"Simply the air we breathe"

September 12, 2023 11:08 AM

Steam, Valve Software's massive online PC gaming store and platform, turns 20 years old today. PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun has posted a thoughtful article about this milestone.
posted by May Kasahara (12 comments total)

Audiosurf was the first game I had on Steam. I remember being skeptical, because a third party service seemed like a needless extra step. Turns out my copy of audiosurf outlasted my mp3 collection. A year later I bought Braid. Then a Humble Indie Bundle. After that, I guess I was hooked. It is definitely the case that non-Steam sites being able to give out steam keys is the main reason I use Steam. There's probably some kind of marketing lesson there.
posted by surlyben at 11:48 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's funny just how ubiquitous it is and how "unobtrusive" it actually is for a third party platform - compared to the MS Stores, Epic, Origin, etc.

(Of course, I'm saying this as I'm playing on my Steam Deck at the moment)
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:56 AM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

The comments on the RPS article are, for once, generally pretty worth a read. Some interesting points about Steam's role in the growth of indie games and in support for gaming on Linux.

A side note; the article is by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, who started there as news editor a few weeks ago. He's been putting out consistently excellent pieces, much more in the vein of the old RPS which I always thought of as "hey, here's an article about a game I'm never going to play, but it'll still be well worth 5-10 minutes of my time to read".
posted by protorp at 12:07 PM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Steam got my respect when I found an old installation CD for Half Life 1 and typed the key into the library.

I got the entire Orange Box, including Team Fortress 2 and Portal. That was nice.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:18 PM on September 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I came to comment on Edwin Evans-Thirlwell as well -- his writing has been excellent in his brief tenure, and he's been producing a bunch. With so much talent having left RPS over the years, it's nice to see future generations having the same knack.
posted by miguelcervantes at 12:19 PM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know people who buy game bundles (humble bundle and the like), and end up with duplicates. Steam makes it easy to swap games, or give away games that you don't want.
posted by Spike Glee at 12:25 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oooh. 20 years, wow. I remember when they switched from WON ID to the Steam service for Day of Defeat, and there was quite a few people who HATED the new service. The first few weeks Steam did not work all that great, as I recall, so it felt really justified to be annoyed with it at the time. My gaming community at the time* wrote a petition to Valve to consider going back - wish I could find it saved somewhere, as I don't' remember exactly WHY we were so upset with the switch...

Today Steam is actually really good, with some really excellent features like sharing and giving away/swapping games. I also love being able to see my various gaming eras reflected both in the library and my friends' list!

*[Dssg] shoutout!
posted by gemmy at 1:14 PM on September 12, 2023

JoeZydeco: "Steam got my respect when I found an old installation CD for Half Life 1"

If they'd implement 64 bit support, so I could once again play these on my Mac, I'd be willing to forgive them for never dropping HL3
posted by caution live frogs at 1:34 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe as an addendum - next to the more critical points within the RPS article and comment section - the People Make Games video essay on working at Valve?

This is not to say that I am not happy, all things considered, that Valve turned out to be the company behind the digital game distribution store that I've been using in all these years. (Rather than EA or Epic, I guess.) Will they be able to hold their dominance in the next twenty years? Here in 2023, that seems to depend entirely on Microsoft's (future) success with Game Pass (and their concurrent acquisitions).

I am not sure I am terribly excited about the prospect of another subscription model (but for games) now, but I also remember my reluctance of installing Steam. The original Half Life was one of my favorite games and, still, the release of Half Life 2 could not persuade me to "install another application" (i.e. Steam) just to play the game. I bought it on a physical disc, after all, like all of my games prior! Looking at my Steam profile, I held out until the end of 2006 and since then have slowly acquired a sizeable collection of games I've either played way too many hours, too little (under an hour) or not at all.

Over the years I've learned to love video games not just as "entertainment" products, but as cultural objects worthy of critical engagement, thanks to places like RPG, Waypoint (now Remap), Metafilter (thanks, all!), Critical Distance, and more. Heck, I can't even read Valve's celebratory retrospective without also having to think of Shira Chess' concept of designed identity (i.e. an ideological construction of a certain type of 'gamer' that is the result of larger social structures and expectations that are most manifest in game design and advertising). Linking those 20 years of Steam to tech, Internet and meme culture and just that speaks to who Valve imagines (or designes) their customers to be.

But enough with the beanplating, after all Roadwarden is 40% off and I might as well make that my 300th game on Steam...
posted by bigendian at 2:07 PM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

I remember my first purchase- I was following a Let's Play of Deus Ex and wanted to play, but I couldn't find my disc. Steam had it for $10 and I figured, hell, if it's a scam, at least I'm only out $10.

Way too many purchases later...
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:20 PM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've never been a serious PC gamer and haven't logged into Steam since 2014 (until today, out of sheer curiosity), but I appreciate that my entire games library is still accessible to me, including Counter-Strike, which actually pre-dates Steam.
posted by asnider at 2:51 PM on September 12, 2023

Steam got my respect when I found an old installation CD for Half Life 1 and typed the key into the library. I got the entire Orange Box, including Team Fortress 2 and Portal. That was nice.

I've almost forgiven Steam for when I bought the Orange Box back when I still had dial-up modem internet. I thought I'd bought the game on a disk—and the disk did have data on it, it wasn't just a Steam key. But Steam still required me to download updates all night every night for almost a week before it would let me play any of the games I'd bought.
posted by straight at 3:06 PM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]