To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.
The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.
who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it.
Exactly. They didn’t discover it. They settled it after discovery.
single player
That’s a critical qualifier because of course if it’s an online game, it requires you to be online.
So saying EverQuest checked to see if you were online when you went online to play doesn’t make a point.
I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify
If you can find it, then name it?
Combine that with how lucrative MMOs
Of course if you are playing an online game it knows that you are online!
Sure we would have ended up with Steam, but maybe not as quickly. The massive success of Steam is what caused all other large shops to copy Steam. Which is how we ended up with so many different launchers
They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That’s what they were pioneers of.
There are tons of online games that don’t require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it’s providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.
And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic’s Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.
To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.
The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.
Exactly. They didn’t discover it. They settled it after discovery.
That’s a critical qualifier because of course if it’s an online game, it requires you to be online.
So saying EverQuest checked to see if you were online when you went online to play doesn’t make a point.
If you can find it, then name it?
Of course if you are playing an online game it knows that you are online!
Sure we would have ended up with Steam, but maybe not as quickly. The massive success of Steam is what caused all other large shops to copy Steam. Which is how we ended up with so many different launchers
They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That’s what they were pioneers of.
There are tons of online games that don’t require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it’s providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.
And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic’s Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.