Nothing from was much more offensive than the gross cases you see around these days, though things were a bit more ubiquitously obelisk adjacent. Dust was created to collect on these suckers. At stores—how quaint—but not as often. After the release of The Orange Box in '07, Steam was my primary destination, and it was becoming the place to buy games for more PC gamers year after year.
Sales, baby. Steam Sales were a different beast back then. Games didn't just get steady, flat discounts.
Limited-time sales reduced games by up to percent. Steam sales were a revelation for kids like me, who had next to nothing to spare on games. Although folks like Stardock tried , no other company had the infrastructure, library, renown, and wild pricing to take Steam on, and so it became embedded into PC gaming culture in the west. A few familiar names were picking up speed, though.
Cheap bundles full of great games accelerated the growth of Steam libraries and renown among participating indie devs. According to SteamSpy , games came out on Steam in In , Steam farted out that many games every two weeks with games released this year so far. Steam was itty-bitty, even if it felt huge.
The peak concurrent users on Dec 26 was 2,, Today, Steam often peaks around 16 million concurrent users. That's around seven times the peak. Steam was the big one, though Stardock Ashes of the Singularity, Galactic Civilizations had a go with their own launcher Impulse , which arrived in June A lack of feature parity with Steam and the sneaky insertion of Stardock's desktop organizer Fences into the Impulse installer didn't help it win over the masses.
GameStop bought out and rebranded the app in , shuttering it a few years later. The next launcher to arrive would be Uplay's primordial form in early I'll never forget the first time a launcher launched a launcher. So, in there was roughly one major launcher. Compare that today's plus. Games for Windows Live made our lives miserable, though it wasn't exactly a launcher, more of an arbitrary overlay and DRM hybrid that forced you into the Xbox Live ecosystem.
I'll never forget the day it was patched out of Dark Souls. Praise the sun, etc. Piracy was definitely a hotter topic in this period. SecuROM was pushing online authentication checks and limiting how many times we could use a CD key to install a game, which sounds like a nightmare from here.
Spore required online authentication, initially limited to three total activations. Mass Effect was even worse : SecuROM required online activation every 10 days when it first launched on PC, though the three-activation limit wasn't a better solution. I'll admit, as a poor college student, I was totally immersed in the world of ISOs and virtual disc drives, especially those lovely no-CD fixes to bypass disc checks.
Being a pirate was easy. The virus-ridden horrors of early P2P programs like Limewire and Kazaa were buried by popular torrent sites, where downloads were faster and content was cleaner or at least easier to verify as such. But was also the year that the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent warehouses, were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and sentenced to prison.
Around then you'd read the occasional horror story about some kid getting sued for millions of bucks because he downloaded an MP3. Do we prefer the old problems or the new problems? The Sims 3 Electronic Arts 2. World of Warcraft Blizzard, Activision 7. Spore Maxis, Electronic Arts 9. With Steam as the earliest source of daily gaming stats we can get a look at what people were still playing near the end of , just keep in mind Steam's library and audiences weren't representative of the entire industry.
Here's a peek at the top games on Steam on December 26, , as preserved by the Internet Archive. This snapshot certainly sends the message that multiplayer first-person shooters were still super popular. Audiosurf, Torchlight, and Killing Floor stand out as prominent indies.
Today's Steam charts don't look terribly different except for a massive growth in players across all games and genres, with some good diversity and new genres peppered in: car soccer, survival games, MOBAs, farming sims, and a bit of battle royale. Most accolades went to big budget projects from established studios and series. This run of Metacritic's highest-rated PC games for would be the middle of the pack in recent years, with a few exceptions. The PC has always been the best place for indie games, but it wasn't until the last decade that we saw those games catch fire in a big way.
Steam and XBLA brought smaller developers to a bigger stage, giving cerebral side-scrollers like Braid a place to thrive. Today, the PC is flooded with games of a similar calibur. I doubt a Terraria or Stardew Valley would stand out in the indie game market of today, where excellent games like Wargroove and Lost Ember show up and seemingly disappear in the same week.
I finally did what I should have done a long time ago. Now the site can be reached under the adress:. It turns out I picked a really good time to do it, because not only was my original host pretty much filled to maximum it was an old one, merely MBs of storage , but to make things worse it also has stopped responding recently. Dodged a bullet there a little :. Please update any feeds or bookmarks you may have.
If you are interested in other PC games you might want to see this extensive list created by Adrian Werner great job Adrian. International readers might want to […]. By: Most anticipated games of the first third of oyvindhauge. RO on March 12, at pm. By: Reasons why it's worth being a PC gamer in - Overclock. I recommend checking out his blog […]. Tomb Raider: Underworld pits you against ruins, catacombs, and ancient vaults the size of football fields on land and at sea, and you spend much of your time making your way through their obstacles and traps hanging by your fingertips.
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