What if Valve never made Steam?

What if Valve never made Steam?

Games would be split between half a dozen different stores and launchers that would all be worse and eventually microsoft would probably find a way to take them out one by one until they had the monopoly

The monopoly would have gone to someone worse probably

gabe would still be looking at the disc

BdW57ri_gif.jpg - 500x525, 703.09K

Microsoft was already dabbling in digital distribution around the same time, it's why anybody talking about the digital storefront revolution or the concurrent indie revolution usually talks about both Steam and Xbox Live. It's very possible Microsoft could've been inhabiting this space or the market would've been much more splintered with every publisher developing their own storefront.
As to Valve themselves, if they weren't getting infinite money from Steam they would've at least had some kind of pressure to actually release fucking games, or at least their existing games would have more frequent updates to compete in the live service market. Or they'd be dead and Half-Life 3 would still have just as much a chance of existing as it does in reality.

A dab'll do yea.

1.jpg - 1920x1080, 181.37K

it's so crazy to me to remember that time. Microsoft was all on in on the xbox and 360 but they mostly ignored the pc market. They had the chance to do what they're doing now: lean in a stick all their games on pc. You would think with the huge installbase windows has that would have been a no brainer move and if they had done that they would probably be the defacto store on pc. They tried windows live for like 5 minutes then gave up and didn't realize till 15 years later that pc was awesome

What if you didn't suck a thousand cocks?

Physical media and 3rd party sellers would still exist. Probably would have never got lootboxes and/or season passes interjected in the industry as the norm, either.

It would be the microsoft store future.
People from this parallel universe are FUCKED

Nope.
The technology is here, the willingness of people is here.
Physical stores were never able to compete with the infinite availability of digital stores.
Depending on the taste of the store owner was just not very good.

Imagine being this fucking naive when MTX and gambling in games existed before TF2 and Dota 2 and already made tons of money

TF2 definitely popularized it.

Some other company which knows what it's doing (not microsoft) would take over PC market and it's client would be similar to steam. Stop pretending that valve is special.

Better question is what if Valve still made games regularly.

Some other company would have been in their place and it would be 100 times shittier because it's a miracle that valve isn't publicly traded.
When Origen first started they had some stupid bullshit like limiting the times you are allowed to download the games from their server before having to beg customer services to allow you more downloads.

PC gaming would be dead. I'm not kidding you, when Steam was launching, pretty much all companies kept saying that PC is "dead platform" and how consoles are future of gaming. Add inability to distribute your games outside big publishers, not to mention other countries or continents. For better or worse, Valve pushed forward digital revolution that saved PC gaming.

hurr durr licences

...and I'm tired of hearing this over and over.

You can kinda see that Steam started to turn a profit around late 2000s - early 2010s

1728242617829.jpg - 4200x4300, 3.42M

What do you consider a regular output for a team of 350 people

Nevermind. I looked up their list of games. I thought they had a 10 year gap somewhere but I was mistaken. I haven't played anything by them since Dota 2.

Companies would be free to create more and more obnoxious and malware tier drm's
Pc players would be getting cucked out from games daily, soon the "no games" meme would apply to
PC's and not consoles with a small crowd of pc gamers coping that "PC'S STILL GOT IT!!!" while playing nothing but old games, freeware and boomer strategy games
Instead of steam we would have Games for Windows Live 5.0 at this point
Japs would continue not giving a fuck about the PC market and their ports would be fucking terrible
Soon companies would move to digital distribution but to "protect their games" they would do it like some crusty old sites do it today where you pay and can only download the installer one time, for only a short amount of time or re-install only a couple times

this sounds infinitely better than what we have now

Linux gaming wouldn't be viable for at least 2 more decades

Gabe Newell is a scammer and belongs in federal prison for fraud.

Valve screwed over the Artifact fanbase by cancelling the Artifact 2.0 beta without even allowing users to invite friends like they said they would in January 2021 and does not deserve your financial support for these gross consumer-unfriendly practices.

there he is

just look at the state of TV streaming to see what happens if there isn't a massive player offering a better service

file.png - 1800x2300, 1.15M

Shit like securom would've gotten worse and worse until current year denuvo seems like a cute mod with zero performance impact in comparison.

Steam killed off physical so although the PC market would be much smaller we would still have ownership over our games.

someone else would've made it

i would've made it

we would still have ownership over our games

just like consoles right

buy disc

still has to download a 50GB patch to start playing

next consoles won't even have disc drives

just give people what they want

earn money

it's really that simple

provide great service and prioritize consumers

make tens of millions in profit

rape customers every chance you get

earn billions, collapse in a few years and get replaced but you still have your yacht and California mansion

most people would go the second route. Publicly traded companies were a mistake

No, no you wouldn't. Without better alternatives companies would push for scummy drm's, games for windows live and limited licences. And no, they were never okay with selling or trading games. That was only assumed, never approved.

And with our hands on our hearts, if we were in the same position, would we be altruistic enough to not consider that option as well.

When did we turn against FatMan?

honestly yes. You can live an extremely hedonistic lifestyle earning "just" 5 million a year or so. Those people making billions each month have a bunch of personality disorders and sociopathic tendencies and I'm a humble guy who feels awkward even wearing expensive clothes

We would never turn against Lord Gaben.

to be fair he had a lot of backlash over paid mods

when he let vampires in

other companies would double down and pay their twitter interns to go "haha copy haters gonna hate this is the future and you're going to love it"

Gaben actually accepted the negative feedback, backed out of that decision and apologized

No wonder they want to bring him down

PC gaming would still kind of be a pain in the ass. You have to admit this. However, we might have more of a physical media presence.

orange box was such a good way to get people onto steam.

I would buy games and instalki them from DVD not a fucking bury from steam

while playing nothing but old games, freeware and boomer strategy games

Y-yeah, imagine that...

???????

I guess you've never heard of securom

Of course not, all fags ranting about how "steam killed gaming" are console fags or boomers with rose-tinted glasses who don't even remember what direction PC gaming was headed towards before the success of steam gave it new life.

However, we might have more of a physical media presence.

Eh, I dunno about that. CD drives have been kinda on their way out for a while now, I think.

Physicalfags are dumb. It's literally faster for me to download/pirate a game than to read it off a disc.
Optical media sucks ass, and always had, we just had no other options at the time.

Games were always gonna move away from physical media.
Crysis and Bioshock with their Limited Lifetime Activations back in 2007 showed what direction the industry was heading. If you're gonna have online bullshit then might as well tie it into an account with an email and a password instead of cryptic bullshit. Spore in 2008 was the final nail in the coffin for heavy disc-based DRM.
A lot of companies experimented with various new DRM flavors during '08 and '09 and games were coming out on just about every digital service under the sun, until Modern Warfare 2 hit Steam and made it the de facto digital game service.
Some like Ubisoft still stayed away from Steam and launched major titles like Assassin's Creed II exclusively on their own launcher.

physical believers don't understand that physical was dying the moment we got internet that was hilariously fast in comparison to 1998 internet and bald man presented his mini computer on stage, that everyone now has in their pocket.

lol

hqdefault.jpg - 880x495, 235.38K

How would the game industry be if Valve didn't come in and make it completely economically non-viable for publishers to brick people's computers with shit like starforce

No I don't think I want to imagine that.

02193098901.jpg - 720x697, 30.18K

PC gaming would be fucked. Imagine having to install a million different launchers or if the only storefront would be Epic or, god forbid, one owned by a leftist cancer-corp like MS or Amazon.

I would keep pirating games, and never would buy them.

MS or Amazon

leftist

Crushing unions is leftist now?

It's a brave new world, innit

Microjew's fingers all over the platform

GFWL

digital distribution would be inevitable, but now with Xbox bullshit + invasive DRM everywhere

no Japanese games ever

no indie boom

publishers ignoring PC or splintered in a dozen dogshit launchers

It's just me, Gabe Newell.

I mean we still have shit like Denuvo

steam killed off the market that was being abandoned because everyone was afraid by piracy

Everyone was jumping ship to consoles because it was much harder to pirate on those than PCs
You had to mod the hardware instead of some kid selling you a CD-ROM with a folder labeled "CRACK" along side the installer

When Epic opened a fund to "disrupt natural traffic", so now you get 10 of these threads every day

You're right, and Denuvo is cancer you shouldn't buy a single game with it, but as far as I know it's not actively destroying people's hardware.

PC cant play 4k blu ray so you still wouldnt have physical. Unless you want to install 10+ DVDs

one schizo

The BDA is such fucking cancer.

Yeah, but it makes games run a lot worse

This is because of turbo kikery, not any actual physical limitations. If without steam PC gaming was still alive and was still physical someone would've thought of something.

Crysis has limited installation DRM

Utter bullshit.

I don't think I can state it any more clearer.
Yes it's an issue that games run worse, irdeto frankly as a business being the retards behind starforce legally shouldn't be allowed to exist. But they ruined, peoples, computers.

we would still have ownership over our games.

The “right” that corporations claim to have to remove licenses applies to both digital and physical games, anon. Nobody owns anything as long as the corporation says it can revoke the licenses for any reason, at any time.
People thought they had the physical games in the old days simply because a system for policing licenses for ordinary users would cost more money than trading the games in the first place, so companies simply gave up policing. But with technological evolution that's no longer true, Nintendo has a unique ID for every fucking physical game it sells, and it can instruct every Switch in the world not to run a unique license. This is the fear of the people who use that MIG, by the way, after all it makes a copy of a game (along with the license) and if Nintendo identifies two of the same license running at the same time, it can theoretically block the game and your physical game has now become an almost useless little piece of plastic.

they still tried that too

Physical media and 3rd party sellers would still exist

not a fucking chance

IWNet was invented by the kikes at infinity ward.

wow and blizzard would still have happened

horse armor would still have happened

gacha existed before valve picked up steam (heh)

what direction PC gaming was headed towards before the success of steam gave it new life.

revisionist spook detected.
you're conflating 2 completely different things. PC was dying because stores refused to carry games
steam didn't do shit. GFWL, battle.net, etc. still existed.

When they made it fucking mandatory to register on steam to even be able to play HL2. Didn't help that steam was a load of dogshit back then with constant crashes and connection issues, not to speak of the ugly as fuck interface. They managed to turn it around years after when they improved their issues and offered games at such low prices that it drove people onto their store like noone else. Also helped that they produced genuine bangers one after another to introduce people to steam in the first place.

gaben you fat fuck fire mary

So what, did Anon Babble always secretly hate Gabe? Or is this the inevitable conclusion to being a total contrarian.

Hey, here's thing, normies LOVE breathing.

What if Valve never forced a monopoly by undercutting their competition and killing digital ownership forever

Utopia.

le monopoly

Cool narrative pushed by the same people who created the "monopoly" by trying to cut themselves off from the PC market while Gaben saw it as something worth investing into

funny how Valve which is fucking tiny compared to the competition can just "force a monopoly" like that, it's almost as if the others keep coming out with dogshit user-hostile services and then they do a Pikachu face when nobody uses them

Then no one would like newer valve games

you're a fucking retard. another company would have come in its place and locked everything the fuck down all the same.
it's always a race to the bottom with (((services))). once they get big enough they set the terms and it's their way or the highway.

What if Valve never made Steam?

Somebody else would have done it, and it would be way worse and way less consumer friendly than it is now. Love it or hate it, we are incredibly blessed that Valve and gabe were the ones who did it rather than somebody else.

Microsoft has always been on and off with the PC market. They've done this as far back as the 90s; they tried pushing Windows 95 as a gaming platform by commissioning and/or publishing various games (or various versions of games) specifically made for Windows 95.

Linux development would've stagnated more, no joke. Just by opening it up to gaming being more viable, it has made a lot more people interested in it as an alternative

But proton is just a fork of WINE

And does WINE better than WINE when it comes to games. Then on top of that, this has allowed Steam enough sway to try and unfuck Wayland which has been a clusterfuck for a decade+. The fact they are now getting involved with Arch's repo management is telling with how much they contribute, and probably wouldn't have that drive if it wasn't for steam and proton.

They decided to lean harder on stressed porting studios and PC illiterate Japanese studios because they knew that they were more likely to start using Microsoft jeetcode APIs to save time once the 7th gen market started shitting itself to death.
And it worked, even after the Xbone publicly embarrassed itself most people still use the garbage 360 controller and it took far too long for Xinput to finally die.

They did back when Games for WIndows Live was still a thing.

killing digital ownership forever

Ownership of anything software/media 'died' in the Clinton era homie.

no it didn't. boomer desk jockeys can write anything at the behest of corporations, but that doesn't change that the floppy or CD in your hands had the program and it was yours, and no one could take it away from you

They had every right to take that floppy or CD away from you that they have the right to take your hard drive, and exercised that right pre-steam by bricking your hardware or installing a RAT on your pc.
Hell both CDs and floppies can easily be destroyed by the thing that reads them.

They had every right to take that floppy or CD away from you

never heard about anyone having their house broken into by devs. meanwhile your nogaemstation or sexbox can be bricked and disabled remotely at the whim of a corporation and the only way to keep your freedom is to dump all your games and mod your system to break out of the walled garden

meanwhile your nogaemstation or sexbox can be bricked and disabled remo

SO CAN FLOPPIES AND CDs YOU SUBHUMAN RETARD

how can a dev make a CD stop working?

destroying the CD

nice way to set themselves up for a lawsuit
also you they can destroy the original, but they sure as hell can't break your burned backups

Hell on earth

nice way to set themselves up for a lawsuit

If that was a thing then you could sue them for remotely bricking a console you idiot.

They have to comply with laws retard

I want to FUCK Gabe!

giphy.gif - 480x270, 3.13M

1) It's not a monopoly
2) Microsoft

Games would be split between half a dozen different stores and launchers

Just like they are now.

he uses other launchers

CDs contain a good. if it stops working, you complain to the dev and they have to compensate or reimburse you

the console relies on a (((service))) to work. most games require patches from this service to boot up and work correctly. the 'bricking' is them terminating the (((service)))

(((services))) are why everything sucks now

the console relies on a (((ser

You stated the console was bricked.
Kill yourself immediately you disingenuous fuck

why is microshaft so bent on making windows worse each iteration?

redesigned UI to be fisher-price garbage. removed menus and replaced them with tablet UI

slow bloated interface

system requirements are through the roof

shitty mobile appstore shoved down your throat

AI garbage shoved down your throat

why can't they go back to making an OS like windows 2000? it'd sell like hotcakes

an 8th+ gen cucksole without online features is effectively bricked. like a lagdroid without (((play integrity))) because every app started demanding it

People would still distribute PC games on optical media discs. Bluray drives would be commonplace in gaming rigs.

damn female memory card. strutting like it owns the place!

Ayo, this any gud?
RE Resistance looks like shit so really I'm paying £12 for RE 2 and 3 instead of £18 for both of them seperately

what's the logic behind the floppy disk turning into an sd card?

Steam with digital downloads

Ancient DRM that even a toddler can crack for decades and contingency plans to keep games playable if it ever goes under, does not give a shit about private servers or piracy despite spacewar being available for decades and clearly trackable, game is there on your drive and easily distributable with no problems whatsoever (Unless there's a publisher intervention with shit like denuvo that has nothing to do with valve)

"I dont own it"

Consoles with physical copies

Needs extensive fuckery to make a copy of the game, at one point tried to lock your game discs per console despite you "owning" the disc, everything has to be downloaded from the store anyway instead of being on the disc making those copies worthless in the future without download servers, can revoke ability to play some games despitre being physical because the servers are dead with the only way to make private servers being extensive reversing autism complicated by the walled nature of consoles

"But i own it!"

It may/may not be ownership on paper but you are a fucking toddler if you think that the a little -paperwork checkmark is what actually decides that instead of just being legalspeak.

file.png - 600x400, 277.98K

PC cant play 4k blu ray

There are 4K Blu-ray drives though.

wrong question
they would've made it either way for their games. counter-strike was huge back then ... it still is.
the question is what if it hadn't been that successful

I still feel that that's an insane amount of output for a company with 300 people that is also running 2 massive live service games on the side.

I like how unlike most companies they actually at least tried to keep making stuff, just in a different direction like all the software and hardware shit that actually turned out useful or innovative in one way or another ( SteamVR, Proton, Controller Deck, Index) instead of the "We will take 8 years to shit out a game and will release nothing else in the meantime" shit AAAs to today.
That's quite commendable.

spurdo toast.png - 133x133, 17.06K

Valve would probably keep making games, but PC gaming as a whole would be so much worse than it is now that it isn't even funny.

PC gaming was in dire straits. Combined with the rise in smartphones, I don't think it's unfathomable that the PC market could have more or less imploded before a successful alternative was developed, had Steam not been so early to the game and had time to mature when it was needed the most.

alien Swarm in 2010, seven years after steam came into being.

God, I remember when I was pissed that I had to install Steam to play Lost Planet, did not think these two dates were so far apart.

They had fewer than 100 people during their highest game output years of 1998-2007. They were fewer than 30 when Half-Life first shipped.

PC gaming would largely be dead outside of a handful of games, just like it was in the years leading up to Steam.

No way you're not rage-baiting

Some of these releases attributed to Volvo are actually developed by other developers (ex: Half-Life 1 expansions) and/or are low-effort releases (ex: Ricochet)

Some other company would've made a successful digital distribution platform. However, chances are that it wouldn't have become as polished as Steam and thus earned such a loyal userbase, so other stores might've gained a significant foothold all with their own exclusives and PC gaming landscape would be like movie streaming where there's no single platform that has everything you want.

Artifact fanbase

kek

Oh no... they don't allow pedophilia. How tragic....

Give me a fucking break jesus christ.