david_chisnall on Nostr: nprofile1q…036ma I still find myself surprised that Steam became successful. My ...

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqqu56p82wp0ucpu7jkwcvvtfdc7wcmuqkdrqvzpkwl78rdkkckucqv036ma (nprofile…36ma) I still find myself surprised that Steam became successful. My first experience with it was wanting to play Counterstrike multiplayer, something I'd done many times before. Only now there was an update and so I needed to install Steam to be able to join. Okay, so I installed Steam and it installed some OS services that showed up in the process monitor as taking double-digit CPU.

I wanted to then launch Half Life, but Steam now required me to install the Steam version. It had the same version number as the version I was running (I owned the CD and had installed all of the updates). This required downloading the entire game again. On a 1Mb/s link, which was the fastest that I could buy at the time, more than half of the people I played against were on MODEMs (26.4 Kb/s on a poor line, 56 Kb/s if you were close to the exchange). On this, I needed to download hundreds of MiBs of files that were already on my computer.

And then, when I actually launched the game, the CPU taken by the Steam client (which needed to be active to join the game) dropped the frame rate below playable.

I stopped playing CounterStrike and decided to never give Valve any of my money ever again.