Thread 11918172

How did people react to this back then? Did it feel like a sign of the end times ?

I screamed and cried and pooped my pants

It was cracked with private servers the same month.

they converted to floiganism

>>11918172 (OP)
There was some pushback against it initially, but then gaymers dropped to their knees, deepthroated Gaben's 4.5 inches of fury and are yet to come up for air. It was the trojan horse that kickstarted the glorious digital future where you vill own nothing and be happy.

Wasn't on-topic is what it was.

>>11918172 (OP)
I hated it at the time and mostly stuck to consoles during the 2000s in part because of the insane DRM that was being used in PC games back then. Ironically I abandoned consoles altogether after the PS3/360 due to multiple hardware failures and the PS4/XB1 being just cut down PCs with none of the advantages.

>>11918172 (OP)
I literally went 17 years without using Steam because of all their bullshit. I only gave up when I left my parents' house and realized buying old games on sale was a lot cheaper and easier than rebuying old CD's and DVD's of questionable compatibility

>>11918172 (OP)
It was extremely gay especially since steam ate up a lot of PC's resources in the background so piratechads were winning as always.
Now, with users simply upgrading if their PC is slow it has become less of an issue.
I only moved to steam in 2013 for multiplayer games which were being sold for pennies like RO2. But its still super gay when you buy a game and it requires you to install an online client.

I'm still mad about being forced to download steam for CS 1.6

>>11918498
Yeah, I fucking hated shit too.
Especially since I the server browser (hlla) I used for classic WON was much better than Steam.

>>11918172 (OP)
Updates being taken care of by Steam instead of having to hunt down a shitty mirror with minute long countdown queue was nice. Having a friend list, being able to quickly join a join, and being able to auto queue a full server was nice, however friend list was infamously known for never fucking working. Fun fact, you can play chess and shit with a friend. Steam was "acceptable" for CS 1.6, any goldsrc cd key you redeem would give you basically the whole back catalog, but Steam also broke Half-Life mods. Steam was straight up unacceptable for Half-Life 2 because shit didn't work.

>>11918172 (OP)
Steam was bad but DRM itself got so bad soon after that animosity didnt last long. I have a bunch of games in my closet that I cant even install anymore because of forced install limits.

>>11918172 (OP)
Rage, mostly. It was considered launcher cancer, but the problem was that every other launcher got way fucking worse and then steam didn't seem so bad because at least you weren't forced into matchmaking.

>>11918172 (OP)
it put me off valve and half life 2. didn't even want to touch steam
but then the orange box came out and I didn't give a shit anymore because those were great games
still wasn't going to use steam for anything but valve games though
oh wait, steam sales
I guess I will own nothing and be happy
they boiled me very slowly

>>11918172 (OP)
secuROM was the sign of end times

>>11918172 (OP)
PC gamers probably never had standards

>>11918238
Should've stuck with Nintendo consoles, kid

>>11918267
You can just pirate video games, anon.
Also GOG exists

>>11918172 (OP)
You can literally read people's reactions in the comments section of the post you took that screenshot from.

>>11918172 (OP)
I thought it was a fucking joke when my friend told me about it at the time, and i still feel that way, no matter how much time has passed or how much worse things became. All these big companies were fags trying to kill pc gaming and harm honest players, just to try and punish pirates which were not effected at all. Valve is just as guilty of being one the same fags who contributed to it as EA and other scum were and gayben will always be a morbidly fat sack of cuck shit.

>>11918857
Steam saved PC gaming.

>>11918172 (OP)
I didn't bother with Steam and HL2 at all until I lost my original HL1 disc (I let a friend borrow it and it sadly never returned), but I still had the case and CD key and realized I could activate it on Steam to download it there. Even then, it took me like four years to actually buy anything on Steam until the first major sale happened.

I didn't (And still don't really) like external launchers for my games, even things like Gamespy and Xfire was too much for me back then. If it wasn't included in the game itself, I wasn't going to bother. Even today, although I use Steam for several games, for managing friends lists and chat, and for the remote play feature that lets me remote to home and play games better than what a VNC setup does, I still appreciate very lightweight games that don't have to connect to anything to play and have very low processor/RAM requirements. Almost 90% of my time playing games is on things that fit that definition.

One of the things that made me drop Blizzard's games was the battle.net launcher, after I stopped playing WoW I played Starcraft II so infrequently that I got tired of trying to log back in each time and uninstalled it, despite liking the game a lot. Never went back to buy Diablo 3 or anything else simply because the launcher got in the way. I probably wouldn't continue to bother with Steam either if it wasn't for all the non-game features the program has.

>>11919007
lol
lmao

>>11919007
Stop huffing Newell's ass steam. PC gaming is a DRM infested plantation. Feeling proud of your "years of service?" Oh right, it's just "ironic," just like how you ironically worship DRM and a fat cretin.

>>11918513
Classic steam had the best UI

>>11919028
>>11919034
it literally did
no one was buying pc games before gabe came around and filled our steam libraries with cheap games, sunk costing us into going all in on digital games
now, you may not like what it had to become in order to be saved. that's fair
I'm not happy about the loss of physical media and actually owning my games
but at least I do play a lot of good games on pc
>Feeling proud of your "years of service?" Oh right, it's just "ironic," just like how you ironically worship DRM and a fat cretin.
you are way too angry about your toys, anon

>>11918172 (OP)
They were pissed because initially the servers were a mess and the game wouldn't even load. But gamers will do anything to get their fix so they put up with it and eventually steam became more reliable.

>>11919045
holy shit, kid
go back to /v/

PC gaming before Steam was one timeless classic after the other.
PC gaming after was endless MMOs, 360 ports and hipster indies.

And speaking of MMOs, WoW got more nuGaymers into PC than Steam ever did.

>>11918172 (OP)
people DESPISED steam for the first couple years of its existence. it was the first of its kind. then people pretty much did a 180 on it in the late 2000s and loved it

>>11919054
shut the fuck up, I was there
yeah, it was better before, it isn't as good now
but are you pretending not to notice the period when pc gaming was almost literally dead and all we got were shit console ports and the occasionally soulful euro jank?
steam didn't kill the golden age of pc games. it brought back a serviceable zombie

>>11919063
>shut the fuck up, I was there
Why do you lie?

>>11918172 (OP)
>How did people react to this back then? Did it feel like a sign of the end times ?
Yes the inclusionn of steam keys in retail boxzes did feel like the end of gaming and in a way it was.

>>11919067
maybe you're just retarded

>>11919045
fair

Every buy a used game like Imperial glory with a disk in it only to find out it was worthless shit with a used steam actiovation key?

Yup steam destoyed gaming. You are all to dumb to realise that. Try selling your steam games. After all they are your property right?

>>11919071
You're the one who thinks there weren't good PC games released before Steam, zoom zoom.

>>11919076
you literally can't read, anon

>>11919091
>literally can't read
as opposed to metaphorically can't read?

>>11919108
as opposed to figuratively
I could be insulting you and just calling you illiterate as a stand in for stupid
but you sperged over something I didn't write, thus indicating that you did not, in fact, read what I wrote

>>11919141
How does one have a figurative inability to read?

>>11919147
well, anon. you may be living that reality
look within yourself

i was mad fucking pissed when i got back from the game shop and instead of installing the fucking game i had to install steam and download it at a whopping 24kbps
to this day it's still the only game i own on steam

>>11919151
I thought my inability was literal....

>>11918213
funny, i was cracking your mom's privates that same month

>>11919162
you have multiple inabilities, anon

>>11919176
then why bother specifying one?

>>11919183
because I was refering to a specific inability at the time
you had just claimed I had written something I didn't
though, to be honest, I have no idea who you think I am since there are other people in the thread, so maybe it was unfair on my part. sorry if so

As a third worlder with crappy internet (so no multiplayer games) I just pirated everything, but this thread reminded me of something funny:
I used to post on an Age of Mythology forum, and I remember a popular guy getting banned because he admited using a crack to play.
Apparently he had the original game (you needed it to play ranked online) but he downloaded a crack anyway just so he wouldn't need to keep the CD inside his PC every time he wanted to play.
That sounds annoying as hell lol

I’ve been a pirate ever since

>>11919243
back then it was kinda common to have multiple CD drives, at least with the shitty prebuilts you'd get, my family's pc had one burner drive and one normal one which had cnc generals in it permanently

>>11918172 (OP)
Shitties timeline. When most of the games started to require some third party software to even install, i stopped buying physical pc games all together. Hell, even if you bought it physically, you still would have to donwload it fully, because it might break the game if it had some old files from the disc.

>>11918172 (OP)
third worlder here. the steam thing really didn't affect us that much since I'm sure none of us want to deal with anything internet just to play games. likewise for all those other weird ass DRMs. we just had to wait for cracked versions to appear and play those. back then the internet was so lame we actually had to buy physical copies of cracked games on CD/DVD. it's only like $2 a pop, but it's still a crapshoot if it is properly cracked, or even if the media was completely readable.

reminds me of this old store which used to sell copied cassetes and betamaxes, then went on to audio and software CDs, and later DVDs.

What year did videogame start pulling stupid bullshit? my earliest memory was my younger brother buying spore and it needed an online connection to authenticate you game to let you play a store bought copy even offline. This was 2007 or so.

>>11919527
2003 when Steam was forced onto people with a CS update.

>>11918172 (OP)
Unironic death of gaming.

>>11918783
>You can just pirate video games, anon.
Not worth the risk of viruses etc

>>11918172 (OP)
>How did people react to this back then?
same as today. everyone hates this shit and software crackers come to save the day. nothing has changed, got more invasive - as predicted.

>>11919483
chad the bootleg enjoyer. i used to find some great things in those kinds of shops.

>>11920473
> download game from untrusted source
> woah viruses and shieet
people with proper sources to wares don't have this problem. never will.

>>11920964
>You just have to like, trust people man!
The days of good faith piracy are long gone.

>>11921176
GGn is one of the easiest private trackers to get into, anon.

>>11919527
BioShock was probably the first non-Valve, non-MMO game to require Internet activation.
Saints Row 2 was probably the first non-Valve game to require Steamworks everywhere.
But backlash from stores like Direct2Drive only started with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Everyone hated it because steam sucked ass on release

Then valve made steam good and people stopped caring

(are you writing this down Sweeney?)

>>11921176
for you it is.

Ah—the announcement that Half-Life 2’s retail release would require Steam activation, in that fateful autumn of 2004. The reaction was, to put it mildly, contentious—indeed, for many, it felt less like a mere logistical wrinkle and more like the harbinger of an ominous new paradigm. What had once been a simple exchange—money for a box, disc, and key—was now complicated by the necessity of an online platform.

To some, this was nothing short of a betrayal. Forums lit up with declarations that Valve had overstepped, that requiring an internet connection for a single-player campaign was an affront to the very spirit of PC gaming. The specter of “ownership” became a hot topic—was one truly buying the game, or merely a license tethered to an account? The word DRM began to take on apocalyptic overtones, whispered as if it were a prophecy of the end times.

And yet—others framed it as progress. Steam was rough, certainly—its early reputation marred by performance issues and skepticism—but it also promised patches, anti-cheat tools, and a new kind of distribution. For these players, the friction of activation was a small price to pay for the convenience and control it might one day offer.

In short—the reaction was polarized, impassioned, and tinged with that peculiar intensity of a community sensing that something fundamental had shifted. Whether it was a revolution or a decline depended entirely on where one stood—but few doubted that the ground beneath PC gaming had moved.

>>11918172 (OP)
Thinly veiled ID Verification topic?

>>11921304
For some odd reason, MW2 was also the first CoD title without dedicated servers.
Rage, id Software's first Steamworks title, was also the first game by them without dedicated servers.

My friend had asked me to play his game and gave me a key. I was like sure thanks, since it's free and all.
I tried to download it from steam website, but it seems I need to download some third party DRM software to even download the game through it (kek).

Do vavlecucks go though this every time? Were going through this all these years?

Then the download box popped out for this steam client for me. No thanks, lmao.

>>11921328
Why are you shitting up the thread with AI slop

>>11920964
>heh, your loss, the $3 you'll spend on Steam sales I'll save for a half dozen ramen packets

>>11918172 (OP)
I think there was a retail SKU of Half-Life 2 which did not have Steam included. I think it was an early version but cannot remember the packaging.

>>11918172 (OP)
The only reason I have a steam account is because gamespy shut down and that's where most of the multiplayer went.

>>11919054
Fucking retard. PC gaming had just as much shit before steam turned up.

>>11922989
I still think about Forumplanet regularly

>>11919054
Yeah Punkbuster was the golden age of gaming bruh!

Underage faggot

>>11918172 (OP)
It was quite annoying. But the real problem was...
>>11921328
>its early reputation marred by performance issues and skepticism
Steam was utter DOGSHIT on release. For several months.

I avoid Steam entirely until 2011 because of it. there were still physical games plus pirating for the DRM free option or just emulating console games

>>11918227
Exactly this.
>that inevitable retard saying how Steam saved PC gaming
lol, I don't even need to scroll through this thread, I can feel your subhuman stench from up here. You reek.

>>11918172 (OP)
I put in a fake email and if I ever replayed it (I honestly don't remember) I used a gamescopyworld crack.

>>11924478
*I only ever actually started using Steam the way they wanted when they were releasing AAA PC games and ports and indies for $3 in the early 2010s.

>>11918172 (OP)
the same way they do now.

whine a shitload online and then buy it anyways