Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming
<i>Valve is not my friend?</i><p>Sure; it is no more my friend than my doctor, mailman or the guy who aerates my yard is my friend.  We have an agreement that they provide certain services for certain fees.  We may have an amicable relationship, but little more.<p>I give Valve the benefit of the doubt for reasons largely nostalgic and mentioned in the article: Valve is the company that brought me the <i>Half-Life</i>, <i>Left 4 Dead</i> and <i>Portal</i> series of games that I have enjoyed considerably.  They also introduced Steam, which back in its early days was most certainly a boon.<p><i>Steam is not healthy for gaming?</i><p>Perhaps, but I&#x27;m not convinced that it is the sinister force the article paints it as.  Anybody else remember the pre-Steam days?  Let&#x27;s go back to October 1, 1999: almost four years before Steam launched.<p>If you wanted to play <i>Half-Life</i>, you had to go to a brick-and-mortar store and find a boxed copy.  Now by October 1999, <i>Half-Life</i> probably wouldn&#x27;t be too hard to find considering that it had been out for 10 months...but how about <i>Age of Empires II</i> or <i>Grand Theft Auto 2</i> (both released September 30th)?<p>If you lived in a relatively large town, you might have a shot at getting a copy.  If demand was high, you might have even reserved a copy (back when pre-ordering made sense due to scarcity).  But if you were late to the store or didn&#x27;t even <i>have</i> a decent store near you, you waited until a retailer ordered new copies and a truck delivered them and somebody stocked the shelves.<p>Steam ended that nonsense with a click.  The amount of time you waited depended upon your Internet connection.<p>What if you wanted to play with friends across the Internet?  Or just join an ad-hoc game with strangers?  If you were lucky, the game you wanted to play had a decent in-game server browser.  If not, you had to rely on something like GameSpy (if it supported the title) to connect you to other players.<p>Steam also has eliminated that problem: you can see what your friends are playing and join them directly.  A built-in server browser can provide you a list of public games to join as well.<p>How did you know when a game update was available?  Back in 1999, you had to hear it from a friend or see mention of a patch release on a gaming website.  Then you had to <i>find</i> the patch, download it (and hope that your download wasn&#x27;t interrupted), and follow the installation instructions.  Not rocket science by any stretch, but still time-consuming.<p>Steam changed that.  Updating was trivial.<p>Taking screenshots in-game and easily sharing them with friends?  Voice communications?  Steam also provided a single integrated solution for both of these, in place of other third-party options.<p>Installing mods, once a real PITA for most games, has been greatly simplified by the Steam Workshop.<p>I could go on.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that Steam doesn&#x27;t have customer support issues, or that such features as game reviews or Steam forums aren&#x27;t subject to abuse, or that sometimes Steam seems to take a bigger cut of the profits than it may appear to deserve.  And, in all fairness, it doesn&#x27;t fully explain why I balk at Origin (perhaps its the bad taste in my mouth that most Electronic Arts efforts leave with me) when it&#x27;s largely the same thing.<p>I think Steam has, at least for most of its lifetime, been a <i>benefit</i> to PC gaming.  We can debate as to what &quot;healthy&quot; means (I would argue that the abuse of what constitutes a DLC anymore and micro-transactions have done more damage), along with Steam&#x27;s culpability in fostering the &quot;Early Access&quot; environment today, but I think gamers are far better off now than they were in the pre-Steam era.