I remember back in 2003 when steam came out along with the release of CS v1.6.
The whole community complained for a long time, setting up private v1.5 servers and doing anything in their power to avoid steam.
The naysayers had their points, but now the bloated software,buggy friends list and LAN party issues have morphed into a model content distribution network making tons and tons of revenue. Who'd a thought?
Steam also had at least a couple orders of magnitude more problems with crashing, corrupting files, and as it was new the (sometimes incorrect) account banning had a lot of weight. It's much better now, and look what's happened: people actually support it.
Valve may have "known it all along", and it's a huge thing to attempt, so I give them a lot of slack for their earlier problems. But it's succeeding today in large part because it's not a steaming P.O.S. like it was when it started.
You notice how Half Life development slowed to a virtual crawl after the launch of Steam? I'm sure it was obvious to them that they had just invented the most awesome source of revenue since WoW, and everything else shrank in comparison. If not for Steam we would have seen HL3 w/ a much improved source engine by now for sure.
The whole community complained for a long time, setting up private v1.5 servers and doing anything in their power to avoid steam.
The naysayers had their points, but now the bloated software,buggy friends list and LAN party issues have morphed into a model content distribution network making tons and tons of revenue. Who'd a thought?
Valve probably knew this all along.