Maybe I'm just set in my ways, but I strongly dislike Steam.
it fucking ruined my favourite past-time.
Guess I'm the only one who loves steam?
These days I have less issues with it, and the precedent it set has made it so that games are constantly being put online, games you'd have to hunt down a physical copy of otherwise, obscure ones, famous ones, overlooked gems. It has, overall, been good for the industry.
But at the time, it was updating CONSTANTLY for multiple days in a row, for hours at a time. It was crashing all the time. It messed with how servers for Counter Strike and TFC, my games of choice at the time, would be set up.
And most idiotically - this might still be the case now - you had to boot Steam up to play a game offline. You had to connect to the internet, in order to set it running in offline mode, before you could play a game that
you already owned on disc. At the time my internet was shaky, so I would play something like Half Life if my internet was down, but it wouldn't let me, because it was constantly crashing and updating and wouldn't boot up, so I couldn't boot it up to connect to the internet so that I could set it offline and then play Half Life.
Yeah, they worked out the kinks - eventually. Now it is one of the best things to ever happen to gaming. But back in, when was it, 2004? It was like giving my computer herpes.