Remember times when there were no launcher? Just double click and you’re running the game. Good times indeed.

Steam was considered an abomination when it was released. Drm and a launcher to run HL2? GTFO.

Yet here we are where everyone loves Steam. Its no surprise other companies wanted to follow knowing that in 20 years, a horrible consumer policy could become beloved.

When it was released? Steam ran like shit for me until probably 2017. It’s finally a usable piece of software.

I also prefer steam because steam comes with a lot of benefits. If steam was still just a launcher and nothing more, I think most people would take issue with it today. That’s just not the case, though.

Easy way to manage games, huge sales, support forums, easy way to manage friends, steam workshop, support for pretty much every controller, fast download servers

And one thing that people probably don’t realize, is that steam will work with developers to implement patches. Many times when I play old games I’ll go to PC gaming wiki and see that I need a few patches and mods to make the game work, but the wiki will say that those patches and mods were implemented into the steam release. It’s really nice.

Unless you’ve been dealing with steam VR which still has a long way to go before anyone calls it “easy”. Not that the blame lies on Steam for rapidly changing hardware and standards but it seems like at some point they just gave up on consistency and served ui soup.