Steam Hardware
store.steampowered.com
external-link
The Steam Hardware family officially expands in early 2026.

No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.

@[email protected]
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733d

People who came to Steam later on probably don’t realise that when it was new it barely fucking worked.

Downloads crawled, games refused to launch because of authentication issues, friends/chat was offline for literally months, etc.

The only reason it became widely adopted was because Valve forced you to use it if you wanted to play the latest CS or, later, HL2. Everyone hated it.

PHLAK
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32d

This is true but this was also done at at time when all of these things were unprecedented. Valve was blazing a trail with Steam and digital distribution and there was nothing else even close.

It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.

potoooooooo ☑️
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263d

What if he really wanted to make it up to you? Is there anything he could do to apologize?

@[email protected]
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183d

HALF. LIFE. FUCKING. THREE.

potoooooooo ☑️
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23d

Exactly. How tf do you propose to get it if you digest him? You’ve hit on the crux of the issue here.

@[email protected]
creator
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173d

friends/chat was offline for literally months

Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.

@[email protected]
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22d

I only got Steam when HL2 released because I had no need for it before then. I don’t remember having any real negative feelings about it.

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