Originally posted by johnc
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Steam solved SO MANY problems in pc gaming it's not even funny. Patching games, installing games, making sure you have all dependencies, finding game servers, inviting friends and so on used to suck. Steam made iterating trough patches much faster, it also allows for testing specific branches the developer may want to keep from the wide public.
They also added many useful features like a forum for each game, a screenshot system that works THE SAME WAY regardless of game. You get to easily share then with friends and so on.
Steam does have it's share of problems or functionality that haven't been improved for a long time, but nobody else has been able to do it better while keeping compatibility with traditional pc games that don't have a strong and unified API tied to then, like MS is trying with their windows store games. It's easier to start with a clean slate like MS is doing, and they still manage to fail.
As long as people care about their back-catalog (something Steam has pioneered, they don't care if a game was released on steam 12 years ago, it will work, unlike consoles or even how pc gaming used to be) people will keep using steam.
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