Steam is 15

Mr E

Not much of a fanfare around (yet) but Steam is 15 years old today.
It was launched on September 12th, 2003.

I think my first experience of Steam was downloading (or trying to download) Half Life 2 over a dial-up connection in 2004. It kept timing out and restarting, so I think I gave up.

What's your best/worst Steam memory?
How many games have you accumulated in your library?

I think my Steam usage has nosedived since I got a Switch.

pixelburp

Yeah, I remember installing Steam for Half Life 2, and being a bit miffed about this whole idea of digital distribution - instead of selling boxed copies of the game like normal people :rolleyes: Beyond the Valve back catalogue, it was a slim product at the start.

Honestly, it has become a necessary evil now, and no number of Sales can distract from how drowned in shovelware the service has become, and overall drop in curation. I'd hate to be a indy developer these days, and can see why so many have drifted towards GoG or the Switch equivalent: why become lost among all the Asset Flips and garbage?

Sabre0001

Ah, how terrible Steam used to be. Which is something people forget about when slamming other services like EA's these days. It took a while for Steam to become what it is today....but it had Half-Life 2, so it was worth it! Could do without Steam clocking how many hours you spend in a game considering my mild addiction to Binding of Isaac and Slay the Spire (thankfully I played Super Meat Boy on console!)

Steam has me spoiled now with its sales (not always crackers, but I have a massive library of games, many of which have been unplayed), wishlist (something I keep wanting on PS4), auto updates, the welcome addition of offline mode, and the simplicity of keeping a collection organised.

Shiminay

I fking despised it because it wouldn't let me play the game I bought and paid for (H-L2) because I didn't have broadband. I got a refund in the shop I bought it from because I shouted at them a lot about the lack of warning that it required a fat internet connection to be downloading patches of 30MB or more. I wasn't able to play H-L 2 for another 2+ years because I moved away from Mayo and its lack of internet infrastructure (it was one of the primary reasons I moved away).

Gods, when you think about a 30GB download now and don't bat an eyelid, it's a sign of how much progress we made in such a short space of time. I'm sitting with a 240Mb connection in the flat all to myself when I had only a 28.8Kbps connection shared amongst 300 odd PCs in college My home connection was the same.

Kiith

I absolutely hated it, then i thought it was ok, then it was absolutely amazing, and now it's just ok :P

You have to give Valve a lot of credit for how they changed the face of the PC Gaming market. They did a pretty fantastic job of getting everyone into one shop, and providing a reasonably easy to use storefront. While i've been fairly critical of them over the last few years, it doesn't take away from the good things they've done.

It could definitely do with a redesign though.

Dave_The_Sheep

I got HL2 in-store, and still took me 6 hours to be able to play. The extra download and then decrypting the files.

I was bulling.

Skerries

like others here I bought HL2 on release and spent the whole night trying to get it to install, I heard some people had to cart there PC's over to other peoples house in order to install it. Madness!
Steam is due a massive redesign and one of my biggest pet peeves is that they don't list your game collection by genre so unless I know what genre a game is I have to look it up if I am in the mood for an RPG or an RTS especially when I have such an embarrassingly large one Ooo-er missus

TheValeyard

I HATED Steam when it first came out. This forced connection to register Half Life 2. Back in the bogband dialup days which took ages!!


But now,.......id hate to guess how much ive spent on it.

ballyargus

I don't get the hate. I'm a long time gamer and it beats the heck out of corrupted disks, dial-a-pirate copy protection and all that nonsense that went before

Shiminay

Murray TheDemonic TalkingSkull wrote: »

But now,.......id hate to guess how much ive spent on it.

Why guess when there are tools that'll do it for you? https://steamdb.info/calculator/

TheValeyard

Shiminay wrote: »

Why guess when there are tools that'll do it for you? https://steamdb.info/calculator/

Im not using that. Divorce papers could follow if the truth was ever known

CastorTroy

Think that calculator is based on full price and not sale/bundle price. So you can feel less guilty

I only installed about 9 or 10 years ago to play Half Life 2 on a laptop. Wasn't much of a PC gamer before that.

Since then, I apparently have 245 games. Though not accurate as since Telltale games are split into their episodes in the library. Then have games like Bioshock which also have the remaster.
And that's how I'm justifying that number.

And in a side note, Murray, your username and avatar reminds me of the game on Amiga, Valhalla

Remouad

Skerries wrote: »

Steam is due a massive redesign and one of my biggest pet peeves is that they don't list your game collection by genre so unless I know what genre a game is I have to look it up if I am in the mood for an RPG or an RTS especially when I have such an embarrassingly large one Ooo-er missus

Why don't you set up categories for each Genre?
That's what I've done.
Makes it much easier to find a game that suits your mood.:)

Sephiroth_dude

Day of Defeat, did that use steam or something? if so that was probably my first interaction with steam until I made an account in 2009 for Dawn of war 2, had no use for it before that.

TerrorFirmer

I think Day of Defeat or Left4Dead might have been the first time I used Steam as well, as I wasn't a Half Life or CS player. Does seem terribly late compared to when Steam actually launched but I can't remember using it pre-DOD.

Funny thing is now I can't remember the last time I actually used Steam to play something, with Origin and Battlenet about.

pixelburp

pixelburp wrote: »

Yeah, I remember installing Steam for Half Life 2, and being a bit miffed about this whole idea of digital distribution - instead of selling boxed copies of the game like normal people :rolleyes: Beyond the Valve back catalogue, it was a slim product at the start.

Honestly, it has become a necessary evil now, and no number of Sales can distract from how drowned in shovelware the service has become, and overall drop in curation. I'd hate to be a indy developer these days, and can see why so many have drifted towards GoG or the Switch equivalent: why become lost among all the Asset Flips and garbage?

I don't really understand this argument. It's a platform. I don't think they need to curate every individual title. Jim Sterling always goes on about this. Don't buy bad games? Its not that hard.

I absolutely hated steam when it first came along. To play counter-strike after any patch, you used to download the patch from thousands of different sources. Suddenly you could only get it from one place, steam. You basically couldn't play the game for a week as every player in the world was stuck in the same bottleneck. Seemed like 5 steps backwards with no steps forward at the time, and it was. It was a long time until they moved onto selling third party games.

This article is mad: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/32981

If users could get the software to launch at all, they then spent the next several hours trying to get updates (some of which are more than 350MB) to download from overloaded servers.

A whole 350MB :eek:

Now it's perfect. It's essentially my gaming library. I don't feel like I properly own a game unless I have it on steam. (Even though technically you don't own any of your games on steam).

pixelburp

Deleted User wrote: »

I don't really understand this argument. It's a platform. I don't think they need to curate every individual title. Jim Sterling always goes on about this. Don't buy bad games? Its not that hard.

Well, obviously don't buy bad games :rolleyes: but the problem is that like the Google Play Store which also has no quality control, the catalogue is flooded with low-rent garbage, making it harder to simply browse the store with any confidence as a consumer, or indeed discover hidden gems beyond 3rd party recommendations.

Steam was perfectly fine up until the 'Steam Greenlight' era, when the gates opened, Valve appeared to stop bothering some basic curation of games coming through, and the overall standard dropped. More than 7,600 games were released in 2017, while 38% of all games on Steam were released in 2016. Seven Thousand! It's arguably a shovelware platform now. To be fair, Early Access allowed games like Dead Cells to hone itself within the public eye, and has been a boon to smaller devs.

Steam's dominant just by being the first / biggest, but I stopped casually browsing or relying on its automated tools. As I said, indy developers have spoken out against Value, because it must be pretty demotivating releasing on a platform that doesn't care about the quality of the product its selling and your magnum opus has to compete against asset flips, achievement spam, and general rubbish.

I suppose I've never casually browsed through steam so this has never been an issue for me. I think anything should go up and let the community self-curate. **** games will have awful reviews. Same goes for google play store. I only see it as a positive that my ****ty apps can be easily available to friends and family while I was learning the ropes.

Skerries

Remouad wrote: »

Why don't you set up categories for each Genre?
That's what I've done.
Makes it much easier to find a game that suits your mood.:)

I have nearly 9000 games, not gonna happen

dreamers75

Skerries wrote: »

I have nearly 9000 games, not gonna happen

this would help

https://github.com/rallion/depressurizer/releases

Skerries

I tried that a few years and found it too fiddly
might have a look again though

pixelburp

Skerries wrote: »

I have nearly 9000 games, not gonna happen

Nine thousand! Good lord man :eek:

How many of those have you played / completed?

ED E

Half Life 2 Game of the year edition. Got it as a gift. Set up my steam account when it arrived. Got it mainly for CS:S but it was allllll good. 12 years of service.

As one of the initial "Broadband" trialists (1Mb down, 128k up) the online requirements were less of an issue.

Skerries wrote: »

I have nearly 9000 games, not gonna happen

Sweet baby jesus. I thought 400 odd was bad.

brevity

Feels like it's around longer...

Sciprio

I played on PC for many years before Steam and now that's all i really use as i have but never use Origin or Uplay and most my games are on Steam but i remember years ago when Empire Total War i had to use Steam(Before that i never really used it) But after it's all i use nowadays.

Marcus Antonius

Mr E wrote: »

Not much of a fanfare around (yet) but Steam is 15 years old today.
It was launched on September 12th, 2003.

I think my first experience of Steam was downloading (or trying to download) Half Life 2 over a dial-up connection in 2004. It kept timing out and restarting, so I think I gave up.

What's your best/worst Steam memory?
How many games have you accumulated in your library?

I think my Steam usage has nosedived since I got a Switch.

First used it when Counter Strike got shifted to it, version 1.6 I think. Didn't need it before that.

Plenty of games many not played yet. Wasn't a fan of it at first at all but it's so handy now days. The huge upgrade from a 56k modem where I'd be in the middle of a CS game doing great and one of my folks would pick up the phone and ruin it!

Mr Crispy

Like a lot of people, I signed up on November 16th, 2004. And also like a lot of people, I hated Steam at first. I mean, the other big titles I was playing then didn't need it (Rome TW and Oblivion). So for ages I only needed this clunky POS for HL2.

Gradually it got better of course, both in terms of the client, and the library of games using it. And for a good old while, I loved it, its convenience, and its popularity. But it's on a downward spiral now imo.

Part of it is a little personal resentment towards Valve for seemingly giving up on making games themselves, instead concentrating on making money off useless virtual goods like hats and trading cards. At the same time they've opened the floodgates as regards the sheer volume of games they're allowing on the platform, but largely ignoring the advancement of the client itself or improvements in their customer care etc.

I used to hope they'd turn it around, but some of their recent moves (or lack thereof) have turned me off the platform completely. It's gotten to the point now where I'll only buy a game on Steam if that's the only place to buy it. But given the choice, I now buy on GOG.

Varik

7th August 2004 for me which predates hl2 by 3 months.

Think I set it up for that stand alone Cs game with the single player and shields.

Lemming

I can recall Steam being released originally as a content delivery system rather than a digital games catalogue/store thing, although whether or not that's where they aimed to send it I can't ever recall hearing about until it happened. I hated it at first because it was just so inconsistent with downloading patches for Day of Defeat, Counter strike, and Team Fortress Classic. Most of the time I used to just download the patches in college and bring them home :pac:

Then came the worst experience with steam. Half-life 2 decryption. Downloaded to 98% and stayed there for two weeks. In the end, I plugged in a 56.6kb modem which got me the last 2%. Since that dismal experience Steam has changed completely, not to mention became a paradigm shift for how games are sold & delivered.

CruelCoin

424 games on Steam.

Around 390 of those i've played.

I had a backlog of 100 unplayed games at the start of the year, but have been making an effort to work through them.
Backlog stands at 30 or so now, thanks largely to humble Bundle not being nearly as good with game choices as it used to be.

I reached the 1000 mark the other day, it made me realise I really ought to stop buying games.

mcmoustache

I joined when they made Team Fortress 2 free. Shortly after, Portal was made free for a short time. Then came a Steam Sale and well, how could I say no to those awesome prices. I haven't pirated a game since.