What made people so eager to join Steam in the 2000s?

This + CS:S

but this too. The early ears were notoriously bad.

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friends list management and online multiplayer for half life and half life 2

I remember downloading it and not even knowing what the hell it was for back in the day. Just did it because it was necessary to play with. The features slowly trickled in and it became more and more worth it though.

Then what happened that made people turn around on Steam? By the early 2010s it was a whole different story from the early hate

Centralized platform to talk about gayms, buy gayms, download gayms, and most important

an easy way to patch games and keep them up to date. If you were into PC gay men before Steam, you had to install the gaym from disc, then search the internet for 30 minutes to find patches. Some patches had to be installed before the latest patch could be installed. It was a cluster fuck.

It got more stable, and more 3rd party games started pouring in. It started as this Origin -style thing for Valve's shit only, but then came other AAA and later indie titles.

They used to have sales with massive discounts, like 50-90% off almost everything on the store. You still see the memes a lot whenever Steam has a sale nowadays, but these modern sales are nothing compared to how big they used to be.

...they started offering things that made it worth using? things aren't as complex as you seem to think

the service got less shitty over time, but it was the steam sales that really turned people around

rip fileshack

The realized it was easier than buying games from a store. Steam also use to have epic sales because publishers didn't really care about PC gaming like they do now. Like 75% off new titles and shit.

When someone in publishers' accounting department told management that they don't pay platform fees to Nintendo or Sony, publishers started to reduce the sales' discount over time.

>eager
lol people fucking hated it, myself included. It ran like shit on my XP machine.

Literally Half-Life 2. Everyone hated Steam for YEARS until it became a decent storefront.

They didn't. It was forced. counterstrike moved to steam officially and later hl2 you couldn't play without steam

personally didn't really have problems with it functionally, but i remember people whining about it not working properly constantly

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I got it for half-life 2, hated it, and never used it again until the late 2000s/early 2010s when steam had AAA PC games for $5 constantly.

The Orange Box had 5 full games in it

Gamers did relent though. Didn’t people care if they owned the games 100% or not? Especially in the mid 2000s where this would be unheard of

Man, I still remember how angry everyone was when Half-Life 2 came out and you had to connect to the internet to activate the game on Steam, even though it was a singleplayer game that had no online functionality. People in more rural areas were PISSED.

This is what got me into Steam in the first place. Most of the games I have I got them from those massive sales.

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Octopi have testicles in their heads.

this

This. It ran like shit, I hated it and still do

>They're just like me!

>offer a version of Orange Box without HL2 + Episode 1 at a cheaper price
>remove that edition a few months before launch and force people to buy the orange box, even if they already had those games
i'll never forget, i'll never forgive

>steam
>eager to join
lol it was a dumpster fire for years.
>clientregistry.blob is missing!
>clientregistry.blob is missing!
>restarting...........
>updating steam.........
>hl2.exe has crashed
>updating steam.........
>clientregistry.blob is missing!
it still amazes me that steam really survived because when other people made game store clients they were even worse. the ironic part is back then there was decent stores (one of them made by EA of all companies) that had games you could buy and download with no client necessary, just a one time activation you had to run, but for some reason people stuck with steam anyways and miraculously they were able to improve it.

HL2 and CSS. Required to play those games, and HL2 was and still is a must play for anyone.

lol

I remember during one of the sales I actually got one game free for free due to some event thing. It was pretty mediocre though.

We just wanted to play Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike. Also by the end of 00s, Modern Warfare 2 and Total War were using Steam as an exclusive PC distribution platform.

OB came out half a decade later, but yeah - it certainly was a fine attraction at the time.

The whole idea of digital distribution was fresh at the time. The #1 concern was the requirement for internet access; it may sound crazy now, but interweb connection was still a tiny extra privilege that not everyone got access to just yet. And when they did, the poorfags and 3rd world country bums might have to deal with 56k modem connections, with a per-minute use fee.

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i believe counter strike 1.6 required you to have steam.

It was an incredible deal even with hl2+ep1.

Yes, and everyone was hyped AF for Source to boot. In fact, it was a common meme that folks bought HL2 just for the CS:S, no matter that HL itself was one of the biggest phenomenons of its day.

youtube.com/watch?v=HY3VR4v-c6s
bros...

Got Steam for free CS1.6 and other gldsource games with entrance of only HL CD-Key. it broke couple of HL mods so you still had to have both versions installed for some lesser known single player mods. Other than that it worked as advertised and I had no complaints about it.

If you read the EULA that came with discs, it was the same thing as digital: you rent the game from the publisher for your entire life.

It's just that discs were a physical product someone would get arrested over trying to take from you.

Imagine a publisher coming to your house to and taking your game DVD because they found out you called someone on the subway a nigger?

But legally, your game DVD is as much yours as a digital copy.

Steam used to be a buggy piece of shit.

to be fair if you had those games you got giftable copies to give away

yeah it was shit but it somehow slipped over to 2010s, gaben must be happy as fuck, this trash finally worked as intended

yeah the 2011 sales gave away free games if you got certain achievements. i got bad rats for free

I think it mainly survived because almost everyone else had given up on PC gaming by that point. If you were a PC gamer in the late '00s, you basically only had Blizzard and Valve.

You got bad ratted by steam?

>they took away your player status based on bi-weekly play time so the casuals dont feel left out
>ill never be a SCREAMING EAGLE again

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I remember something like gunman chronicles serial giving you all the basic hl games and mods or so in steam.
Everyone was buying that to get cs because it was bargain bin title

Steam on early release ran like absolute dog shit
only trough constant updating and work on it, they made it functional at it is now

One thing that gets lost these days is how much of a big deal it was that the service itself mandated patches. Counterstrike used to be an absolute shitshow in that you had to install the correct version of the mod off the correct version of Half Life, times however many people you were gaming with. I remember LAN parties back in the day where we legit spent an hour getting everyone able to join the game before we even started playing.

You Best Buy selling games on disc.

Digital distribution didn't blow up until Steam sales were good.

Absolutely nothing Steam was despised when introduced back then you stupid underage newfag.

I remember that my HL2 copy ran at 5fps because of my ancient PC that wasn't capable to handle it. But I don't remember steam running bad.

This.

No one was fucking eager but we were forced to use steam to continue playing the games we were already playing.

Steam is and has always been cancer.

Orange Box happened, normie revolution begun.

Valve games and also the concept of a video game library was fresh and not run into the ground. Also the summer sales were actually really nuts and on good games.

Cunter strek

Steam was at that time an absolute resource hog, or rather moreso than now. People just don't remember it as bad, because the computers at that time on release were dogshit too

game distribution was an uncentralized mess
gamers had to jump through hoops to bypass securom for games they owned
all patching was manual

i bought gta 4 for like $7.50 in 2009
that was pretty based

back then the steam sales were genuinely bonkers

Bro you used to have to wait in line to download CS patches before steam

>whole STALKER trilogy for 10 bucks
>HL series as a whole for same price
was neat

because they announced months in advance that it was going to be steam only and WON was going to die

CS 1.6 Beta was Steam Only and when they finally shut down WON we had to migrate

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>Used to come to Yas Forums to learn about good games to get on sale
>Picked up Ys Origin for $5
>Had jolly good times in Killing Floor, also $5
I miss those days. I guess we still have Risk of Rain at least.

I feel like portal for free in 2011 was a huge jump for steam adoption

That's what got me to download it.

>it's been 16 years

I miss my Day of Defeat friends.

It was necessary to play Half-Life 2 IN ADDITION to having to keep the dvd in drive until later patches.

my copy of half life 2 came on 5 cd roms

you can still find servers with bots or one here or there with a small handful of actual people
I miss it too

I really wish Source wasn't so much more popular than the original

Like told above ITT, the early days were rough, and the memes were roasting it all the time.
Still, just like Windows XP, Steam also got better with each major update.

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SUBMIT TO THE LORD

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nothing, we were basically forced if we wanted to play hl2, css etc

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I think the only people "eager" to join steam that early were the ones that had enough foresight to understand short steam IDs might be worth something later down the line.

Friends was broken for longer than it has worked.

>germans
yikes