I love steam. A big part of my complaints 20 years ago was that I barely ran these games in the first place! Nowadays computers are a lot more powerful compared to games.
Proliferation of credit cards, increased internet stability/speed, and more powerful computers have taken the warts away. Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer, and also very offline friendly.
I completely agree with you. 21 years ago when it was released it was simply “yet another competitor” to the sort of overlay systems that gamespy and the like were trying to implement. You installed it because Half-Life 2 (and the litany of mods that became empires into themselves) required it, but it took years for it to develop in a direction that pointed to where we are now.
The first time I did a rebuild and now no longer needed the installation media for games, or the license keys in the manual/game jacket, and I was fully sold.
I don’t fully grasp the hatred, because almost every aspect of it is a vast improvement over what existed 20 years ago. But fortunately there are alternatives.
>Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer
Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.
Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.
Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.
Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.
Nowadays their return policy is really generous though. And it gets me to buy more games, a couple hours is long enough to figure out if a game works on my end.
Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…
It used to be normal for steam sales to be somewhat rare and surprising, but the tradeoff was that it was the norm for big and popular games to have staggering discounts.
In 2012, Terraria went on sale for 25 cents. Valve sold the entire Half Life family for like two dollars. AAA and big name games would go for 80% off or more, back when that actually got you a full game without microtransactions or significant DLC to buy.
People got excited about the sales because you might wake up to find the game you really wanted for $60 was now a few dollars.
Objectively "Incredible" deals are a lot less common, and old stuff doesn't have massive discounts anymore, sticking with "just" very good discounts.
I still see some pretty staggering deals now and again, but maybe not to the extent you remember (I don't really remember that, but I was also primarily a WoW player back then, and didn't pay as much attention).
How much of that is to blame on steam vs. the publishers, though? I would imagine the publishers have much more control over (if not total control?) over pricing. So, unless I'm wrong, it seems misguided to put that at steam's feet.
Proliferation of credit cards, increased internet stability/speed, and more powerful computers have taken the warts away. Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer, and also very offline friendly.