that's just there to try to collect your personal data and take away control from your gaming experience. There was even some debacle where STEAM was logging your browsing history. But no one remembers that because it was pre-HL2. And all of this was happening when the vast, sweeping majority of Internet users at the time still had 56k dial-up modem connections to the Internet.
But even though it was shit, and everyone hated it.. Valve kept chipping away at making STEAM better. It became one of the first places that indie game devs could easily sell their games, and have them sitting next to AAA titles. 3rd party games became able to use STEAM to push out updates. Operating Systems became more capable of actual multi-tasking, and running multiple programs at once, even while you have a hardware intensive game running. Eventually it just became more convenient to buy games off STEAM than to buy them anywhere else. I've moved around a lot, and lost a lot of my physical consoles and games as a result. But everything I had on STEAM is still their.
My STEAM account turns 20 in January.
I thought it was bit dumb in the beginning... but... It just grew... Now I'm like ent from lotr in the forest of Steam.
I really like that even thought they have different ideas, they didn't try to undermined each other or sabotage each other. It's really why they are able to get really big. They focus on their own things and all of them succeed.
What are the story alterations he is talking about between portal 1 and 2? Like how glados appearance changed?
They changed the ending, so that Chell is dragged back inside after the explosion. They also added the radios for the ARG.
In the original Portal 1 ending (WARNING, SPOILERS) no robot came to the crash site to take you back. That was supposed to be the end: you killed the bad robot and get to live your life. Also, they retroactively added all those radios you find randomly though the game (the ones emitting static noise) for the community to find and analyze said static noise (they turned out to be weird pictures related to portal 2 and a website if I can recall)
@@Linkale_ The "noise" is actually SSTV (slow-scan television) which is used to transmit images over radio. All radios emit their own signal after completing the game, but only at certain locations of the level. Also, not all radios spawn initially, most of them spawn after you completed the game at least once.
(Also, if I remember correctly, not all of them were SSTV, but most of them were)
@agocs6921 i know that, i was simplifying
2:09 hloy siht Focal Point? (I’m insane)
In a different world we'd be playing Half Life 3 on Games for Windows Live.
“It’s stupid until it works”
Considering what a piece of shit the software was in the for those first few difficult years, I guess that makes sense. I assume Valve isn't stupid, and wasn't stupid back then, but the platform was truly terrible at launch.
I still remember when the store had fewer than 100 games on it. 4 pages to browse. And that was starting to get big already.
It's funny how origin launcher eventually tried to do this play is you download idea. Last I remember it download a demo of the game and then download the actual game so that was useless
early origin was good until they took a huge dump on it
IS THAT AN ETHIX HOODIE?? Did not expect the fpv crossover
I've been using Steam since 2004 and always loved it, even when it was new.
EA Play/uPlay/Epic Games are all horrible in compare and I avoid them like the plague.
If a game I want is released on any of those other platforms,
then I will gladly wait 1-2 years for the Steam-release lol.
I guess clicking download button in epic or others is beyond your comprehension levels, unlike steam.
@@SINfromPLepic is just a launcher to launch fortnite nothing else inferior platform
@@SINfromPL Never understood why anytime someone says they don't like Epic someone comes defending it extremely pissed about it lmao Tim Sweeney aint gonna fuck you bro.
@@LBrivet mr gayben isn't even aware of your existence. stop shilling for wealth hoarder.
@@SINfromPLAint nobody gonna give your their money.
It is funny how the original seed of Steam was streaming downloading, and now PC is really the only platform without streaming downloading because it just never came to Steam.
Had steam ever since CS 1.6 was released back in 2003, was able to get a 5 digit steamid. Loved it then and love it now
kinda hard to pay attention with the guy on the left locked into the developers soul without flinching lmao
interesting he talks about shipping things in the previous games and now lately there's a lot of depot updates for HL2
probably gonna be a update for the 20th anniversary, like they did for the 25th anniversary for Half-Life 1.
They still a renting license to play in essence
Well, "downloading a game as you play it" is not something Steam does right now, so it must have been a pretty dumb idea after all. It's everything else Steam does that's the moneymaker....
its not a dumb idea, its just hard to do for a developer standpoint, battlenet used to (idk if it still does) have this back in atleast 2015-2016 and it was honestly really good, its just it requires a lot more work from the developer, which isn't so good if your platform appeals to every developer ever, whereas for battlenet the only people selling games on that were blizzard
Guild Wars 1 did this back in the day. The initial install downloaded the starting zone and the rest of the game would download as needed as you played.
I don't think it was a dumb idea, it just wasn't an impactful one, for how hard to implement it would be (especially because every dev of every game would have to do the legwork to define what files should be downloaded in what order for it to all work). It only changes the experience with the game for the first hour or 2, and does absolutely nothing for the rest of time. And even less as higher speed internet became more widespread.
@kukuc96 I'd rather they figure out how to let users download precompiled shaders, at least for major graphics cards
@@_ZaidGW2 still does it and it's great
i hope one day i can work at a company that sounds half as adventurous as these companies in there starting days, gets me so pumped to work but than i remember my job sucks lmao.
Dude same. That documentary got me hyped and then I rememberd my job sucks haha
Didn't know steam was originally about progressive downloads for games. That makes a lot of sense.
I know lots of multi-player FPS games were like that, in principle at least with you downloading maps and models off the server.
But it's surprising to me still that guild wars is pretty much the only game to do this for real. Installer was single digit megabytes and it just booted.
Steam was a total shit show on release and long after.
I am convinced nobody loved Steam before those seasonal sales started rolling in.
I remember when I got HL2 DVD from a physical store and brought it home only to find out that I had to download some strange program (steam) to download the game first. I was so annoyed and thought steam was a stupid idea. Boy was I wrong.
This shows you not everyone has it to make it big, some people will think you are stupid for trying something but give it a go anyway, you may be trailblazing.
I'll never forget buying a game knowing full well I probably won't be able to play it for 3 days until it finished downloading
steam saw what happened to sears and decided to be a bit more proactive, and it worked.
Still waiting for the rest of HL2...
And so did the users, originally...
Gamers hated it at first too. The original DRM, and everybody hated it including me
and they were right, until steam started making them money
The only difference between Steam and Origin is that everybody likes Steam.
So THATS why Valve handle their games like they do... they think the idea of them is stupid i guess
Asset streaming?... thank god they didn't do it
So was the community.. I MISS GAMESPY lolol!
It was stupid and Steam started out really crappy.
Steam was actually pretty garbage back then. Its still clunky to use even in 2010 when 12 year old me first download it to play dota.
Agreed, steam was horrendous like ea when it’s out. So laggy, resource hog and slow internet.
Game launchers in the 2000s were terrible and simply resource-demanding
I remember so many gamers were so actively opposed to Steam because of digital ownership that people were hording WON accounts left and right when it came out.
They were so right in the long term, that digital ownership has become a trap. But short term, Steam is great. As long as Gaben runs the company we're fine.. when he retires..
It only becomes stupid when they try to make Steam 3
I think the discounts made steam what it is today. Some games get bought and never played. Like I just spent 100 bucks since the last steam sale and I've played like two of the games
W gaben and valve
These comments would have me thinking I'm the only one that ever enjoyed steam when it released. Prior to it I remember SO many corrupt update installs for half lfe, Day of Defeat, CS, and Team Fortress. Yes it had its fair share of issues, but so did doing things like running janky servers via hamachi and relying on IRC for keeping up to date with things.
if we actually owned the games it'd be great. Buying a license to play the game is a stupid idea.
Gamers thought steam was a bad idea at first too. First year or so, gamers constantly used to say "I crashed again, thanks steam". People even developed a "WON 2" set of servers so they could avoid steam completely.
This always happens with good ideas. People hate anything that's too different. Then they realize how much they needed it in the first place.
I remember everyone thinking Steam was stupid. Especially the competition. Only few realized that these people were short sighted.
still is since you can't disable updates to games. no i don't care about balance changes in a game i play by myself, have to constantly curse out devs that seem to force their way into ruining any game you buy
They weren't wrong. Some of us recognized this mean not owning the games we buy, and here we are...
Now they just don't make games... Yay
why does this video seem to attract epic game store bots ???
I love how to every gayben fanboy, anyone who doesn't worship valve and doesn't go every Sunday to steam church is automatically epic boy. Is that your biggest arch nemesis? Wow. You guys are actually afraid to have competition.
@@SINfromPL Epic games developer hands typed this comment
@@ProjectSakaki wannabe valve employees strikes back
@@SINfromPL it took Epic several years to get a shopping kart and in the meantime they deleted every game they had made except for Fortnite. Paragon is gone and so is the entire Unreal Tournament series. You can no longer buy Unreal Tournament anywhere.
@@sharoyveduchi Paragon assets became free to use in Unreal Engine. UT was also published as sample project. Noone is perfect, and arguably Epic is the only company even fighting the establishment. You really want to give away 30% of profit just for hosting files? You do not want alternative app stores on your iphone? Do you hate free to use, hyper powerful game engines in the hands of the people? I don't know why you even mention all those things. Steam isn't doing anything anymore, they are comfortable with their monopoly position. It's laughable how everyone don't want to hear anything bad about valve lol.
i absolutely hated steam when it launched. i despised it above anything else. it was only teamfortress 2 that finally convinced me to make an account. honestly, still not that big a fan. it's DRM, and i don't think DRM is ever good. steam is just the lesser of all evils in here.
At least it comes with proton, input, workshop, and such.
@@flamestoyershadowkillso steam features that no developer can even pay for to use on other platforms like Xbox? Basically make your game steam exclusive, or other ports won't have the same functionality. Genius.
@@SINfromPL You can use workshop on other platforms,Same with proton, and SteamInput isnt something devs use
@soliduszor no you can't. There is no steam workshop on Xbox or ps3, there is no workshop if you buy the same hand from epic. That's why workshop is dying and more developers are moving to open mod platforms like modio
@@SINfromPL There is for some games though
What a depressing intro. We used to work on games, then we thought huh, we want more funny, screw games.
It was a stupid idea, it took away gamers freedoms and rights to ownership. It's just that valve back then cared about games instead of money.
What are you talking about? You couldn't "own" a game in steam right from the beginning. It's just a stupid eu law forced steam to make it clear. And now you start yapping
@@spookyscarygraviton5944 idiot
@@spookyscarygraviton5944 lol "stupid" law sure. its important that people know they don't own said games. not everyone that has steam knows that fact.
If it wasn't steam it was going to be someone else. Some exec would have seen what netflix was doing and would have done the same thing. I'm just happy that valve got to it first.
Businesses care about money. Full-stop. The fact they have a service and/or product is a means to an end. Stop sounding like some dumbass on reddit.
youll own nothing and youll be happy.
Enlightenment summed up in a single sentence, nice
Well your physical disc also starts the process of decaying the day it gets produced. DRM is tricky and i much prefer what GOG is doing but Steam is just such an amazing platform that i sometimes buy games on Steam i already own on other platforms just for the sake of convenience.
I'm ok with being happy
@@emilflarsen2 physical is stupid too. seed the world.
@@emilflarsen2 Lets not forget that if you buy a game and the dev later blocks it for purchase, you can still download and play it. So glad I got War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron.
Because it is.
People should have boycotted it. But people are stupid too. xD
I mean - We don't even own our games anymore there. It's so stupid and yet it works only because steam already got huge inertia.
I don't think anyone thought steam was a bad idea. It just makes it seem like a better story if they say that. How is a virtual marketplace to sell games and software a bad idea? If anyone actually thought it was a bad idea, I'd question their intelligence.
It's ruined gaming.. it's only digital
I'd have less a problem with digital if it was digital OWNERSHIP and not a license.
I've been a bit upset since finding out you can't leave a Steam account in a will which is ridiculous.
@@BlazingOwnager
physical media, ESPECIALLY discs, dies eventually. you only have a license for the duration of the lifetime of the physical media. if you're backing that up, you are legally indistinct from dling cracks for digital copies and storing them.
optical. media. sucks.
Honestly? I wouldn't have it any other way. If anyone is to be in charge of the monopoly of video game distribution I want it to be Valve. If I could, I would have had them in charge of micro transactions.
Valve think vac is stupid
its still stupid
I used to be a big fan of Valve when they were "Valve Software". Not a big fan of "Valve Corporation". Unfortunately being "too big to fail" has proven to be a bad thing for consumers and fans. I wish this weird reddit obsession with valve who can do no wrong and "gaben" being some sort of holy figure never happened so that valve would actually have to take accountability for their bullshit and perhaps continue to innovate rather than stagnate.
steam deck, half life aylx, the index, linux gaming support
Why do people always do this? Why do people always come towards videos like this to complain about stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the subject being talked about?
Nothing in your comment is about how they develop their games or manage their platforms, it is only a rant about Valve without any input on their games' philosophy, you're ignoring the very topic of this clip.
@@dan-con8713 Why do people always do this? Why do people always come to the rescue for valve whenever someone criticizes them in a video about valve devs criticizing company decisions?
Nothing in your comment shows you're not a valve fanboy coming to their rescue for maybe 5 cents (wallet deposit) it's only showing how upset you are that someone talked negatively about your beloved game developer who barely develops games anymore.
I gave you a thumbs up, we need more comment police officers on youtube, thank you for your service and as stated previously, 5 cents have been deposited to your steam wallet.
@@sony_mdr7506 steam deck is an interesting concept that has yet to be executed properly, alyx was only made to bundle with their 1500 dollar headset (hence why no official non-vr version ever released), the index, much like the steamdeck isn't innovative at all and just an opportunity to cash in on an existing trend, linux gaming support is built off wine which has existed for years and isn't really valves idea. Try harder valve fanboy, they still wont value you as a fan or customer.
@@e2m8Nothing in my comment implies I was defending anything about Valve, I was defending the channel's owner who doesn't upload just for people like you to spout details unrelated to his uploads.
Nothing in your comment talks about this 3 minute discussion.
Nothing of what you said disproves my point, there are many videos out there where you can go and complain about Valve all you want.
The only reason you say this here is because you wouldn't have the courage to say it to Weier's face. You only do it here because it's a lot easier to type this in a youtube comment than to do it in person.
You're going everywhere on this channel calling people fanboys, I guess it's fair to tell you the opposite then, you have a hate boner.
Valve is such a cool company, I wonder what cool things all my fellow commenters have to say about this interesting video!!!
Bot comment lmao
Let's be real here, the only reason why people like steam is because of the sales.
Not at all
@Volkogriz why do you think it got popular in the first place?
@@Ricewarrior01 it got popular not in the first place but in a long run with TONS of QOL features and other important things, like steam market, family sharing, remote play together. +steam is loyal to you as customer and can issue refunds, something others launchers and companies avoid like wildfire
@@Volkogriz All right, fair enough.
Steam was and is awful and the Valve fanboys have been conned.
they were right
Steam is still dumb.
first digital game store monopoly that takes 30% fee and more - no thanks
Monopoly? There's many stores...
LOL
Epic Games Store, GoodOldGames, Itch, Humble, BattleNet, Origin... many alternative stores and markets. Steam is huge, but they aren't a monopoly.
you're right lets sacrifice user reviews, a refund system, the workshop, the unmatched library, family sharing, remote play, proper community features, the implemented game/community ban systems, user made guides, lack of censorship, the ability to play the games that you bought after they were delisted by the developers, the community market, and many other features. im sure id have a better time on epic games or uhhh.... xbox game pass because these 30% fees for developers are very anti consumer and i cant support that
steam isn't a monopoly. if they feel like a monopoly it's because they're the best option available. i'm willing to pay that 30% because they have proven to me for over a decade that they have the best service. i don't care how many free games epic offers me, i'm still sticking with steam. valve has earned my trust
You're obsessed with valve aren't you? Your boner for everything valve is so obvious. You're biased at every level for pro valve.
I'm glad he is. I like learning more about Valve's internal stories.
@@ea09 there is nothing cool about valve, it's a file hosting service and they good games comes from before steam success. Rich fat man as cancer to entire world, hamstering global wealth. But people like kiwi can't even imagine in their head saying anything half bad about valve.
Your comment is hilarious; I laughed out loud it really made my day by how ridiculous it is, so thanks for giving me a good chuckle. I have interviewed over 100 game devs with 8 of them being Valve devs, so I dont know how I am obsessed. In fact I have done way more Retro Studios content than Valve content.
Secondly these are clips from the devs themselves, I am not saying anything, they say whatever they want to say and then I make clips of stuff that I think will be of interest to people, so you don't even know what my opinion is of Valve because I have never spoken publicly about anything they have done. lol
Once again thanks for the laugh. lol
@@KIWITALKZ that's cool, thanks for featuring me on your twitter! you got so upset by that you had to let the entire internet know, that's just another confirmation. you are literally talking about how "awesome" valve games are, what valve has and has not at the company. it's obvious how _you_ feel about valve, probably even would love to work for them given the chance. how are you even? it seems like a "nobody" with a camera. you aren't a game developer, you are not a programmer, you call yourself "game developer interviewer" so that's it? you ask a basic-level question and let the guests talk, what's your input in here? who cares you made more retro? your channel is filled with valve related stuff. 5 years ago probably nobody even related to valve would even reply to your email.
@@KIWITALKZ dont feed the trolls, you should know this by now.
if you ignore them, they go away, if you dont they will never leave you alone.