this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

We can always go back to the old ways of having a download from the company website and downloading directly from them. What? Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Those days didn't even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.

However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Uh, all games had patches and mappacks downloaded directly from the game's distributor. It was extremely slow, hence the invention of CDNs like filehippo, hwfiles, 2cows etc and some gaming companies (at the time you could rent your own server and host the games. Incredible, huh? You could also have LAN parties and play with your clan against other clans all using LAN, no internet required) were also doing mirroring of those files (in Italy it was gamearena and ngi, for example). Steam wasn't even a thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Lol patches... Unless you were having LAN parties, or attempting to play a game of AOE2 over dialup (hoping your mom doesn't try to use the phone), you just ran whatever version of the game came on the disc. By "you", I guess I meant me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

For bandwidth, it'd absolutely make sense if a game that's 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn't even have multi-player.