Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans.
Steam first opened its figurative doors all the way back in September 2003, and has since grown into the largest digital PC gaming storefront in the world, which is actively used by tens of millions of players each day.
“In case anyone’s curious about the odd colours, that’s the colour scheme for the original Steam UI when it first launched,” commented Redditor Penndrachen, referring to the badge’s army green colour scheme, which prompted a mixed reaction from players who remembered the platform’s earliest days. “I joined in the first six months,” lamented Affectionate-Memory4. “I feel ancient rn.”
No, wait, it literally WAS Steam. I mean, it wasn’t just Steam, but those guys were there at ground level. Valve is ultimately an offshoot of Microsoft, it’s not like becoming the main app store on home PCs by introducing structured DRM, sales and download management software wasn’t part of their plan.
So let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. Denuvo? Yep, that sort of DRM predates Steam. License limits and online activation? That’s contemporary to Steam and it’s the problem Steam is trying to solve. Online app stores built around DRM? Steam is as early on that race as it gets, and it’s absolutely built for that purpose.
I like it as a piece of software, too, it’s well made, but why whitewash it?
Plus, I have to point out that you seem to be arguing two opposite things at once. Is DRM inevitable? Well, since you seem to be correctly arguing that DRM-free alternatives do exist and seem to be financially viable… I’m gonna say no?
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wish i could hide badges… the CS 10 year veteran badge makes it really shameful to play CS… because I never play CS, I just own it.
I too bought CS:S so I could use the assets in Garry’s Mod.
I only signed up to play hl2 I think before that I used keys and CDs for things like ground zero
I think I made mine in 2009 for some sweet sweet TF2.
The orange box was such a good deal
I remember how much everyone hated steam at first. The WON was fine why ruin it with this stupid steam thing?
Nice. I didn’t make a Steam account until it supported Linux back in 2013 or so. So I guess I’ll be celebrating 10 years on Steam soon.
11/22/2004 reporting in. Just currently 18 almost 19. I do not have a short steam ID though. Can’t remember which game was the first but pretty sure it was either half-life or HL2
Member since 24 July 2004 here. Doesn’t feel like 20 years, but it’s also hard to imagine having ~5Tb of installed games across multiple launchers just… available. Plus emulators and other resources. Steam was a pain in the arse at first, but they made it work, and they saw beyond the limitations of dialup tech. I was all for it at the time because I had one of the few Coax connections (NTL at the time, later taken over by Virgin Media) which at that point I believe was 10Mbit… Of course, nowadays we have Gigabit FTTP rolling out throughout the UK, so this seems really quaint, but it’s pleasing to see how far we’ve come.
The US coverage still sucks. Sort your shit out guys, you’re 20 years behind the UK, and we’re a good 10 behind Norway, Hong Kong and others thanks to Twatcher.
I’m always shocked at how behind the US is in some areas of tech despite having so many of the big tech companies located there. Like you say their internet coverage and terms of packages, like still having data limits in 2023. Also the fact that they still sign for card payments in shops, when we’ve been though both chip and pin and contactless since that method was common.
Yeah - I don’t even cary cards with me any more, it’s all on my phone. Including many store cards (Coop, Texaco, Shell, McDonalds…) which automatically pick up without me doing much - I scan, it works.
The only thing I can think is that the US is such a fractured environment with Federal, State and Local government, each with different jurisdictions, rules and taxation, that trying to get it to work would be beurocratically difficult. But at the same time, it’s so ruled by corporations that surely they’d want to push the easiest way - flip your phone out and wave it to pay, easy and secure, so make it happen :D
One more year and my Steam account can legally drink and smoke. I’m taking it to Vegas!
You can start drinking at 18
In America, probably not. It’s 21 for all states due to a federal law. If a state has it lower than 21, they get way less funding for Federal high ways, as the bill was aimed to lower drunk driving.
aw, only 19 for me!
Mine was 19 years, but I was military and got sent overseas for a few years. When I came back, I hadn’t actually logged in for the entire time and my account had been reset.
18 as well.
My argument is that it was inevitable at the time, and everyone saw it coming. It was going to happen regardless of whether Valve created steam or not.
You literally state this:
Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
I don’t think any of that is true. You can avoid most of the shitty DRM today and the big brother-esque remote DRM. People who adopted it then, didn’t usher this in.
But they did it. They made it work. Somebody else might have, I suppose, but it was literally them. EA was trying hard to push online activations and failing miserably. Download managers paired with DRM were a dime a dozen and were not making a dent. It was Steam.
They took the most anticipated game in the PC landscape and acquired the most played mod, bundled them together with their trojan horse of a DRM-cum-online store and forced the entire PC community to buy into it or be unable to play the big stuff.
That´s what they actually did in the real world. I remember, I was there.
So given that Steam absolutely counts as “shitty DRM” in my book, I’m not sure your representation fits reality. Like I said above, I buy DRM-free games whenever possible and my Steam account is still growing way faster than my GOG account despite prioritizing GOG.
Damn, 16 here
