I joined Steam when I bought the Orange Box for Portal about 10 years ago (Oct 10 2007). Didn't actually used it much though until early last year (when I found out you could give away games).
Anyhow, congrats on reaching the big 1-0 :)
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Congrats on your Steam decade, Nudiustertian! :D
I've joined Steam on 27/03/2004 so I could install the Half-Life Platinum Pack. I could have installed Steam a couple of months sooner because I thought, then, that Steam was DRM like Starforce and such. But Half-Life pulled me through and since then things have evolved. :-)
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Well, Steam was, and still is, DRM. It's just the most benign form of DRM most of us can imagine, so benign you barely even notice it's there anymore. Even so, if I have the option to buy a game DRM-free I'll take it over Steam.
Stuff like this makes me feel old. DRM used to be a big deal. These days DRM is absolutely normal and we've got all the ways publishers try to squeeze every last penny out of us to worry about instead.
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These days DRM is absolutely normal and we've got all the ways publishers try to squeeze every last penny out of us to worry about instead.
I think that's all pretty much normal now, too, sadly.
I miss using the code wheels, or finding the fifth word from the third sentence in the second paragraph on page 27. :P
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I still have my codewheel included in the carton box of Secret weapons of the luftwaffe. There's even a real manual included. ;-)
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Ah-ha, cool :) I've only got a couple physical boxed games left over from the olden days, which somehow escaped the yard sale/trash pile or one of my mother's many cleaning marathons in my childhood.
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I've got them stored on shelves as I still play them on my legacy systems. I recently played some Dynamix titles like Red Barron, Aces over Europe and Aces over the Pacific with the 1946 expansion disk.
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Believe me or not, I remember that game very much lately.
I only played it on a demo provided by PCREVIEW magazine in a 5,25" disk. It took ages to load every time the only mission allowed was started.
It was in my WL then :)
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I played SWOTL for hours and hours, defending the fortresses in the multiple gun positions against the vile nazis or going after them with a Mustang or Thunderbolt. That big carton box contained only the base and original game on 1.44 MB disks. Later I found a cd-rom with the base game and the expansion packs that added 4 more planes to the original game being the Lightning and Shooting Star for the USA and the volksjäger and the pfeil for nazi germany.
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Like you said Steam is DRM. But not of the level of that of the early Starforce versions who silently installed drivers to the root directory. Latest Starforce versions are now an online CD check only.
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I agree that DRM is a fight that isn't fought loudly enough anymore but part of the reason for that is probably people not understanding or even caring what DRM is. Steam, for instance, is not DRM; Steam offers DRM.
Here's a list of DRM free games on Steam. Of course nowhere near a complete one since it's user reported!
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Although the list of games making use of this "offer" is still much larger than the list of games that don't, I'm pleasantly surprised at the increase of DRM-free games on Steam.
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I agree. Like I said though the list is far from complete - Kerbal Space Program for instance is an example of a very popular game that doesn't use the Steam DRM and can be run fine without Steam once downloaded. If you shut down steam and go try to run the game exe files from their directory I wouldn't be surprised if you find several others. In the end it's a bit of a moot point though because most of these games use Steam for updates and a lot of other things anyway, so while not using it for DRM you could say the games are slightly crippled without Steam.
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Top-notch consolation giveaway, I'm not even disappointed to not be level 10 :D Anyway happy Steam birthday, I'm from the same month but from another year (as you've probably figured out already) :P
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Happy steam-cake day :) I'll be 9 in a couple of weeks. Created my Steam acct when they gave out Steam keys for the very first Humble Indie Bundle. Tried to run Steam in WINE and it was not so great, and I didn't touch it again for a few more years.
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I'm in!
(Apparently I hit the 10 year mark on 10/6/2017. I didn't even notice!)
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Happy steam birthday! I hope you had 10 great years on steam. :-)
I'm quite new on steam (only 6 years) compared to you, but I wasn't a big fan of steam in the beginning, because of bad download speed at this time. I think the first game that requires steam was Half-Life 2, if I remember correctley.
Thanks for the consolation giveaway!
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Congrats. I'm already in two 10 year Steam groups, but I'll be happy to join another :)
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I did actually briefly check to see if there was an existing group on Steam that I could just reuse, but the ones I saw weren't actually vetting their members. :-P
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Happy Steam Birthday! and thank you for the amazing giveaway :3
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Bump and meow. If you reverse the digits of this cat's age, that's how long I've been on Steam...
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... and by coincidence I've just realised today is my Steam birthday! =^.^=
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That's a sign. I don't know of what, but it has to be a sign.
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You see, I was going to suggest you had to do a GA now, but for some reason that doesn't always go over well. I don't know why, it's not like it's my fault that the universe gave you a clear message.
The passing of your years is honored in the starter now.
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Double the celebration! Happy Steam Bday to you too! :3 <3
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Seems my account turned 10 4 days ago. Sent you a little something in Steam chat :)
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I don't have a group invite request from you, nor anything in chat. You may want to double check.
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Congratulations on 10 years of Steam, I joined Steam on day one 12th Sept 2003 (my birthday also) so I have a 14 year badge :D
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Me 12+ years!
Congrats on your 10!!
I was one of those half-life users that had to install Steam to play it...
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Congrats on the anniversary, Nudiustertian!
10 years. Ahh, to be young again.... ;)
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Thats different and also cool idea.
Turns out i just turned 10 on 13th this month XD
I didn't enter steam on its first years on purpose- im against closed platforms of one publisher only like EAs, ubisoft and such (come on, we would have to use how many third party software?) - it needed for steam to start opening up... then came the orange box drawing my attention (of course it did) and i looked again 'now things are getting interesting'.
And indeed they did.
Couldn't imagine back then that 6000 'games' would be added on steam on a yearly basis. Heck, couldn't imagine i would have a library 1k+ 10 years later. Bundle what? Its funny to realize that valve actually premiered non-bin bundles way back
Really nice idea! o/
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7 is actually a much nicer number than 10. It's traditionally lucky, it's prime, and the decimal expansion of its reciprocal forms the cyclic number 142857.
...not that that helps with giveaways.
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One could say it's prime but not optimal prime for giveaways... I'll see myself out.
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Congratulations for 10 years. I am 13 years and counting...
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I got balloons yesterday because it was my 13th Steam birthday yesterday. I was already putting together train for something else I wanted to do and decided to change it up for that, but then it got late and just went to bed.
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Ah, the "I wanted to do something but in the end I couldn't be arsed and just left it" scenario, we've all been there.
Or you could be like me and stay up way past the time you should already be sleeping, which is really not a better idea.
...I'm going away now.
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I was up till 5am when I sad fuck it, I'm going to bed. I never do the cake day or birthday giveaways, but I was looking on Steam looking for games to giveaway on another train I'm planning when I noticed the balloons and decided I was going to do 13 games for 13 years on Steam instead. I'm saving the other games because they're themed, so I started to dig through my spreadsheet of game keys and pick out 13 good games because I didn't want to give out crap games. I found 9 games and couldn't was struggling to find 4 more. I'm still digging and hope to have it up tonight. If I can't, I'll just go with my original plan because those games are already picked out, I just don't have the giveaway slots to do both.
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Congrats for your 10 years of steam !
I'm curently on my 12+ :)
Like many others i have start using it for play Counter Strike :)
And thanks for the nice giveaway !
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Oh my, what's this? Enhanced Steam actually hands out balloons and streamers on your Steam birthday. (It's just Enhanced Steam, Valve doesn't care. :-P)) To be honest, my birthday, cake day and Steam day are all pretty close to each other, so this one snuck up on me. I don't usually do anything special, but hey, balloons. And it's 10 years. Remember the Orange Box? That's only slightly older. And I am, of course, much older than that. Son, back in my day we got instruction manuals, on paper, the size of a small house, telling us how to move the magnets up and down to twiddle the bits on the tape in the proper way just so we could play a game...
So let's do something a little special for the occasion. There will be one giveaway that is open only to people who've been on Steam for 10 years or more, at the day I turned 10 (2017-10-23). Because why not? Now, I can't pick a game for the occasion, so you get to do it for me: it's going to be a wishlist giveaway. Entry token for the giveaway is to be determined when I've gathered enough folks to make it fair. To join, request an invite for this Steam group. The GA is not up yet, so there's no rush (and don't get disheartened if I don't respond immediately, I'm not online for most of the day). Feel free to share this with anyone you like. The group is solely for administrative purposes; there will be no spam, promotional links, chats or anything else like that.
For all the people who haven't reached the big 1-0 yet (like I hadn't, yesterday), rejoice in the flower of your youth! Also, of course there's a consolation giveaway. I hope it takes your fancy -- finding something nice on Steam these days isn't easy.
Bonus: give it up for Caractacus, a fellow Steam day celebrator, and the lovely giveaway that comes with it.
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