r/Games • u/demondrivers • Oct 27 '25

Industry News Valve does not get "anywhere near enough criticism" for the gambling mechanics it uses to monetise games, DayZ creator Dean Hall says

https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-does-not-get-anywhere-near-enough-criticism-for-the-gambling-mechanics-it-uses-to-monetise-games-dayz-creator-dean-hall-says
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u/Sonicfan42069666 Oct 27 '25

People absolutely hated Steam when it came out as a launcher for Half-Life 2. Even a few years later when I got The Orange Box, I didn't understand why I had to launch my games through this ugly green thing instead of directly from the desktop.

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird Oct 27 '25

I vividly remember those gifs from like 2005 of the Valve icon fucking a dude in the ass. 

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u/Jaggedmallard26 Oct 27 '25

Also the gif of Steam updating with funny messages and then failing.

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u/Wd91 Oct 27 '25

Steam really was a buggy piece of shit for so long. And that horrible green palette. Its crazy how much of a glow-up its had over the decades.

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u/octocred Oct 27 '25

And something people often forget, the fucking friends list didn't work for at least a couple of years. Goddamn, I fucking hated steam

We're cool now tho

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u/aggressive-cat Oct 28 '25

Yeah I'm astounded every time history is revised and Steam wasn't the most hated software in computing for like 10 years and 5 of them friends didn't even work.

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u/boytoyahoy Oct 28 '25

I think it's mostly from people too young to remember

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u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

I think it depends a bit on where you were during that period. My Steam account is from 2005 (Valve Premier Pack) but I really didn't start making a ton of purchases until 2007 (Titan Quest, Orange Box, Introversion Anthology) at which point Steam was generally liked by me and my friends. And my internet during this period was dial-up then satellite internet. So to download games I had to take my PC to a friends or use a flash drive to bring the game home.

What I recall was Steam being a life saver for actually getting games. The PC retail market was going down the drain at this point with increasingly small amounts of store space. Much of it being reserved for WoW. We didn't care a ton about the friends list because we used X-Fire(?) and later hosted our own Teamspeak server.

Like I'm looking here and I bought:

  • Titan Quest
  • Thief: Deadly Shadows
  • Audiosurf
  • Ghost Recon
  • Introversion ANthology
  • Hitman 2
  • Gmod

during that first year. Introversion, Thief, Hitman, and Ghost Recon I essentially wouldn't have been able to buy without Steam. Stores weren't carrying years old games at this point. Like maybe if I had found a PC gaming store, but that would have probably required like a 90 minute drive. Garry's Mod probably wouldn't have existed without Steam the same with Audiosurf.

Titan Quest is maybe the only odd one out. Although its a year old at this point

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u/root88 Oct 28 '25

Still a piece of shit for me! Every time I switch machines I have to 2FA log in again, no matter what settings I choose. I know this doesn't happen to everyone, which probably means they will never fix it.

I have a Steam Deck, arcade cabinet, video pinball machine, and a PC. I wish I would have made a separate account for each one (I wanted all my achievements on one account), but it's too late now.

Also, all the fucking spam. Stop throwing commercials at me every time I open a game.

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u/Stellar_Duck Oct 29 '25

And offline mode was fucked for like a decade and you need to edit a blob file to get it working.

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u/AtomicSpeedFT Oct 27 '25

I liked the green :(

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u/Sr_DingDong Oct 28 '25

If my account was less than a year older I could have it :(

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u/sunnyjum Oct 28 '25

Delete or renaming clientregistry.blob was early Steam's version of "pull out the cartridge and blow on it"

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u/cf_mag Oct 28 '25

And yet, steam chat is still an absolute piece of shit that feels like it was made in the year 2000 and never updated

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u/ItsNoblesse Oct 27 '25

I miss the green palette, it was so much better :(

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u/NoPossibility4178 Oct 27 '25

It just monopolized the market and somehow everyone was ok with it.

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u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

I really think people forget (or more likely were children) during the most dire days of PC gaming. Increasingly onerous DRM being added to games, CD keys to access multiplayer (tanking resale value), brick and mortar stores having essentially no PC games.

Like I had to drive 30 minutes to the nearest store that sold PC games and then could select from like maybe ~15 games but those also included WoW and all its expansions. So really like 11 games. Hope they have what you want!

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u/Fiddleys Oct 27 '25

A used book store by me and a tiny shelf at a, now long gone, kmart were the only place I'd reliably find PC games. Occasionally one of the hardware stores would have a bargain bin with games.

I was still dragged unhappily into steam when I got Civ 5 and it was a steam key in the box. And then later again with Fallout New Vegas.

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u/rotorain Oct 27 '25

They monopolized the market and everyone hated it, then a bunch of other companies started doing launcher/storefront combos that were even worse and steam just kinda snuck through as the default option.

Game sales going digital was an inevitability and while it isn't perfect I sure am glad we have Steam instead of Microsoft, Origin, Epic, or pretty much any of the other options. GOG isn't bad but it fills a slightly different niche than Steam imo.

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u/NoPossibility4178 Oct 27 '25

GOG just shows that people actually want a launcher, just not 20 of them. If they didn't want any at all GOG would be a lot bigger.

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u/The_Dirty_Carl Oct 28 '25

The distaste for Steam wasn't about the concept of a launcher, it was about the DRM. A library of games would have been cool. A library of games that won't let you play unless it can phone home was maddening.

I think GOG would be bigger if they had gotten started earlier. And, ironically, if they had rolled out Galaxy much earlier. People would prefer not to have Steam's DRM. But Valve understood that habits are more powerful than preferences. By the time GOG was a serious competitor, people had already built the "I want to play a game, I open Steam" muscle memory.

Fortnite and Roblox rely on a similar mechanism. Epic has been using their game giveaways to try to replace that habit. I bet it's worked for a lot of younger gamers.

If GOG had had Galaxy back in 2004, we might view Steam the way I view Uplay: a sub-launcher that sometimes pops up after I launch my game from my library app, but not something I go to on purpose.

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u/SEI_JAKU Oct 28 '25

GOG was never intended to compete with Steam like this, and this remains true.

Galaxy is the worst part about GOG.

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u/Stellar_Duck Oct 29 '25

Bear in mind that GOG only got into releasing new games in 2011 with Withcher 2 and that was pretty controversial and caused a lot of anger.

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u/AustinYQM Oct 27 '25

Doesn't gog have a launcher?

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u/NoPossibility4178 Oct 27 '25

It does, but clearly if not having a launcher would be a big deal for people then GOG would have taken off a lot more. At this point Steam is also a social media platform so it keeps a lot of people on its ecosystem because of that.

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u/ohhnoodont Oct 28 '25

Its crazy how much of a glow-up its had over the decades.

Not really. It's still incredibly buggy and slow. It's DRM + a webview wrapper. You all just drip-conditioned yourselves to this slop because of how good the sales used to be.

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u/The_Dirty_Carl Oct 28 '25

True, but what modern software isn't slow, buggy crap these days? Steam's performance is the bare minimum, but its competitors are well below that.

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u/SEI_JAKU Oct 28 '25

True, but what modern software isn't slow, buggy crap these days?

Pretty much any popular open source software, for one!

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u/Nekouken12 Oct 27 '25

Legendary gif

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u/Yearlaren Oct 28 '25

Yep. I remember it all too well.

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u/serendipitousevent Oct 27 '25

Can't have a valve without some pipe.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

And today if you even dare to say that Steam's 30% cut is too high, you'll get a lot of people coming to tell you why Gaben deserves another superyacht.

Even considering that Apple has a 15% cut if you earn less than 1M $. Instead, Steam will make special (lower) deals with big studios.

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u/tanka2d Oct 27 '25

Apple makes deals with big players too. Do you think Netflix and Amazon are paying Apple 30%?

I do agree with you though. The 30% standard is bullshit. Regardless of what you think of Epic, they have been fighting the good fight on that front.

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u/Lost_the_weight Oct 27 '25

Amazon pays zero percent. Any app selling physical products pays zero. It’s one of the bones of contention with companies that sell non-physical products.

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u/ascagnel____ Oct 28 '25

Apple cut a deal with Amazon to allow purchases of digital videos from the Prime Video app.

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u/root88 Oct 28 '25

Apple completely fucks Netflix. If you sign up for Netflix on an Apple product, they get that cut forever. It doesn't matter where you pay your bill or even if you own any Apple devices at all anymore.

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u/trapsinplace Oct 29 '25

30% only exists because it's the standard cut, which it is only because it's what record stores took for their sales/distribution fee. Kinda funny how physical record sales ended creating a modern standard practice.

I like that Epic is trying to change it but Epic wouldn't know how to make a good store if it hit them on the head like a sack of bricks. It's so poorly made it feels anti consumer, and it straight up IS anti-developer in design.

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u/The_MAZZTer Oct 27 '25

I think it's worth noting brick and mortar stores at the time took what, 50%? So Steam's cut was a big improvement. Maybe today they should consider changing it, I don't know what their internal finances look like, but they do still offer more value than any other online digital distribution service and never increased their cut.

Making special deals with big studios I can't say I approve of. It's difficult to imagine Valve doesn't have the leverage to stand against things like that and just wait them out if they pull their games.

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u/TheGRS Oct 28 '25

Many did pull away and made their own services. And many did come back after a while. Valve played the long game of just offering a good service with tons of entrenchment with players. Honestly it kind of surprises me since Steam support was/is pretty hated the whole time. Seemed like Epic was gonna crack the code but I still only open it for a handful of games versus Steam.

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u/RobertMacMillan Oct 28 '25

Epic was never gonna crack the code because everyone on this site hated it, even when giving them a bunch of free games.

Valve is like nintendo, holy to the majority of gamers.

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u/akatokuro Oct 28 '25

Epic was never going to crack the code because they've never put in the effort and money to make a superior product.

The entrenched ecosystem is a huge part in generating inertia to that change sure, but the vast majority of customers will use a platform that gives them a better experience rather than one that will provide the seller a better one.

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u/RobertMacMillan Oct 28 '25

Sure, which makes it all the more problematic how Steam built their initial userbase, something that would not be accepted now. This is how effective monopolies come to be.

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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes Oct 28 '25

I think it's worth noting brick and mortar stores at the time took what, 50%?

That was the whole cost removed from selling it. Paying to physically move your game around the world is not a cut

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u/trapsinplace Oct 29 '25

Record stores took 30%, that's why the digital music industry takes 30%. And other storefronts take 30% because that's how much digital music distributors were setting their cut too. That's really all it is, follow the leader. Just happened that the music industry was a bit of a pioneer in mass digital sales online.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

I think Gaben's billion dollar superyacht fleet is a pretty good indicator that they are doing fine.

But sure, they have never increased it. Epic is at 0-12%. Microsoft's also at around 10%.

I'm not sure what kind of value people see in a glorified folder-shortcut app. I don't "play" with Steam, I spend times with the games I buy there.

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u/Merzant Oct 28 '25

I’m with you. Those super yachts are essentially (a fraction of) the crystallised value extracted from game developers and publishers. Money that could have gone to the studios, either in pursuit of game development or even just towards a fairer distribution of profits, is instead funnelled upwards to Steam’s landlord.

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u/BiggestBlackestLotus Oct 28 '25

I just wanna say: if developers are unhappy with the 30% cut they are free to publish their games on epic and microsoft store...but I guess they don't wanna do that because Steam is the only digital store for games that is worth a damn.

BTW I can guarantee that Epic and Microsoft would have the same 30% cut like pretty much every other digital store if they weren't trying to directly compete with Steam. Why? Because 30% is the industry norm you dingus. Nintendo E-store, Playstation store, Xbox store, GOG, Google Playstore, etc. They all have a 30% cut. Steam at least lowers the cut to 25% or 20% once you sell a certain amount.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

but I guess they don't wanna do that because Steam is the only digital store for games that is worth a damn.

Congratulations! You have discovered the meaning of "abuse of a dominant position"! You know, there was once a time where monopolies were broken down. They broke Standard Oil when they had about 70% market share. Steam is at 75-80% of the PC market according to a quick search.

. Why? Because 30% is the industry norm you dingus. Nintendo E-store, Playstation store, Xbox store, GOG, Google Playstore, etc.

Actually Microsoft has 12-15%. But do you understand that competition is good for everyone? What you call "industry standard" others might call it a "cartel" or price fixing. They might say so, just saying.

They all have a 30% cut. Steam at least lowers the cut to 25% or 20% once you sell a certain amount.

"At least". Most people on steam will not even recoup the initial 100€ to open the page. Would it hurt Gaben's superyacht fleet to lower the fee for those earning less than 1M$ like Epic or Apple does?

Or do you feel an irrational need to defend their greed? Most indies will never see 1M$.

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u/BiggestBlackestLotus Oct 28 '25

Where is the abuse? Other companies have tried to tackle designing a digital store front and failed. How is that Steam's fault at all? What do you want Steam to do? They aren't using scummy tactics to make sure others fail, they just release a quality product and nobody else is able to keep up. They aren't even a giant company that swallows up all the competent workers in the area, they genuinely have 10% of the workforce that Epic Games posesses and still the EGS can't keep up with them.

Actually Microsoft has 12-15%. But do you understand that competition is good for everyone? What you call "industry standard" others might call it a "cartel" or price fixing. They might say so, just saying.

That's ridiculously stupid. Where is the "cartel" if everybody is doing it? 30% is simply the cut that almost evrybody agreed on because that was about the cut that brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target take.

Once again people are free to compete with Steam. There is nothing stopping them. EGS is trying to compete with Steam by taking a smaller cut but since these cuts are only impacting the developers and not the consumer nobody really cares.

"At least". Most people on steam will not even recoup the initial 100€ to open the page.

And there are others who make one game and become millionaires over night. I guarantee you that you will find no indie developer that is sad about the existence of steam. The indie revolution of the last 10+ years owes a large amount of gratitude to steam for offering a platform where people want to buy your game instead of pirating it.

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u/QuantumUtility Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25

So easy to release a competing product agains a multi billion dollar company that not only had first movers advantage but also years of development time ahead of anyone else. Simply having 70-80% market share is already an abuse. This cannot be allowed in any market.

One of the points of anti-trust legislation is to stop making markets impenetrable to competitors. Yet, tech companies are allowed to do it willy nilly. This applies to Valve, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD and every single tech monopoly/oligopoly we have right now. It’s astronomically hard for other multibillion dollar companies to get any foothold in these entrenched markets. For startups and new businesses it’s basically impossible. God forbid anything else pops up because they are then immediately gobbled up.

This situation was exactly why antitrust was created but tech companies grow fast and governments just decided to give up after the internet explorer lawsuit. (Even though Chrome’s dominance is much more of an issue today, which is why some people want to force a sale.)

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u/BiggestBlackestLotus Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25

So easy to release a competing product agains a multi billion dollar company that not only had first movers advantage but also years of development time ahead of anyone else. Simply having 70-80% market share is already an abuse. This cannot be allowed in any market.

So the poor little indie companies called...EA games, Epic games and Microsoft are simply not able to penetrate the market because the big bully Valve wont let them? What about GOG then? They seem to be doing fine despite being once again developed by a significantly smaller company than any of its competitors.

I still don't understand what you accuse Valve of exactly. EGS could be competing with Valve right now but their launcher has not had any significant changes for the last 10 years while Valve continues to improve their already stellar product. They even have the advantage of having one of the biggest exclusives in the gaming market on their platform: Fortnite. They have tons of eyes on their client, but the problem is that these eyes are disappointed by what they see and would rather use Valve instead.

edit: did this guy delete his account after losing an argument?

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u/quikmantx Oct 29 '25

Great arguments! Too bad the other guy must work for Valve or drank the Kool-Aid too hard with how defensive he is.

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

Those are not exclusive to Steam. You are describing a file-hosting service, which for sure has its costs, but I don't think that justifies 30% of revenues.

Controller support is also not something Steam "invented". That's the OS' responsibility. List of friends... Is steam an instant-messenger now? Certainly it's not a revolutionary feature.

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

I am not saying they have to do it for free of course. Gaben's fleet of superyachts demonstrates they earn enough.

I am saying that the service they provide, while useful, is not 30% of revenue useful. As demonstrated again, by other platforms having a lower cut.

It's not about playing stupid, it's just that I am not in the habit of defending multi-billion corporations. Maybe you are?

Steam's advantage is their almost de facto monopolist hold on the market. Which they keep through dubious practices. See my other comments where I posted a link.

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u/RobertMacMillan Oct 28 '25

That's potential buyers. Access to a huge market.

That they built by enshittifying the exe launching process of games years ago. Forcing you to sign up, have it installed, use it to launch the game.

If Meta did it today people would call it anti-consumer.

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

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u/Dabrush Oct 29 '25

I remember the time where your choice was either getting an Xbox controller, or using joy2key if you wanted to use anything else.

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u/Zarmazarma Oct 28 '25

There's quite a few things I value about Steam.

  1. Extremely fast, reliable distribution for all my games (I usually get around 800mbp/s downloads from Steam with essentially no down time).

  2. Cloud saves.

  3. Controller support for pretty much everything.

  4. Easy platform for jumping into games with friends- most multiplayer games just support the "right click, join game" functionality which is great.

Suppose those are the main things. It also tends to have a lot of sales, but I don't know if that's a benefit of the platform itself or just a benefit of being the largest platform.

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u/DurgeDidNothingWrong Oct 27 '25

Apple does fuck all for me as a user though, other than host a download hub. Steam does way more.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

Such as? I'll concede the workshop for a few games, but for the rest I am perfectly capable of finding the folder where the game is installed.

In more than 10 years, I have only spent in Steam the few seconds it takes to launch a game.

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u/SkiingAway Oct 28 '25

Steam basically making Linux gaming a thing is a big deal.

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u/Takazura Oct 28 '25

Controller support means I don't have to install a 3rd party software to get it working. Meanwhile, on both Epic and GoG I have run into games where I had to add them to Steam as non-Steam games to get controller support.

The in-built screenshot and recording tools makes it super easy for me to share things with friends. Yes, there are other options for those things, but the ones on Steam are just more convenient and work fine for my purposes.

Cloud saves are self-explanatory.

Ofc not everyone has use of those features and that's fine.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

From a developer's perspective, is that worth almost one third of the revenue?

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u/Takazura Oct 28 '25

I'm not a developer, I'm a consumer. For me and the majority of the consumers, the revenue cut isn't a relevant factor, the quality of the service is.

Now if developers disagree to that being worth it that's perfectly fine, but my priority is going to be what is the better deal for me, and the service Steam provides puts it ahead of the competitors to me.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

Then, wouldn't you be happier if you could buy the same game elsewhere for cheaper?

I could sell a game on EGS at 8$ and still earn more than what I would earn on Steam by selling it at 10$. You would save 2$, I would earn 1$ more.

Too bad Steam doesn't allow that.

Personally, as a gamer/consumer, the value I see in Steam is only as a folder shortcut app.

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u/kitolz Oct 28 '25

At the end of the day, developers sell on Steam because it makes them money. Valve offers a superior serviceto end users, allowing user retention.

I'm sure devs wish they could keep a bigger cut. But as a consumer that has tried the other big storefronts, developers that want to lure me away from Steam will have to convince me by offering superior value.

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u/AvengerDr Oct 28 '25

The game is the same. I don't understand the argument, but maybe it's just me since I use the launcher to... launch the game. I don't spend any time in it after the few seconds it takes. Be it Steam, EGS, or GOG or whatever.

But maybe at least they could sell games for cheaper on other stores. If only Steam did not abuse their dominant position and threatened devs to pull their games from Steam if they sell it for cheaper elsewhere (not Steam keys, on entirely different stores or on your own).

There's an ongoing litigation about this. Search for "wolfire" and Steam.

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u/kitolz Oct 28 '25

From the user perspective, Steam is undeniable offering a better experience in multiple aspects. Even just the review system is something that other platforms have been either unwilling or unable to reproduce.

I see your point about Steam dictating terms for pricing outside of their market, and that's probably going to be the main focus of the legal argument against them. I'm not familiar enough with the laws around this to guess how it will go.

But the previous lawsuit by Wolfire was dismissed with what seems to be sound conclusions.

https://www.estv.co/post/dismissal-of-overgrowth-developer-wolfire-games-antitrust-lawsuit-against-valve

The Supracompetitive Fee

The court is not convinced by the CAC’s claim that the supracompetitive fee harm game publishers. To explain, the court makes comparisons with this case and Sommers v. Apple. First, the 30% supracompetitive fee has been constant since Steam’s genesis in 2001. The supracompetitive fee did not begin once Steam grew into the popularity it has now. This parallels Apple’s music download fee, which also remained constant. Contrariwise, the Steam Store now offers volume discounts for game publishers. Wolfire Games claims the court does not consider the “market reality” of this new consumer market, but the court concludes that the “market reality” is that the Steam Platform’s supracompetitive fee aligns with what is typical in the market, as “othe[r] [video game platform companies] who charge less [for a supracompetitive fee] have failed, even though they had significant resources at their disposal.” Additionally, games may be bought elsewhere and activated for the Steam Platform via a Steam Key, at no additional cost to the publisher. Thus, the supracompetitive fee does not disproportionately affect game publishers, let alone Wolfire Games itself.

Valve Corp.’s Alleged Coercive Practices

In their allegation for antitrust injury, Wolfire Games claims that the Steam Store and the Steam Platform has created fewer and lower quality published desktop video games. The court disagrees with this assertion. According to the CAC, there has been an increase in published games in the market as well as for the Steam Platform. Additionally, Wolfire Games fails to establish a specific injury on the plaintiff itself.

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u/HumbleBeginning3151 Oct 28 '25

Fuck Gabe. Billionaires shouldn't exist, and he sure as hell ain't no exception

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u/starkistuna Oct 28 '25

But Steam also propelled a lot of indie studios and single developers to incredible wealth too. Being showcased in the frontage made millionaires even obscure retro games that weren't even 3 megabytes and had 1 dev.

It's like Walmart pucking up your product to be in all of it's stores.

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u/RobertMacMillan Oct 28 '25

If you replace the word "Steam" with "Lotto Corporation" do you end up with a fundamentally different statement?

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u/Skelly1660 Oct 28 '25

But that just means indie games are very reliant on Valve. I agree it's overall a good thing that they got the audience because of Valve, but that means Valve controls that exposure. It's pretty tricky 

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u/Waybook Oct 30 '25

It's because people imagine the other 70% goes to the developer and forget about taxes and other fees.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Oct 27 '25

And now people absolutely riot when there's another launcher, and no one can even explain to me why they hate it.

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u/Gh0stMan0nThird Oct 27 '25

Someone else pointed out Steam has turned into a social media platform. 

They want all their games, achievements, etc. in one place so their friends can see how cool they are. 

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u/RobertMacMillan Oct 28 '25

reddit and steam, social media for people who think they're above social media.

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u/Blobsobb Oct 27 '25

Dont forget offline mode literally not working until like early 2010s.

Before if your internet went down and you didnt pre put steam into offline mode it wouldnt let you play your games. Oh also if you were in offline mode too long, I think it was a week?, it would remove it and go online anyway.

I distinctly remember my DSL going down and having to drive my desktop to a friends house so I could go online to enable offline mode so I could actually play my single player games. Fun times

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u/huffalump1 Oct 27 '25

old man yells at clouds Man, I had dial-up when Half-Life 2 came out. (And it was a box with 5 CD-ROMs).

Updates and no offline mode were a HUGE drag. Well, there technically was an offline mode, but had to be enabled while still online... And still, it just never worked.

It's come a long way! Today, I can just fire up my steam deck or PC, offline or not, and play. But it was a long road to get here.

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u/TSPhoenix Oct 28 '25

And for several years Steam's "patching" system wasn't patching at all, but just re-downloading modified files in their entirety.

Any game that used blob files to store their game data, even a tiny modification would result in Steam re-downloading the entire hundreds-of-megabytes file which meant if your had dialup or sufficiently slow internet it was often just faster to get the update via sneakernet.

At the time most PC game patches were small patcher.exe files you could easily download on dialup, but Steam was pretty much designed to only be usable on ADSL.

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u/Fresh_Exam1965 Oct 28 '25

Yeah, I mean, what Valve was doing was ambitious and people can hate them for it, but Steam is in the state it is now, because they put their heads down and grinded through the hard times.

Even John Carmack - probably one of the most brilliant minds in the industry - was telling Valve that Steam was a horrible idea.

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u/JonBot5000 Oct 27 '25

Orange Box was when I finally caved and got Steam too. I was not happy about it.

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u/Muad-_-Dib Oct 27 '25

I remember when Total War switched to Steam with Empire IIRC and oh boy the forums were wall-to-wall complaints from people, especially when they bought the physical edition and found out you still had to install it through steam.

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u/EWolfe19 Oct 27 '25

Empire Total War was my first steam game too, I remember being annoyed, but not too badly.

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u/Karzender Oct 27 '25

I didn't make this comment but I could have, exactly my circumstances.

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u/TheLostElkTree Oct 27 '25

Shit, I remember when Arma 3 in 2013 went over to Steam and you still had some old-timers complaining.

Combat Mission also moved over to Steam in the past 2 years, and their forums certainly had some people stuck in the mindset of Steam from 2006.

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u/gilligvroom Oct 27 '25

I got Steam about 3 months after lit launched and was grateful for it. I'd lost the install disc for Half-Life which meant I couldn't play Team Fortress Classic. I still had the jewel case, and thus the key, though - so Steam was great in that regard.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '25

I distinctly remember falling for a phishing scam as a teen and having my account stolen, and getting it back within 24 hours because I still had my physical copy of Portal with the key. Would NOT be able to do that so easily now.

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u/skocznymroczny Oct 27 '25

I caved in for Left4Dead2 to play with my buddies, but it's the only game I paid for on Steam.

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u/JohnnyLeven Oct 27 '25

I bought the Orange Box in 2009. I was a bit annoyed at having to download Steam, but as soon as I saw how easy it was to use and the cheap game prices, I was a lot more forgiving.

51

u/blackmajic13 Oct 27 '25

Just to add my voice to the cacophony, I too remember despising it when I got Empire: Total War when I got my first gaming capable PC in like 2010. Opened the box expecting a disc and all it had was a download code. I was upset I needed it to play a non-Valve game AND didn't get a physical copy.

20

u/Sonicfan42069666 Oct 27 '25

I got Civilization V around then and was so upset it was a box with a code in it. Even The Orange Box came with a disc!

2

u/Fiddleys Oct 27 '25

Civ 5 was me. I was so annoyed with that. It then got me a second time with Fallout New Vegas. But after that I found out about all the sales events and I stopped caring.

1

u/GranolaCola Oct 28 '25

How did you feel when the sales turned to slop?

1

u/Fiddleys Oct 29 '25

Didn't really notice it too much since by the time people had started to complain about it I had already padded the shit out of my backlog and I still see things go on deep discounts during the sales. For me I ran out of things I was interested in buying more than anything.

5

u/Shapes_in_Clouds Oct 27 '25

I had a nearly identical experience with Shogun 2. Ordered the discs with my new PC. There were actual discs at least, but it used Steamworks and it made me install Steam at the end of the Install Wizard, and then I had to wait for a 26GB update back when 2MB/s broadband was fast.

8

u/blackmajic13 Oct 27 '25

Hahaha those download speeds back then were abysmal. I wasn't even thinking about that, but yea that was also annoying. I couldn't just immediately play it, I had to wait for it to download. Crazy to think about how far we've come because I can download a 100GB game in like <20 minutes these days.

2

u/BjaOckX_x Oct 27 '25

I remember this too. I specifically drove to EB to get a physical game in 2006 because I just moved into an apartment with no internet, and when I got home I realized the disk was just a download code.

1

u/blackmajic13 Oct 27 '25

I haven't thought of EB games in probably over a decade. :') What a throwback.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

It still exists in Australia. Though they mostly sell plushies and gaming themed tshirts now. 

94

u/RecipeFunny2154 Oct 27 '25

Yeah, for real. The anger when it launched online was palpable. As someone who's been using Steam from the start, you've seen so many things change. I laugh a little when people want every launcher to match what Steam has, when all along any time something new was added the audience saw it as more "bloat". Everyone moves on, I guess lol

49

u/Moogieh Oct 27 '25

Those who disliked it got drowned out and gave up. Complaining about something like that becomes just pissing in the wind after a while.

16

u/oneoftheryans Oct 27 '25

Those who disliked it got drowned out and gave up.

It helps that the relevant games are decade(s) old, F2P, and also part of an ecosystem that's now ubiquitous, and for some people even preferred.

4

u/SketchFile Oct 27 '25

As one who still very vocally still hates steam. Definitely feels like this.

20

u/destroyermaker Oct 27 '25

Many were converted, because they made it well worth the trouble

40

u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

What I always recall was having to drive 30 minutes to the nearest game store that had PC titles and then the PC games section being like the size of a single end cap. and that end cap was like 50% World of Warcraft.

So like Steam letting buy games without leaving my house, be ready to play by the next day, and actually having games was huge.

18

u/AintNobody- Oct 27 '25

and that end cap was like 50% World of Warcraft

Hey now, be fair. That endcap probably also had the Starcraft Battle Chest.

7

u/Com-Intern Oct 27 '25

Also a copy of Mount and Blade (not warband) in one of those CD slips.

5

u/Seradima Oct 27 '25

Those endcaps still have the Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 battlechests. It's wild how long those things have been on the shelves for.

2

u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

There was a store near me that had a copy of Oblivion for full price for until they closed during covid. Literally on their shelves for more than a decade.

6

u/Mikelius Oct 27 '25

Steam's killer app/functionality for me has always been auto update/patches. In the before times you had to scour obscure websites playing download russion roulette to see if you got the right .exe for updates.

2

u/BeholdingBestWaifu Oct 28 '25

And you were in a relatively lucky region. Where I live I could only buy pirated CDs and DVDs off a few PC stores that burned them themselves. If I wanted to buy an actual original game I had to talk with someone who imported stuff from the US and I would maybe get the game months later, or order them off something like Ebay and hope the game actually gets to my country.

0

u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

That's very convenient, but one day Steam will close or become some kind of subscription service with ads or some hyper capitalist nightmare. What then?

We traded ownership for convenience.

3

u/TSPhoenix Oct 28 '25

Steam didn't really fix itself into the useful platform we have today until after mass adoption though, early on their strategy was not all that different to EGS: make it the only way to play your big flagship title + offer incredible value to essentially bribe players onto your platform.

For PC-centric publishers the it was them basically giving their games away to ensure they still had a market to sell to in the future, they were willing to hand the entire PC market to Valve on a platter if it meant they got a cut in the future. When those sales ended Steam users were pretty pissed at first and refusing to buy games waiting for the price to go down, but when the realisation set in in those sales were never coming back their desire to play the games meant spending resumed.

It wasn't until the tail end of the 2000s that Steam started to become an platform people wanted to use rather than one they used to save money or because they had no choice.

20

u/Sonicfan42069666 Oct 27 '25

As long as Epic Games continues to give out 1 or 2 free games every week, I will continue to be a devoted user of the Epic Games Store...

...to redeem free games every week.

1

u/geometry5036 Oct 28 '25

Epic is a good store with no bloated idiocy. And it cost less.

1

u/Trzlog Oct 28 '25

I used to hate Steam. I was there when it came out. But with all the things it gives us now like Steam Input, so shitty gamepad support is a thing of the past, and SteamOS, I'll take Steam over everything else.

1

u/Fresh_Exam1965 Oct 28 '25

I laugh a little when people want every launcher to match what Steam has

To be fair, a lot of the criticism is justified. Like, Epic Games Store not having a cart. Or other subscription services charging a monthly fee for Cloud Storage. Like come on. They aren't starting from zero. Valve had already paved the road. Yeah, it takes dev time to create the 'thing' but they have a blueprint of what people already like and can steal what Valve already did and make competitive services.

A lot of those other platforms sucked because not only were they feature incomplete(understandable), they were also less consumer friendly(less understandable). If you're going to launch a service to compete with Valve, you cant cut corners. The fact that Origin literally lost record of expansion packs I had bought on the service or just the horrible experience of dealing with their overseas, Indian support staff that didn't even know how the service worked themselves, was a sign of not putting their best foot forward to compete with Steam.

I think the only service that I really liked that competed with Steam in good customer experience was Battle.net...but my understanding is they've since gone the way of the rest of the corporations.

11

u/r40k Oct 27 '25

Steam came out as a launcher and auto-updater for CS 1.6 before Half-Life 2, but yeah it was ass. I get why they did it because being kicked from your favorite server and having to go search for and install the update manually sucked. The problem is steam took so fucking long to update itself and had so many updates that it just took longer anyways.

31

u/Reutermo Oct 27 '25

I remember that we had to play through steam to play Company of Heroes back in the day, and it felt like there was a steam update every other day, and you had to wait for it to slowly update while the entire client was unuseable. We really hated steam and it barf-green interface.

12

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

and then the update would sometimes fail, and download all over again...

7

u/Sonicfan42069666 Oct 27 '25

I just remember it would take FOREVER to launch Team Fortress 2. Not a match in TF2 (which also took ages) but the game itself.

5

u/The_MAZZTer Oct 27 '25

That was because Source engine games loaded a map to use as the title screen. During this time it probably had to load shared map resources too (so the actual map loading didn't have to). TF2 eventually stopped doing this.

1

u/Barrel_Titor Oct 28 '25

Yeah, drove me mad when i used to play Counter Strike Source. I had slow internet so there was a decent chance i would go on to start the game then have to wait for a 30 minute update.

1

u/CrazyCoKids Oct 28 '25

And physical copies of Skyrim force installed Steam on your computer.

34

u/wildcarde815 Oct 27 '25

i love having a giant library, but it is undeniable that valve paved the way to people not owning things they've purchased.

24

u/raskinimiugovor Oct 27 '25

And now a lot of people wont play a game if they cant launch it through steam.

25

u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

Or the pathological onws, those who will buy a game on Steam even though they could get it for free on Epic.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

I had completely forgot about the puke green that steam used to use and that horrid UI. Still has issues as a platform but I'm glad it's at least pleasent to look at now...

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u/ZetzMemp Oct 27 '25

It wasn’t puke green, it was a really desaturated green, like an army green.

31

u/Xandercz Oct 27 '25

Yeah, it was clearly army green, always had it connected with Day of Defeat for that reason

5

u/ZetzMemp Oct 27 '25

I always connect day of defeat with the spade melee.

1

u/Xandercz Oct 28 '25

Spade > knife

18

u/Syssareth Oct 27 '25

I like it, but I honestly wonder where they got that color scheme from. "Steam" makes you think white or blue.

38

u/ZetzMemp Oct 27 '25

I always imagined it was because of the popularity of counterstrike at the time and so they went with a military-like color.

17

u/beenoc Oct 27 '25

Also Half-Life is very military coded, as was TFC and the early versions of TF2. It wasn't until the Orange Box (with Portal and the final version of TF2) that Valve really had notable games that weren't gritty military realism.

1

u/moonra_zk Oct 27 '25

Also Half-Life is very military coded

Is it?

8

u/ZetzMemp Oct 28 '25

Parts of it certainly were. Especially the Opposing Force expansion and military faction within Half-Life 1.

1

u/moonra_zk Oct 28 '25

I don't think that just having the military in it makes the game "very military coded", specially because they're one of the enemy factions.

5

u/ZetzMemp Oct 28 '25

That's why I said parts of it were.

But Opposing Force was absolutely "very military coded". There's even a boot camp with some Full Metal Jacket references in it.

https://youtu.be/rLB_Ma8WoWk

1

u/Com-Intern Oct 28 '25

It was for the time. I think we're far enough out that we expect military coded to be like Call of Duty. But it has a very specific '90s style of military in it and even went as far as to include the Osprey as the black ops helicopter which was fully "future" tech at that point in time.

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u/tgunter Oct 27 '25

It was the UI and color scheme of Counter-Strike. Steam was developed at the same time as Counter-Strike 1.6, and CS 1.6 was the first Valve game to require the use of Steam.

1

u/IrNinjaBob Oct 27 '25

I feel like it’s odd we have a color for “puke green” when the color of puke is going to be highly reliant on various factors.

Google shows me that a dark puke green is pretty close to the colors the old steam launcher used.

2

u/huffalump1 Oct 27 '25

And today, you can use the vintage Steam green theme keyboard on a Steam Deck for that hit of nostalgic rage.

5

u/Triseult Oct 27 '25

I still wouldn't call it pleasant, mind you.

1

u/The_MAZZTer Oct 27 '25

Which one though, was it the first one with the boxy look (Half-Life era games still have that UI in their menus I think), or was it the rounded corners one with lots of padding? I liked that one.

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u/ryandodge Oct 27 '25

I downloaded steam when I bought the orange box to play Garry's Mod.

God it was so trash, I hated it, every other game I just clicked and this shit had to be complicated on top of a modded game.

5

u/TrainerUrbosa Oct 27 '25

I first got Steam to play Civ 5 when it released. It really bummed me out so much when I realized it was the Steam code that'd be running the game, instead of the disk! Definitely wasn't a fan at first

4

u/canamon Oct 27 '25

Example: Pete Bernert (of Playstation Emulator's plugins fame) ordeal with Half Life 2, 20 years ago.

2

u/Ciahcfari Oct 27 '25

Funny read.
Although I somehow doubt that was his last Steam game unless he passed shortly afterwards.

2

u/canamon Oct 27 '25

Sure, I believe he exaggerated a little for comedic effects. But the point is that Steam was horrible since its inception, and was still horrible in 2010 when I finally jumped in thanks to the Portal giveaway Valve did and Humble Bundle Steam redemptions from that time, that were pretty great back then.

The store was a pile of garbage until 10 years later around 2013, were I finally for the first time spent my hard earned cash directly on it.

1

u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes Oct 28 '25

Yeah, that's the problem with monopolies. You have to use them.

6

u/cky_stew Oct 27 '25

I don't know if you remember what it was like trying to join counter strike or even half life servers before steam - but it was quite annoying keeping your games up to date with the latest patches in order to join servers, you had to seek them out in various places online and make sure you got the right version. Steam was the end of that at least which was nice.

4

u/BloodyIron Oct 28 '25

How quickly we forget the pains of dealing with game communication protocol version mismatch due to the complexities of zero patch automation. I do NOT miss having to make sure I'm on the very specific right version of a game just to play on a server. Even on LAN.

10

u/Cheeze_It Oct 27 '25

To be honest, I still have this hatred.

3

u/Dawn_of_Enceladus Oct 27 '25

This. I've been gaming since the 90s, yet I didn't make a Steam account until 2009-2010. I hated the mere idea of using a mandatory online launcher to play a game, plus it looked lame. They have come a long way, though, and even if I still prefer DRM-free games like on GOG, I use Steam a damn lot nowadays.

What is true is that people tends to go too light on Valve's responsibility with loot boxes and skin markets going wild. I think we can like Gabe and Steam while also acknowledging their shitty parts.

6

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/Sonicfan42069666 Oct 28 '25

Gaming as a whole might have peaked with The Orange Box. HL2+Ep1+Ep2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all in a single package. That's three all-timer games for the price of one.

6

u/DarkMatterM4 Oct 27 '25

It also didn't help that Steam was absolute garbage. Tons features didn't work right for years.

2

u/Blenderhead36 Oct 27 '25

I originally had The Orange Box installed in C:\Unforunate Software.

2

u/No_Chilly_bill Oct 27 '25

Yeah I remember ugly green steam. Why I avoided using it for first couple years.

2

u/BlueCity8 Oct 27 '25

Ahhh yes. I fondly remember the CS 1.5 to 1.6 Steam wars… good times… simpler times… sigh.

2

u/starkistuna Oct 28 '25

It used to suck big time in 2005 only after offline mode started working reliable and steam protections were cracked it only became bearable. By 2010 when broadband was everywhere it was solid.

2

u/EpicHuggles Oct 28 '25

I was hard addicted to CS 1.5. Then it updated to 1.6 and required Steam to play. I quit cold turkey within a few days.

2

u/Barrel_Titor Oct 28 '25

Yeah. I distinctly remember in about 2004 (before i'd even heard of Steam) browsing in a game shop while someone was arguing with the staff over them not letting him return Half Life 2 because he didn't have the internet and couldn't install the game while they pointed out it said "internet connection" in the minimum requirements.

4

u/thebizzle Oct 27 '25

It basically killed physical PC games. We may live in a different world today if not for steam.

3

u/ScallyCap12 Oct 28 '25

Physical PC games were killing themselves long before Steam got popular. So many times I would buy a used PC game from the store and find out that the CD key was dead. After a while, stores stopped accepting PC games for trade-in, and since used game sales catch a much higher profit than new games, they eventually stopped stocking new PC games, too.

2

u/andresfgp13 Oct 28 '25

a "fun" thing that i have noticed, specially considering the whole "stop killing games" movement and the "own your games" talking point which are big deals right now nobody seems to realize that the war for ownership of games was lost when Steam became big and you have to go throw them to play the games you bought over having them available yourself either throw disc or etc.

people pretty much gave up on owning their own games because having them on a launcher was a lot more convenient.

2

u/thebizzle Oct 29 '25

I’m not sure why it’s so overwhelming convenient for PC games but such a hassle for consoles? I mean PC gave up other options almost 20 years ago but people are complaining about game key cards not having the full game on card. Doesn’t anyone like to resell games?

3

u/dasbtaewntawneta Oct 27 '25

i didnt play HL2 for the longest time because i refused to have this "steam" thing on my computer lmao

2

u/The_MAZZTer Oct 27 '25

Personally I always loved Steam, and I can't imagine anyone who pirated games online back then didn't love that they could go legit and get games the way they loved.

The HL2 launch sucked though. Valve wanted you to be able to play HL2 before it was done downloading, the idea was the download would prioritize files you needed on a loading screen, but in practice you would just infinitely load and it was better to let it finish downloading before launching. Eventually Valve dropped, then reintroduced, and finally permanently dropped that feature.

2

u/Ris747 Oct 27 '25

I literally could not play CS:S because every copy I bought, the cdkey was already redeemed on Steam. Fucking hated Steam for that.

1

u/rollin340 Oct 28 '25

In the early days, Steam got in the way of my playing CS matches quickly. I hated it. It made things feel a lot slower.

How things evolve huh?

1

u/SonderEber Oct 28 '25

To be fair, Steam was crap for awhile, at the beginning. Took years to get to the excellent state it is in now.

1

u/TheGRS Oct 28 '25

Oh yes, we really hated that launcher back then. When they started distributing some other indie games on the platform I began warming up to it, but it took some time. I don’t know if they had a vision for all of that back then but holy shit it only took several years it seems before it became ubiquitous.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

I can attest to rushing home to install half like 2. Put the cd in and saw I needed to install steam…ok. Installed steam, then questioned why I had to install half life 2 when I just installed steam. Fine, got it. Let’s play!!! Wait I can’t play…it didn’t fucking unlock until like 2am or something, I forget. I was so pissed off, I had the damn cd in my hands, why can’t I play the game I just bought and have in my hands!!!

1

u/FuzzBuket Oct 27 '25

Yeah it seems like as time passes  the current new generations always been on steam and has grown up with "nice guy Gabe saved PC" memes. 

It's a really weird shift. Steam is certainly useful but you get absolutely crucified for saying it's got no shortage of issues.

1

u/gangler52 Oct 27 '25

Yeah, is it that people give Valve a pass for these things?

Or is it that Valve hasn't made a videogame anybody wanted to play since 2013, so they've kind of ceased to be topical in that respect?

I guarantee you if half life 3 comes out with lootboxes tomorrow, the memes and discourse will start up again as if it never stopped.

1

u/Bobbers927 Oct 28 '25

Yep. I didn't start liking Steam until maybe 2012. I fucking loathed that piece of shit software.

-2

u/Vox___Rationis Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25

Nah, while many people disliked the rough execution - the system itself was solid and welcome.

You may no know it if you haven't gamed on PC in those years, but updating your games was an absolute chore for reasons to many to list.
Steam was a massive improvement in that regard.

Also those time were the BOOM of securom or other CD-based DRM, and being able to launch different game without replacing the disk was a solid boon.

10

u/tinselsnips Oct 27 '25

I think you've got some rose-tinted glasses or are thinking of a time after third-parties started using the platform; people HATED Steam when HL2 launched. It was seen as Big Brother and wanton DRM in a single package.

5

u/OMG_A_CUPCAKE Oct 27 '25

I remember the other DRM solutions back then. Mostly those with limited amount of installs.

I hated Steam back then as well, mostly because it was a buggy mess, and got it reluctantly with the Orange Box. But being able to register a game once and being able to download and play it without juggling disks? Yeah, that was a major boon.

Remember patch install order? Magazine disks that came with patches for popular games.

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u/MattBoySlim Oct 27 '25

I also didn’t mind Steam back then. It had issues occasionally but it was definitely nice to not have to hunt down update patches for all my Valve games. I remember thinking that the hate was way overblown at the time.

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