To be fair when Steam first dropped, the idea of digital distribution was hopelessly naive and everything similar to it (like GameTap) was shut down pretty quickly.

Everything that tries to be “like Steam” also fails hard.

So there was a time when I was laughing at Steam with the rest of them.

Steam came before it’s time, while we were still on dialup. Once high-bandwidth internet became common then it made sense, as did many other cloud-computing and cloud-storage ideas.

Sadly, it still has problems, especially when end users can’t get along with the customer-facing staff and lose access to their licenses. There’s also the problem that has revealed itself with other game clients, when games shut down, when distro-clients go out of business (I still hold a grudge with Stardock / Gamestop) and when governments seize cloud storage without consideration for the end-users (as happened with MegaUpload). When Newell dies or retires, then we only can wait to see what becomes of Steam and our libraries and what company is going to attempt to buy (and exploit) all that responsibility.

It’s going to be trading Robert Baratheon for Joffrey.

I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn’t trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.

Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.

I was one of them. But I mean, back then most people either didn’t have Internet or at least didn’t have broadband. I had dial-up until like a month after it released.

I remember Steam’s launch and understand completely.