I'm old enough to remember burning frothing hatred of Valve around when steam launched, around 2003? People were creeped out by the DRM and the prospect of creating an account for something to play a game. There was a moderate amount of folks who demanded the ability to play HL2 without Steam, had some forum that's been lost to time.
I remember there was a web comic from around then about how invasive signing up for steam was, like what you want a blood sample too?
Valve had to do... Something to rid themselves of that stink. Some kind of fancy PR or astroturfing.
They literally just waited. It's the same strategy with everything else - horse armor was a punchline when it was introduced, but within a couple years tiny DLC packs were being done by everybody and nobody thought it was weird anymore. Introduce loot boxes and everybody complained, but eventually they lost patience and it became the new normal. Deus Ex sectioned off a sidequest for ten bucks and people lost their minds, but now that's completely standard practice among major releases.
I'm old enough to remember burning frothing hatred of Valve around when steam launched, around 2003? People were creeped out by the DRM and the prospect of creating an account for something to play a game. There was a moderate amount of folks who demanded the ability to play HL2 without Steam, had some forum that's been lost to time.
I remember there was a web comic from around then about how invasive signing up for steam was, like what you want a blood sample too?
Valve had to do... Something to rid themselves of that stink. Some kind of fancy PR or astroturfing.
They literally just waited. It's the same strategy with everything else - horse armor was a punchline when it was introduced, but within a couple years tiny DLC packs were being done by everybody and nobody thought it was weird anymore. Introduce loot boxes and everybody complained, but eventually they lost patience and it became the new normal. Deus Ex sectioned off a sidequest for ten bucks and people lost their minds, but now that's completely standard practice among major releases.
The answer was sales