Before Steam you bought a physical disc and it didn’t matter that you technically only purchased a license, the disc was yours and nobody was coming to your house to take it away if the publisher started fighting with the developer or whatever.
True, with some modifications:
Some games had online activation built in. Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.
Regular CDs have a lifespan of 5-10 years, shorter if not stored ideally. Almost all games had sophisticated mechanisms to prevent backups being taken.
Even if you could take a backup, record associations and publishers lobbied to make it illegal and punishable by severe fines in many countries.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software. EA shipped CDs with autoexexuting software that would actually delete CloneCD and other CD copying software and prevent new installes from working. My copy of Sims 2 came with that bullshit and OH MAN I was not happy about it.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.
Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.
The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.
Yeah good ones allegedly last 200 years if stored correctly. Cheap ones are 5-10. 20 can be expected for quality CDs stored correctly.
But no matter the claimed quality, it’s a gamble. Our local library had a lot of 10-20 year old CDs that had developed microbubbles.
5 years is low range for CDs, but common enough that you should be taking backups for anything you keep longer.
Before Steam (esp. right before Steam) it was common for a disc to have nothing but a 100mb installer that attempted to download the game, or an actual game build so buggy that you were forced to download patches that required you to be online.
Prior to this, games came with serial numbers and needed to be activated online. This made reselling PC games no longer a thing as you needed to trust who you were buying the game from.
In both cases, the physical disc was yours, but it was pretty useless. It wasn’t the game, but also was required to play the game.
Before that, we had truly resellable DRM: “Enter the 3rd word on the 20th page of the manual 🤣”.
No, dialup was still common in the early days of Steam, game content was not largely being delivered as downloads yet and discs were still useful because it could not yet be taken for grated that a customer would be always online.
But I’d still rather download a game straight from the developer or publisher without an additional middleman. Privacy aside, the cost of that rent seeking from Steam gets passed along to you.
