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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!

It's so funny how this works. I remember when Steam came out (I was in HS) and it was extremely controversial. Everyone, and I mean everyone, hated it. "I need to start ANOTHER application to run my game?" It was slow, clunky, buggy, and basically a piece of garbage. It also started the anti-consumer aggressive software DRM trend (you basically couldn't share games anymore). In other words, it was a huge gamble by Valve.

There's few people I'd tag as "visionaries" in the software realm, but Gabe Newell is one of them. No idea how (maybe it was just luck), but he literally saw 10-15 years into the future. Very few people are able to do that: off the top of my head, I can only think of Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.

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Steam was 100% visionary. After Steam I realised everything would go online - I kept telling my dad to stop buying DVDs because I told him it would all become online and discs would be pointless.

Turns out it was like 10 years too early. That just shows you how early Valve was.

Except I'm not sure you were right. There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline. It's all just streaming with a catalogue of titles that can be removed at any time.

> There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline.

You've been able to do this for at least a decade, it's called the iTunes Store. I believe Amazon Prime lets you download movies now too.

Yeah turns out even that didn’t happen. Actually piracy is the closest we can get to a universal service.

Even more so now it is not pointless to own some nice CDs or DVDs.. You do not need internet connection.. just put it in the player and go.. still way easier than any spotify integration in modern hifi equipment that I have seen.

Oh yeah, I was pissed at the time. I held off playing HL2 for years because of it. I think I remember reading about a Steam easter egg where it accepted your old Half-Life box set codes. I tried it, and was pleasantly surprised. I bought the Orange Box, and never looked back.

Even years later, they quietly added HL Alyx to my library. I’m 100% skeptical of platforms like Steam, but Steam & Valve have won my trust.

Their unflagging support for Linux is just another piece of why I won’t budge from their platform.

You're right, fortunately for steam all the rest of the gaming world became worst than having steam. Now the choice isn't between renting a game with DRM and needing another application to work or owning your game that you could copy , give or lend but between the former and the same + worse shit added like needing a second software or having exclusive

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