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
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/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/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
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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...
And little Timmy said gaming would be better without a Steam monopowly.
Fair points. Controllers work in big picture mode, but I get what you're saying. But on the other hand, the Steamdeck and Proton have done a lot for making Linux gaming more accessible.
Oh, I was criticizing other stores.
The offerings of Origin, UPlay, EGS, and Battle.net pale in comparison to what Steam makes available to customers. And out of those, the only one that isn't a heaping dumpster fire is Battle.net–which actually put effort into its UX and design.
Oh, i complete misread your comment. Sorry! I see that now. Steam and GOG are the only stores I have, I don't play a lot of new games.
This is the case in steam already. There are lots of (mainly Indy) games that will start fine without steam.
Yeah, some games have drm it depends
You just rent a license on Steam. So it's a definition of DRM.
The definition of digital rights management is licensing? That does not sound right to me.
A long time before steam the software sector moved to selling licenses only btw.
ik, but when you lose your account you can copy the non drmed games to another pc or smth.
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.
Vivendi got so close to killing Valve and HL2, it is scary. Gabe had balls of steel and championed on.
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.