I mean… It was a gamble. Internet was still young. Speeds weren’t keeping up with game sizes outside a few major cities. I was mailed a few large files because it was quicker than downloading them. Not to mention the desire for physical copies over a digital thing you can lose with a bad hard drive was at an all time high.
Then people realized the internet wasn’t just nerd shit, ISPs slowly ramped up their DL speeds and suddenly the thing people mocked for not being feasible is doing well because of how convenient it became.
Gabe even admits he had doubts for awhile.
I wonder where gaming would be if he had listened to the doubters. There’s no denying valve has had a major impact on modern gaming
Someone would’ve picked up the model. The execution? Doubt it.
Yes, someone would have. Eventually.
But valve did it early.
It’s easy to fill a niche once it’s formed. Not so easy to do before, or as it’s forming. Or predict if one will form.
I’m not saying valve or Gabe had some kind of foresight or wisdom, I still think it was a gamble. It just happens to be a gamble that worked.
It’s literally the risk taking behaviour to foster innovation that economists supposedly talk about.
I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn’t trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.
Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.
I remember the uproar when CS 1.6 required steam. It was huge and everyone was angry. It took a lot of pull that CS didn’t die because of steam, a lot of players stayed on 1.5 for a long time. But HL2 was too big of an argument to stay off steam.
It was Garry’s mod that got me personally. I saw it somewhere and my jaw dropped, I had to have it. Steam didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time, but the thought of a physics sandbox was practically unheard of before that.
I was finally convinced when steam sales were incredibly favorable.
I could either go to Gamespot and buy a used game for $20 + tax and have to deal with some sweat giving me shit about my gaming choices. Or buy that same game digitally for $10.
Around 2011, I remember not buying consoles anymore and continuing to grow my PC collection.
Around 2017, my pirating dropped significantly. I think I had like 1000+ steam games from buying so many bundles.
By 2020, I didn’t pirate a single PC game, the games I bought 10 years ago still work, and I bought a game from the Microsoft Store, only to rebuy it on Steam.
I remember Steam’s launch and understand completely.
I hated Steam for a long time because of Half-life 2.
I mean yeah.
I had to install some program and connect online to PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME? I have the CD already and entered my CD key. Why does it need validation?
This is surely the death of PC gaming.
- me in 2005
Oh MAN. I forgot about those times, hand typing in a 36 character CD key that was spat out by a dot matrix printer with questionable typeset legibility…
To be fair, 2005-2009 felt like a Death of PC Gaming since people stopped making PC Ports of games out of fears that that just invited piracy.
RIP games with no Steam release like Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard and Enchanted Arms
Hope ports happen some day.
It’s ironic cause that’s when I ascended.
Seeing the ps3 as a quasi computer made me see the writing on the wall.
So what? That’s called survivorship-bias. He can only say that because he got excessively lucky against all odds. Lottery-winners shouldn’t exist either 😉
You think Valve is what it is because of luck?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read on here for a while.
Every great business idea needs luck too. You just never hear of other incredibly great ideas that just had none. You can’t just calculate success and have it guaranteed. You need money (for marketing at least), a great or even mediocre idea and luck. And be it just the luck of doing it at the right time.
You can write the best book the world ever saw, but it’s worth nothing if you don’t get lucky the right person (with influence/reach) reads it at the right time and happens to like it. Otherwise you would have to persistently throw money at it for an indeterminate time. And the longer that is the less profit is ever to be made. See epic games…
But if you think luck is irrelevant, suit yourself.
Pretty much, I mean I’ve seen amazing things the mainstream will never touch or know about… ultimately they made no money and the creators of them are either bitter or dead.
And I’ve seen absolute shit become a global phenomenon
Luck is sadly a necessary survival skill
Oh and there’s Alone In The Dark which just defies any explanation I have because it had one good game that aged horribly, and people are still trying and failing to reboot it.
We all have, i guess. Pearls slowly withering in the vast ocean of stuff. You can swap luck with money though. But not always. That’s mostly when “absolute shit” becomes the global phenomenon. Just throw enough money at it until some success may show.
Oh yeah the effing reboots and remasters and endless sequels. Nobody dares to do new stuff coz they fear for their investment.
Ok so all of a sudden Gabe is everywhere giving quotable quotes. Is this damage control after the bazillion dollar fleet of yachts news, is he about to retire, is it just because of the HL2 anniversary, or…?
If you read this article you would know that these are quotes from the Half Life 20 year anniversary documentary released a few weeks ago.
Also it’s not damage control for the yachts, he’s literally sitting in a yacht when he says this quote lmao
To be fair, the only people criticising his yachts are some smartasses over Lemmy and Reddit thinking they’re on a moral high ground by doing so, when everyone else doesn’t care
I hate PCGamer so nah I’m good.
Ok, but feel free to continue sharing your stupid takes
Will do, thanks.
Out of curiosity, why?
On phone it is crammed full of ads, even with Pi-hole. The fact that they’re regurgitating weeks-old news for this particular article doesn’t scream quality either.
What ads?
Not only do you spout nonsense about things you don’t bother to read, but you don’t even use adblock either? LolThe top of the article has a banner ad, there is a floating footer ad that refreshes every 20 seconds, as you scroll there are text ads, image ads, auto-playing video ads (one which floats to the top of the page once you scroll past it). Those ads. Edit to reply to your edit: pi-hole is an adblocker lol
Seriously though. Firefox and uBlock origin.
Don’t live with ads.
You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”
I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it’s a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have any obligation to shareholders.
The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it’s not viable.
GOG Galaxy is the closest I’ve seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.
Steam is a monopoly, it’s just not cartoonishly evil and the bar for a good company is super low these days.
I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly, it’s just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I’m not sure if that’s worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.
This, I mean… Epic tried and had a storefront so terrible they had to bribe developers into making their games exclusive. Something that never fucking worked for any game that wasn’t Kingdom Hearts; Only resulting in the games bombing because they released on a constantly malfunctioning storefront that constantly got bad publicity.
And Origin was literally ran by EA, so… yeah…
GOG is the only real competitor Steam has, and most people’s opinion of it is “This is nerd shit”, which is a take even I agree with because the only games it really has are older than dirt, meaning I’m the only one who gives a shit about them.
