Half-Life 2 pushed Steam on the gaming plenty… and the plenty pushed again – Cyber Tech

It is Half-Life 2 week at Ars Technica! This Saturday, November 16, is the twentieth anniversary of the discharge of Half-Life 2—a recreation of historic significance for the creative medium and know-how of pc video games. Every day main up by way of the sixteenth, we’ll be working a brand new article wanting again on the recreation and its impression.

When thousands and thousands of keen avid gamers first put in Half-Life 2 20 years in the past, many, if not most, of them discovered they wanted to put in one other piece of software program alongside it. Few on the time may think about that piece of companion software program–with the pithy identify Steam–would ultimately turn into the important thing distribution level and social networking middle for the complete PC gaming ecosystem, making the concept of bodily PC video games an anachronism within the course of.

Whereas Half-Life 2 wasn’t the primary Valve recreation launched on Steam, it was the primary high-profile title to require the platform, even for gamers putting in the sport from bodily retail discs. That requirement gave Valve entry to thousands and thousands of avid gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the corporate bypass conventional retail publishers of the day by instantly advertising and promoting its video games (and, ultimately, video games from different builders). However 2004-era Steam additionally confronted a vociferous backlash from gamers who noticed the software program as a chunk of nuisance DRM (digital rights administration) that did little to justify its existence on the time.

Free (from Vivendi) ultimately

Years earlier than Half-Life 2’s launch, Valve revealed Steam to the world on the 2002 Sport Builders Convention, asserting “a broadband enterprise platform for direct software program supply and content material administration” in a press launch. Valve’s imaginative and prescient for a brand new suite of developer instruments for content material publishing, billing, model management, and anti-piracy was all current and careworn in that preliminary announcement.

Maybe the biggest purpose for Steam, although, was eradicating the middlemen of retail recreation distribution and giving extra direct management to recreation builders, together with Valve. “By eliminating the overhead of bodily items distribution, builders will have the ability to leverage the effectivity of broadband to enhance customer support and improve working margins,” Valve wrote in its 2002 announcement.

On stage at GDC, Valve founder Gabe Newell took issues even additional, positioning himself as “a new-age Robin Hood who needed to take from the grasping publishers what impartial recreation builders deserved: a bigger piece of the income pie,” as Gamespot’s Closing Days of Half-Life 2 function summed it up. Reducing out the publishers and retailers, Newell stated, could possibly be the distinction between a developer taking house $7 or $30 on a full-price recreation (which typically ran $50 on the time).