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Gabe Newell says no-one in the industry thought Steam would work as a distribution platform—'I'm not talking about 1 or 2 people, I mean like 99%' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world -1 points 3 weeks ago

who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it.

Exactly. They didn't discover it. They settled it after discovery.

single player

That's a critical qualifier because of course if it's an online game, it requires you to be online.

So saying EverQuest checked to see if you were online when you went online to play doesn't make a point.

I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify

If you can find it, then name it?

Combine that with how lucrative MMOs

Of course if you are playing an online game it knows that you are online!

Sure we would have ended up with Steam, but maybe not as quickly. The massive success of Steam is what caused all other large shops to copy Steam. Which is how we ended up with so many different launchers

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That's what they were pioneers of.

There are tons of online games that don't require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it's providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.

And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic's Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.

this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
424 points (97.3% liked)

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