Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans.
Steam first opened its figurative doors all the way back in September 2003, and has since grown into the largest digital PC gaming storefront in the world, which is actively used by tens of millions of players each day.
“In case anyone’s curious about the odd colours, that’s the colour scheme for the original Steam UI when it first launched,” commented Redditor Penndrachen, referring to the badge’s army green colour scheme, which prompted a mixed reaction from players who remembered the platform’s earliest days. “I joined in the first six months,” lamented Affectionate-Memory4. “I feel ancient rn.”
I’m just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).
And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go “you maniacs, you blew it up!” and so on.
At least it’s digital rights control now instead of your rights depending on a fragile piece of plastic and aluminum.
What good is legally owning a game if I lose access to it just because it physically broke? I’d still have to buy it again (or pirate it) if anything happened to the disk, so IMO, it’s a wash.
We give up legal rights in exchange for extra short term safety and convenience. And if Steam or the developer ever takes it away from me, I can always just go pirate it to get it back.
If I punched you in the dick, would you say, “At least you didn’t kick me in the dick (with shoes!)”?
What good is legally “owning” a game if you can never sell it, and what good is games never breaking if you can’t buy and run them from a yard sale for a quarter?
Owning over a 1000 copies of physical games sounds like a nightmare in managing the space and searching for titles to me. And when I look at the market prices of old retro games and then the counterfeits I’m not too upset about the move towards digital.
My point is that owning games was never any good because there was always some severe limitation on your legal rights since the game itself is a piece of software and there’s no universal way to guarantee your ownership of a piece of software.
The disk could always break. If there was any online component, they could always take down the servers. Or if the game was broken from the start or became broken at any point, they could always just never provide the necessary update to make it playable.
I’ve never really been one to sell my games because I’m always wanting to go back and play them later, so I can’t really offer any input on that fact.
I just prefer the system that gives me at least a paper thin guarantee over the one that’s less convenient and has absolutely no guarantee.
I don’t inherently disagree with what you’re saying, but online DRM would have happened anyway sooner or later, and online isn’t always online.
But most importantly, I’d rather a billion times have Valve rolling in that Steam money than any other publisher on the videogame market: the industry would be just that much worse, with unexisting indie devs and no Proton.
I mean… would it? Indie devs not only existed before Steam, but typically have a hugely contentions relationship with them. I haven’t forgotten all the growing pains about races to the bottom through sales, arguments about curation and the entire Greenlight fiasco.
I’d give them credit for pushing indie devs enough to get Nintendo to stop being annoying to work with, but that was Microsoft pushing Sony which in turn pushed Nintendo. Steam is background noise in that process.
Valve solved the issue of PC piracy in the way Netflix solved the issue of TV and movie piracy: by creating a convenient service people liked to use that is significantly more hassle free than digging through shady websites. If they hadn’t figured it out, the next-in-line big store that happened was GOG, which is coincidentally a DRM-free storefront that grew as a reaction to Steam. I don’t know what the CD Projekt Deck would have looked like, but we at least would have gotten a third sequel of a game series, so there’s that.
You might disagree with the Steam DRM wrapper in principle, but in practice it’s laughably easy to bypass (by design). The difference between a DRM-free game and a game solely running Steam DRM is five minutes of effort, at that point does DRM even matter?
The Steam DRM wrapper is an important part of Steam platform because it verifies game ownership and ensures that Steamworks features work properly by launching Steam before launching the game.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
It matters because it’s there. If it was meant to not be DRM it… wouldn’t be DRM. That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
In practice, the DRM matters because it discourages keeping a backup of fully owned game files. On GOG it’s trivial to backup offline installers, which are provided explicitly (and I do keep a backup of games I only own on GOG, by the way). Steam explicitly limits your access to your games and how you use them, presumably to support a secure microtransaction environment within the Steam platform. That’d be the “ensures the Steamworks features work” bit in that text.
That’s extremely nontrivial for Steam, for the record. Disputing the ability to drive separate MTX under Steam is why several major publishers ended up withdrawing for a bit until they realized it’s not commercially viable and Steam is effectively a quasi-monopoly on the PC platform.
There are different types of DRM. Your original post was that Steam “forces always online DRM” and “you never own anything you buy”. This doesn’t really apply to Steam DRM. You don’t need to be always-online and it is not for anti-piracy. It sounds more like you are describing Denuvo which is another thing entirely. Comparing Steam DRM to Denuvo is like comparing the Wright flyer to a fighter jet.
I don’t like DRM either but at the end of the day I can just run Steamless so I don’t really care. Streaming services like Netflix have the same thing but it all can be pirated anyway so no big deal. It would be different if Steam actually implemented effective DRM, but it doesn’t.
That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
Steam allows it, but they actually officially discourage the use of third party DRM
Anti-tamper / DRM: In general we don’t recommend use of such solutions across any PC platforms, as they may impact disk usage and overall performance. Getting them fully functional in the Wine environment can take some time and add significant latency to getting your title supported.
I don’t see a situation where digital distribution of games would have led to a space where games having no DRM would have been mainstream. Even with DRM companies continue to associate PC with piracy.
There was also the whole Sony rootkit after all with music CDs, so I’m just not seeing this whole argument of this space could have been different if it weren’t for valve. Not even sure PC gaming would have been as big as it is now if it weren’t for Valve and it really would have been a situation of PC gaming being dead and for niche titles as opposed to just some clickbait headline.
But those things can be true at the same time. Yes, PC gaming was in a rough spot before Steam solved DRM and digital distribution. Absolutely physical PC games were struggling with no alternative and Microsoft sure wasn’t figuring that out.
But Steam’s success was to transition PC gaming to an all-DRM-all-the-time quasi monopoly built around removing PC game ownership from the table altogether.
I’m just as fine with both of those statements. In the real world things rarely are complete positives or negatives, despite our cultural need to take sides on stuff. This entire thread started with a tongue-in-cheek joke about how controversial Steam was at launch, which is an undeniable fact. People get weirdly defensive about it, though.
The biggest difference between Steam and others is that people tend to recognize Apple’s weirdness about the App Store or the downsides of Spotify or Netflix, all of which pulled off similar moves. Steam, though, still manages to present itself as a bit of a plucky upstart that is with you on this thing against the big bad publishers, which is kind of nuts.
I just don’t see the level of influence as you do when it comes to DRM. DRM is something that was going to be in place and had been in the works, and if it wasn’t it would be due to the market not existing to begin with. Epic or any other company deciding to not bother to try to enter digital distribution on a massive scale rivaling consoles for decades is a reflection of how little value companies saw in the PC space despite progress in digital distribution. One even music and movies were quicker to recognize.
Eh, I joined knowing full well that I was trading permanent ownership and the risk of losing access if steam failed for the convenience of installing and updating without needing to do every game separately. I wasn’t in the habit of trading in games anyway, and if I get an average amount of enjoyment across games then that works out whether I uninstall from steam or throw a box in the trash.
After using it for two decades steam is still the best decision I have made for gaming even of there is still a risk that they could go belly up or remove my games at will with no recourse. The few games I lost access to were online multi-player where the servers shut down, and physicsl media would not have avoided that. On the upside many games that would have lost support over time have always been available to install and run without needing to store physical media, and a combination of sales for lowered prices and a game just being available have made the platform my reliable go to.
Competitors like GoG that offer DRM free versions are another great avenue for people! I even have a couple of games from then, but convenience and consistent reliability has been the reason that I load a game in steam nearly every day even if just for a quick round. Basically the opposite of a hellscape in my experience, but then again I have had mostly reliable internet during that time.
On a side note, I have no idea what steam levels are or whar any of the steam perks stuff is. I just use it for launching games.
Cool. I don’t disagree with any of that, for the record.
It’s the defensiveness and outright denialism of the tradeoffs that I’m calling out, if anything.
When it was released, Steam was absolute shit, which is something people tend to forget or ignore.
It has certainly come a long way, but it’s still a “Games as a Service” where you don’t really own anything.
Then again, my account is 18 y.o.
Everyone saw the current landscape coming, and there was no way around it if we wanted online distribution. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, and love my physical collection, but it wasn’t Valve and Steam that ushered in this BS. You can avoid steam, and a large amount of DRM if you genuinely care about. There was pushback years later and even Apple allowed you to DRM-less options.
After years of MPAA and RIAA BS piracy claims from cd & dvd ripping and declining physical sales, every company and their mom was looking into DRM to allay the fears of copyright holders and enable digital distribution. It was going to happen regardless of Steam. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, etc were all launching the same shit. Apple launched the iTunes store months before with complete DRM and people ate that up. Companies new years before people would adopt it if the benefits of digital distribution outweighed the inconvenience, and they were right.
Shit like Denuvo was going to happen regardless, as despite the push back on some of the invasive DRM, some companies remain unconvinced. They do it even on top of Steam.
No, wait, it literally WAS Steam. I mean, it wasn’t just Steam, but those guys were there at ground level. Valve is ultimately an offshoot of Microsoft, it’s not like becoming the main app store on home PCs by introducing structured DRM, sales and download management software wasn’t part of their plan.
So let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. Denuvo? Yep, that sort of DRM predates Steam. License limits and online activation? That’s contemporary to Steam and it’s the problem Steam is trying to solve. Online app stores built around DRM? Steam is as early on that race as it gets, and it’s absolutely built for that purpose.
I like it as a piece of software, too, it’s well made, but why whitewash it?
Plus, I have to point out that you seem to be arguing two opposite things at once. Is DRM inevitable? Well, since you seem to be correctly arguing that DRM-free alternatives do exist and seem to be financially viable… I’m gonna say no?
My argument is that it was inevitable at the time, and everyone saw it coming. It was going to happen regardless of whether Valve created steam or not.
You literally state this:
Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
I don’t think any of that is true. You can avoid most of the shitty DRM today and the big brother-esque remote DRM. People who adopted it then, didn’t usher this in.
Really? I was against Steam when it came out, it felt like insanity: I have to create an account, then register my CD key and it’s gone!? How will I be able to share this game with my friends?!
But after a while it’s straight up better. Do you still remember SecuROM (which shut off its servers, so you can’t even get games with it to run nowadays)? Or having to go to the developer’s website to manually download update 1.0.1a to 1.0.1b to 1.1 to 1.1.2 to 1.3a to 1.4 to … (if you were lucky they offered bigger patches where you could directly jump from 1.0.1a to 1.4 or something). And then years later the developer was bought up or shut down, so the patches were no longer available.
Don’t even remind me of having to stand up, go over to my pile of games, find the right box, open it up, grab the CD, go back to the PC, put the CD in, then start the game I want (hopefully the CD wasn’t scratched). Nowadays I don’t even have a CD drive anymore and I currently have ~70 games installed that I can start in a second or two.
I grew up with sharing CDs (and keys) with friends, or putting a CD into one computer, boot the game, put the CD in a second computer, boot the game, then play on LAN. Steam is way better still. If you don’t like it, buy from GOG.
I do buy from GOG. It’s my primary online store. I only go to the others when something isn’t available there. Which is most of the time, because we live in the lamest dystopia.
For what it’s worth, fanboys are gonna fanboy, but I have no need to deny Steam’s conveniences to call them out on the anti-property DRM crap. Absolutely piecemeal DRM is worse. Not that Steam made it disappear, I had a game install Denuvo on me over Steam just this week.
Absolutely digitally purchasing games is better than digging up optical media for DRM checks. Absolutely it’s better to have worldwide digital launches where you just… get the game the second it launches instead of running around after it like a crazy person.
But we do live in a DRM dystopia where we own nothing and are supposed to like it, the tens of thousands of dollars dumped into my Steam account will go away the moment a Steam moderator decides they don’t like me and they will certainly evaporate after I’m gone, and many, many games are now lost media like we just started making TV but haven’t invented video tapes yet.
All those things get to be true at the same time. I was kinda joking with my original post just to remind people that Steam was far from controversial and beloved at launch, but since we’re talking about it… yeah, hell yeah, we gave up on basic ownership for the sake of convenience and Steam was absolutely part of that process.
“God damn you all to hell” indeed.
Not every game on Steam has DRM. There are plenty of indie games on there where you can download it, copy the files away and play them offline. And for what it’s worth: Gabe Newell did promise that if Steam ever shuts down they’ll offer you all your games as downloads (though so far they have been solid).
I’ve never heard of a legitimate Steam account getting banned. You might be thinking of VAC bans (where your account is flagged as a cheater), which can force you out of multiplayer servers. But losing your entire Steam library? Unheard of so far if you don’t mess up on purpose (like trading stolen items, excessive account sharing, using a stolen credit card, doing chargebacks, etc.).
Member since 24 July 2004 here. Doesn’t feel like 20 years, but it’s also hard to imagine having ~5Tb of installed games across multiple launchers just… available. Plus emulators and other resources. Steam was a pain in the arse at first, but they made it work, and they saw beyond the limitations of dialup tech. I was all for it at the time because I had one of the few Coax connections (NTL at the time, later taken over by Virgin Media) which at that point I believe was 10Mbit… Of course, nowadays we have Gigabit FTTP rolling out throughout the UK, so this seems really quaint, but it’s pleasing to see how far we’ve come.
The US coverage still sucks. Sort your shit out guys, you’re 20 years behind the UK, and we’re a good 10 behind Norway, Hong Kong and others thanks to Twatcher.
I’m always shocked at how behind the US is in some areas of tech despite having so many of the big tech companies located there. Like you say their internet coverage and terms of packages, like still having data limits in 2023. Also the fact that they still sign for card payments in shops, when we’ve been though both chip and pin and contactless since that method was common.
Yeah - I don’t even cary cards with me any more, it’s all on my phone. Including many store cards (Coop, Texaco, Shell, McDonalds…) which automatically pick up without me doing much - I scan, it works.
The only thing I can think is that the US is such a fractured environment with Federal, State and Local government, each with different jurisdictions, rules and taxation, that trying to get it to work would be beurocratically difficult. But at the same time, it’s so ruled by corporations that surely they’d want to push the easiest way - flip your phone out and wave it to pay, easy and secure, so make it happen :D
My account is @hotmail.com. I’m not sure I’m in this wave, but it must be a few weeks till I hit it.
If you still have access to the original email address you can definitely change it.
Hmm I’ve definitely changed the email that was associated with the account name, but the account name I think originally required an email domain in the field? That is something that you cannot change. It’s fine though, because the user name can be changed.
Found it on the FAQ, Account ID can’t be changed - https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2816-BE67-5B69-0FEC
Nice. I didn’t make a Steam account until it supported Linux back in 2013 or so. So I guess I’ll be celebrating 10 years on Steam soon.
I remember connecting with WON before steam, nostalgia CS days
