Why did people hate Steam so much back in 2004?

[ejb626]

OK so if you remember my thread "My dad is trying to shove the PS3 down my throat" then you know I was in a pickle over a new gaming console I think I'll go with the 360 its a risk but the PS3 just doesn't appeal to me, for a while a considered getting a gaming PC but that was just because I wanted to try out TF2, so my friend found a website called "Can you run it?" where you type in your computer model and stuff and a game and it tells you if you can run it or not and according to it I can run WoW on my laptop so I thought "Hey, if I can run WoW I can definatly run TF2 I'll get an account and buy it off Steam"

last night I was fooling around on Urban Dictionary and looking random stuff up I looked up Steam and found a bunch of negative defintions all written in 2004 here they are unedited
NOTE: These are not my opinions they come from people on Urban Dictionary

1. "a waste of code designed to turn good games (like CS, dod) into piles of shit,
2. the worst way to update games,
3. a REALLY bad idea,
4. a way of getting 56k players off half-life in the hope to reduce lag but because of the fuckups in code its laggy with more than 4 people playing on a server, "

"A one-shot-one-kill weapon usable by gaming companies to kill a game. See awp".


"The only thing on the face of the earth that could have so many errors" (this one had a second part that I'm not sure I'd be allowed to say on here)

"The un-amazing way in which Valve has decided to let people play Counter-Strike and Half-Life, so buggy a program it is almost completley unusable."

"The finest example of a commercialization of a popular game. Steam has only one main purpose and that's to fill Valves pockets. Steam takes away your freedom by forcing you to autoupdate annoying updates almost every week. Valve makes it impossible to add custom features, like skins or tools. Programmed by the noobs at Valve Corp"


I think you get the picture all of these defintions were written back in 2004 which was somewhat comforting but they made have second thoughts on using it is it better today? And feel free to use this thread to discuss how bad it was back in 2004 from a more intelligent perspective than some of these people.

 

[Gxas]

You know, despite how good it is at doing what it is meant to do, I still refuse to get Steam.

The strangest part is that I honestly cannot give you a reason for that. There is just some little voice in my head that doesn't want it, so I don't get it.

[small]Maybe its because of my extreme dislike of most everything Valve...[/small]

 

[Nugma]

Steam is a very useful the day today, unfortunately it hasn't always been so.
Personally I use steam for all of my games, including non-steam games.
With Steam Community, Steam Overlay and Steam Store, it's a tool that you can use for every game you have, add a steam short cut to your non Steam Games, and you can access these features in-game.
Steam has undergone gazillions of improvements since 2004.

 

[ejb626]

Look, allow me to explain to you how things work.

Urban Dictionary is like Xbox LIVE.
Which is to say 99% of the users could fucking hang themselves and the world would literally become a better place overnight.

Unicorns would roam the lands, flowers would spring up everywhere, God would come down and be all like "Dudes and ladies I am so fucking sorry I have been so hungover so like what's happened while I've been gone?" et cetera.
You get the picture.

These are people who think "fag" is the height of wit.
These people make Oscar Wilde roll in his grave so hard that he creates a time dilation effect that actually reverses time far enough to bring him back to life.

Just ignore them.

Yeah I know its pretty entertaining but these defintions were written in 2004 and while yes most I'll shorten it to UD because I'm lazy users are way over-exaggerated idiots who seriously need some Ritalin I wanted to make sure Steam works now because I don't want to get it if its a shoddy product

 

[Kollega]

Because the Internet was not as fast back then,and Steam itself was in the beginning of a loooooooooong improvement run.

 

[Jonci]

Hard to remember back then, but I kinda of a vague recollection of when Steam was coming out. There are few people that liked the idea of digital copy, when you could have a nice, solid, in your hands disk. Plus, Steam had a lot of issues early on. I had basically considered it a failed concept and had forgotten about it. It didn't even come to my attention again until last year. Obviously the idea of digital copy has survived and it being done more often, and Steam works to the best of my knowledge. I only use it for the beta test of Global Agenda.

 

[Kstreitenfeld]

Steam had plenty of problems back in the day, but was still usable... Nowadays it has gotten much better, and also houses many more features.

 

[mikecoulter]

Urban dictionary is just a joke place surely. Maybe its sarcastic?

 

[Therumancer]

I think there is still a lot of Steam hate out there. It's just that a lot of people on sites like "Urban Dictionary" don't bother to explain themselves and why they reached that conclusion.

To date I have DLed roughly 3 games from Steam (I have yet to use their community). Those games are Sacred Gold, Warhammer Dawn Of War II, and Risen.

The problems I have with Steam are manyfold.

#1: First and foremost given that I am not getting a disc, manual, or other physical goods as well as the fact that I am dependant on the goodwill of, and continued existance of their service to access what I purchused, I feel the price of the games should be lower.

#2: Steam slows down games and causes problems. When I downloaded "Warhammer 40k" from Steam after buying it on THQ's site (for the wargear pack) I had tons of problems getting the game to run properly. Indeed I wound up giving up on it due to how horribly it ran. Ironically pirated copies without Steam ran far, far, more smoothly from everything I heard. As I do not pirate (despite what some people might think from some of my other messages) I basically do not play this game, very sad because I love Warhammer 40k, and wanted to see how it ended.

#3: Steam has trouble with patches and updates despite allegedly being "easier". Over time I have seen multiple games which have patches that are specifically not compadible with the Steam version of a game. While I doubt this is a universal problem, it's enough of one.

#4: Steam puts spyware on your computer according to many reports, and "rats people out" for having pirated games. Honestly I am personally not at risk from this, but I do not like the idea of anyone going through my system except for me, no matter what their reasons are.

#5: Like #4 above this is "by reports" but apparently Steam also engages in censorship. One game I've discused recently is "Risen". Allegedly Risen has several sex scenes in the game (on the level of the sex scene in Gothic 2 when you hire a hooker) that have been specifically cut out of the STEAM version, but exist in other versions of the game. There was no notification of this being a cut version (that I saw) upon download. What's more there are some rather sloppy "skips" in the game at certain places because of it. Criticize on my taste in content all you want, but basically I do not want my ganmes censored.


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In general I do not like digital downloads at all, and will not approve of them until the industry substantially lowers the price for D2D games compared to physical copies, and finds some way of guaranteeing that prices will remain low.

About the only time I do digital downloads is when looking for very specific independant games, or games not seeing a mainstream release in the US (like say Star Wolves 2, or Planet Alcatraz). Even then I'm less than happy about doing things that way. I generally tend to avoid supporting D2D in any form, and with big/mainstream releases I absolutly refuse to use it.

Case in point, I'd love to replay Persona 3 with the new female character (announced here) to see how it changes things, while not a PC game, if they release it in the US as "PSPgo" only, I will simply pass on it due to the format.

 

[targren]

For many of the same reasons as a lot of people hate it now.

1. Requires a connection between your machine and the steam servers. Back then, steam downtime was a lot more common, but it still happens (especially when hot new releases come out). Nowadays, downtime on the player end is more common, but the end result is the same: unless you have a crystal ball that says "Some idiot is going to plow into a telephone can and knock my internet out for three days. I should put all my games into "offline mode" now." you can't play.

2. It gives someone else the ability to lock you out of your own, legally-purchased games because they take exception to something you've done. Whether it's to lose your temper and let loose with both barrels on that TKing idiot or get caught with a 3rd party mod for an OFFLINE game (as in, not cheating other players), a ban gets all of your games taken from you.

3. Publishers still don't seem to "get" digital distribution. Steam isn't particularly bad about this, but the concept is still broken when companies like NCSoft charging $30 for a digital download of the original Guild Wars ($20 on sale now!) when it's available for $10 or even $5 dollars every other week from a retailer selling it in a box...


Simply put, years of dealing with Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and EA among others have left me unwilling to trust game publishers to do anything approaching The Right Thing, and Valve also has a particularly ugly past record, so I'm not adding THEM into the mix.

 

[Neur0t0xin]

Being one of the very early testers until I forgot about it for 2 years and forgetting my account, I'll explain this the easy way. Simply, in 2004, Steam was shit. When it was first released, there were many problems, mostly stemming from it originally being pretty badly coded and not having most of what was promised included, as it ended up having to be rushed to a 'full' release for the release of HL2.

However, over the last 5 years it's been improved many, many times and it's now the first thing other than Firefox I'll download onto a new PC. It's worth it alone just for ease of having one place to launch all games from and the non-invasive in-game instant messaging it allows.

As for people whining about performance issues...Maybe several years ago. Nowadays, it's much, much better coded and has a tiny system footprint.