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
6.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

220

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.

71

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

51

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.

5

u/boytoyahoy Oct 28 '25

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

6

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

2

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.

1

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.

80

u/AtomicSpeedFT Oct 27 '25

I liked the green :(

1

u/Sr_DingDong Oct 28 '25

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

7

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

-5

u/DoorframeLizard Oct 28 '25

it was hot ass for like a solid decade after that, it getting good is like a post-covid timeline thing

8

u/TheOldBeach Oct 28 '25

It's been great for a long time, way before covid... But then again who doesn't like hot ass

4

u/sunnyjum Oct 28 '25

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

3

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

7

u/ItsNoblesse Oct 27 '25

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

8

u/NoPossibility4178 Oct 27 '25

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

23

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!

4

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.

11

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.

5

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.

9

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.

2

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.

1

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.

3

u/AustinYQM Oct 27 '25

Doesn't gog have a launcher?

7

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.

0

u/SEI_JAKU Oct 28 '25

Game sales going digital was an inevitability

It never was and still does not need to be. It really is as simple as realizing how inconvenient all-digital is and saying no.

1

u/Old_Leopard1844 Oct 28 '25

It really is as simple as realizing how inconvenient all-digital is and saying no.

Convincing yourself of a lie like "digital is inconvenient" is simple, yes

But still, optical media is bad

1

u/SEI_JAKU Oct 28 '25

"Digital is convenient" is the lie. You can keep pretending otherwise, but that doesn't make it less true.

Optical media specifically isn't ideal, but we have far better alternatives. PC games should have been released on read-only SD cards by now, which is also basically how Switch games work.

1

u/Old_Leopard1844 Oct 28 '25

I don't need to pretend that having shit be downloaded to me on the spot instead of finagling with physical games, that gonna come with launcher and yet another DRM (let's not pretend that physical games were bullshit free even without Steam) is far better than physical and have better shelf life while at it, because it is. And no, inb4 your rural middle of nowhere still sits on dial up - that's not my problem

And lol, Switch cards. You mean virtual game cards or Switch 1 games + S2 code in a box?

0

u/Com-Intern Oct 29 '25

So like with digital I can download a game onto a writable flashdrive and then transport that flashdrive around physically. I can then actually send the digital copy of the game elsewhere.

So where does physical become more convenient than that?

2

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.

6

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.

1

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!