@blakeyrat said:
*) It started with -1000 points, since when it was new Steam did nothing but prevent people from playing their long-delayed Half-Life 2 purchase for 3 days due to bugs
...
I think that Steam has *grown* to become something decent, but it's been digging itself out of a hole since launch day, and there's still too many things that Valve simply doesn't feel like fixing. That said, it's still the best of a bad bunch.
Steam launched over a year before Half-Life 2 came out. I know, because [url=http://steamcommunity.com/id/powerlord/]my Steam account[/url] is from mid-2003, while Half-Life 2 launched in late 2004.
Having said that, Steam definitely sucked when it launched. I really only got it to automate HL1 updates... which also netted me all of HL1's mods (Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Counter-Strike, etc...) as an early Steam bonus.
@blakeyrat said:
*) The app's usability, and most of its coding is abyssimal. Until the
last year or so, I'd call it borderline broken. Even now you can't use
shift-up arrow to select text in a Steam textbox. (God forbid they use
the OS-standard textbox widget! Then it might fucking work!!)
The new version uses Webkit for rendering, so you can blame Apple for that.
@blakeyrat said:
*) About a third of the games on Steam don't work in Vista or Windows
7... some (Quake 1-based games) don't work at all. Valve doesn't care.
They also don't offer refunds if your game doesn't work
Don't they? I just assumed Quake 1-based games ran through DOSBox, just like Doom does. I know Doom worked, albeit with a stupid control scheme that I'm not sure how to change. I'm really spoiled by mouse-look, which didn't really become common until Quake launched... or was it Half-Life that made Mouselook common?
@blakeyrat said:
*) About once every three months or so, Steam will manage to corrupt
either itself, or one of its games, and require a long re-download and
re-install. If you're lucky, you don't lose save games when this happens
I've only had that happen once in three years.