Yeah, and I don't remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.

Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn't necessary to use, it's rare, but some games just don't protect their game with any DRM).

Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.

That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.

None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.

Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.

They straight up don't want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don't want to.

Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you're doomed. Companies don't care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.

See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?

For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.

They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.

And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.

Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?

Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.

Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.

Drm = digital rights protection

Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto