Valve first came up with the Steam Hardware Survey more than 20 years ago because it wanted to know what specs it should target for Half-Life 2
Valve first came up with the Steam Hardware Survey more than 20 years ago because it wanted to know what specs it should target for Half-Life 2
The first public Steam Hardware Survey came in April 2003, but there were private antecedents used by Valve earlier.
It's great how this has helped them make many more games after that.
Yes, but can you imagine how much more shitty PC gaming would be without Steam?
Let's see...
- "No takesies-backsies" refund policy.
- User "reviews" are hidden and only used to serve you better ads.
- Supported platforms are Windows and Windows.
- "Join our Discord to discuss game."
- Controller input rebinding is nonexistent; disabled people don't matter.
- Controllers are supported... except when doing anything before the game is actually launched.
- Download strange DLLs from websites to install mods.
- Alt-tab between your game and YouTube to read guides.
And little Timmy said gaming would be better without a Steam monopowly.
We have to thanks Vivendi group (a shitty conglomerate from my country who killed a lot of good products) who have forced Gabe to move to online sale as Valve couldn’t adapt the bad reseller contract they had with this Vivendi (who tried later to kill their business via lawsuit).
If you didn’t see it yet, have a look on the 20 years documentary of HL2. Really interesting.
I'd say less shitty and just more fragmented.
Indie games releasing on tiny little sites out there across the web, like how independent authors release on small publishers websites.
Linux (as a gaming platform) would be fucking toast, though. You could hope for some of the efforts from the Raspberrypi and emulation community on that front, but not AAA.