Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007.

Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam.

It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.

It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.

>It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

My understanding was they were solving the update problem:

Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.

This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.

Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.

And downloading patches often meant waiting in a queue at places like FilePlanet for an hour or two, then downloading it at a snails pace

I absolutely do not miss "download button roulette" on cnet or whatever site it was where it you had the joy of playing "which of these 3 banners saying 'DOWNLOAD NOW' is actually the download button and not a sketchy ad that will ruin your day"

And then manually applying them. If the game was old enough you might need to apply multiple patches, something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve was going with this was the future.

Oh god! Fileplanet. That also reminds me of "Download managers". They were literally apps that would search for the same file from multiple places so that it could try to part the download up and then combine the file at the end. It was like BitTorrent before BitTorrent.

I remember getting game patches from CDs that came with the game magazines.

Haha I totally forgot about that aspect of the Internet

Yep. That's essentially why "the cloud" became a thing.

This was it 100%. I lived through this and that was exactly why Steam continued to be used in our LAN groups. Even for LAN parties, it made it super easy for everyone to make sure they were on the same version of everything. Extending that to online play is the reason it persisted to this day.

At the expense of Valve exerting more control over what CS version that server admins and players run

It's odd seeing Counterstrike because I haven't really done gaming (and certainly not FPS) since Counterstrike was a free mod to Half Life.

Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or two

One nice thing about Steam (back then, maybe still now?) was after the mod status left.

One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many copies as the whole thing.

I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically granted a new Half Life license and cloned the derivatives

There was also a separate release of counterstrike called condition zero that included a single player campaign and a tweaked version of counterstrike multiplayer.

That was not included as part of that bundle.. but if you used the dedicated server tool to download the czero mod and copied it to your halflife folder you could play both the single player and multiplayer version on steam

This was how my brother played it. He was too dumb to know the difference because the box art literally looked like CS’s splash screen. CS != CZ but nevertheless, a steam account was a steam account, and technically CZ was HL so he downloaded CS off FilePlanet and was getting destroyed by me and my friends for weeks until he learned the strafe-run hack.

I still have my 6 (7?) digit ID from those days as my steamID. It got rolled into a larger one but still kept the old digits. Pretty cool of them.

You get a special badge now too. I waited a month or 2 from release to install Steam because I only cared about Half-Life 2 and that was the first game from Valve that required Steam. You didn't even get a CD in the box, just a Steam redemption code.

It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its professional players were born. It is truly a timeless game.

It wasn’t just CS, Team Fortress had a huge player base. Natural-Selection as well. There were like 7 or 8 mods for HL1 that were “on-par” with the quality of HL1, which says something about Hammer Editor and the toolkit they had at the time. GTkRadiant is great but Hammer Editor (formerly WorldCraft) was excellent.

The popularity of the mods, CS included, is what drove Steam to become the store that it is.

I still maintain that GldSrc was the golden age of game modding.

We are, admittedly, in a pretty sweet spot right now with games running the genre gamut from Rimworld to Minecraft to Cities: Skylines to Starsector to the Bethesda RPGs having vibrant mod scenes but man, I have serious nostalgia for CS, NS, and DoD, oh and Tribes.

Tribes! The OG of “yeah, we’re gonna open source this”. Torque Engine was awesome.

This is giving me a flashback to the time when I was still on dialup (the off-campus dorm I lived at had a shitty shared cable connection that was often slower or less reliable than dialup) and spent about three days downloading Half Life 2 on launch.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized I could take my laptop to campus, download it over their incredibly fast WiFi, and then transfer the files to my desktop that had a decent GPU.

It did feel unnecessary at the time, but I was obsessed with all things half-life so I was there mashing the refresh button the night when it launched. The launch itself was kind of a shit show, but IIRC it didn’t take more than a few months for everyone to realize that it was massively improved compared to the old ways of distribution.

Do you remember before Steam won, there was also Stardock. They're still around now because they make Galactic Civilizations, but back in the day, they were also one of the early innovators in having their own store launcher for distributing their and others' games.

I still use stardock fences on my windows pc.

I also... Fondly?... Recall the time everybody was excited to have Xmas or star trek themes desktop with windowblinds.... Funny how not just fashion changes, but even need for fashion - virtually nobody customizes their windows desktop anymore :)

I remember that. It was a really good store, the first of its kind IIRC. Every so often I think about what happened to the games I owned on there?

It's kinda funny that there's a company out there that does both game publishing and popular desktop utilities

Before steam won there was also _WON_, and I'm still grumpy about losing their nice UI ;).

Oh child, Stardock was originally a windows shell… Dressing to be modded like your Winamp skins.

It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-responsive.

I have heard nothing but good things about skype for business!

Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that product!

suppose no news is good news, I think I see the mouth moving but the picture froze.

I remember using Steam for the games library and using Xfire for the ingame chat features. At some point steam because the only survivor there.

Xfire is something that died a sad death. Used it to chat with many people I met playing Star Wars Galaxies and Empire at War - think it was actually bundled with that one.

The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too.

Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.

Don't forget GameSpy. Many, many rounds of multiplayer C&C: Renegade played through that back in the day.

> "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it

If it's even still possible to install/activate them. Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would rebuy them there just for the convenience.

> steam was terrible when it came out

Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever thought steam the application was a bad.

the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these days, but on dialup... yeah)

the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything

this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o

I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!

ha, im just forgetful. thank you.

Internet and DRM back then were absolutely shit. So a company coming along and embracing DRM in a consumer friendly way during a time where DRM was rightfully a major topic of contention put a lot of negativity out there.

Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time, and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill gaming.

I disagree wholeheartedly here. The Steam client has its problems but it's not shit. I use Big Picture mode exclusively on my gaming PC that's hooked up to my TV and I never have problems with Steam unless some other garbage launcher (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft) crashes and doesn't return focus. That's it. Other than that, all my games stay updated, the client updates on restart, and I never have to mess with it. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.

Wait, how do developers get squeezed? As a developer I need to know if I’m standing in quicksand.

Having access to so many gamers, at once, without me having to setup a storefront, and pci compliance, and credit card data, is actually good for me. If you live in part of the world where there isn’t a tax treaty with the United States, that’s not exactly Valves fault. Blame your government for the squeeze.

When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was collapsed to the system tray and wasn't downloading game updates in the background.

I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.

Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles better than any other client out there.

I wonder if it's going to become even more web based but it has also accomplished things like a sorta unified desktop/web/mobile experience and the steam deck. So there's that.

It was shit for a very long time, but it's actually been improving, slowly but steadily, for years. It's honestly pretty good these days.

Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.

Giving GFWL less excuse for being as bad as it was. They'd witnessed Steam's early problems, yet repeated them (and added more besides).

probably about the same time they managed to get the Friends service to work