Steam wasn't the reason for more indie games, in the beginning, they hardly had any. But the guys saw that it was a growing market and started to add them to their platform.

Also language change is not Steam thing but a cost thing and about licences. While consoles had multilanguage versions for some time and were shipped on DVD, many PC players (mostly in US, in Europe the DVD for PC was spread much forther) still only used CDs. That meant that the manufacturers had to keep the production costs down. Also it was often the case that one publisher would own the rights to the english version, another one the rights for the german version, some of these licence holders even created the translations themselves (that's why we often don't have them on GOG). With online sales this changed drastically. Most publishers from these days are gone by now (anyone see SoftGold publish anything lately?), one company would hold all the rights. Also unused language versions would not take additional CD space (=waste of money). You COULD say that since Steam was the first big online platform, that it is their merit, but it was a change in the industry, it's not related to Steam directly.

The sales are cool, but the whole structure also means that older games don't become cheapter by default. That ender completely.

You named the main reason: Steam is/was convenient, there is no arguing about that.

Also gamers tend to defend their choices: "I do / I chose this and this is good. Everything else is crap."
For some reason, all their community stuff is also valued by many. I try to turn off whatever I can. But then again I also don't use Facebook or anything similar (apart from a messenger or two). People wanted, and Valve provided.

Steam attracted millions of people to the platform. Steam has like 90 million active users. You could argue that those people might have come anyway, but to a different platform, in an alternate history where Steam was never made, but that's highly hypothetical.

This^

We can end the thread right here.

No more hypothetical than the other way around.

And I disagree, most gamers had very little choice about Steam, so not so much about attraction, as not much choice with a monopoly. And then it became the norm. None of that means there would be less gamers if Steam did not exist.

In fact, when I first fully realized what Steam meant, I stopped buying games for many years. Back in 2008-2009 using Steam in most of Australia was a horrible experience and hard to avoid .... 56K modem back then. I wasn't alone in rejecting that situation.. At that point I switched to console games for my kids, and ignored new PC games for many years ... until May 2017 in fact.

Gotta agree with you on that one. I remember that during the early 2000s almost every month I'd go to the retail stores and buy new or discounted CD games. And I also bought plenty of gaming mags that used to come with a free game on the CD (along with demos, wallpapers and free apps).

The emergence of steam and almost all games coming with steamworks from 2005 onwards forced me to stop buying games and resort to piracy whenever I wanted to play new stuff.
I only stopped pirating games when I discovered GOG and it's offline installers system.

One word: Artifact

Because they have been around forever. You see them in common stores like Walmart via Gift Cards. They are convenient. Its where the majority of peoples gaming libraries are.

If Valve was a fruit, it would be the Carambola (which is kind of poisonous btw, avoid if you have kidney problems)

And the worst thing for me back then, was I was buying discs and then couldn't play the game until Steam did an update, so with a 56k modem that could take a week in some cases. I was so disgusted with the situation, especially as I was not really all that aware of what Steam was initially, and I don't buy games and play them immediately, just buy them in a good sale. Once I realized, it was too late, and doubly worse was how small the print (in many cases) on the case advising of the Steam requirement, which I found downright dishonest. Extremely hard to read in poor lighting and in bad colors.

I'd purchased the Valve 'Orange Box' and SiN: Episodes box games (as discs) and lived to rue the day. I never got past attempting to play the original SiN game which came with SiN: Episodes.

Up to that point I'd been religiously grabbing CD check cracks for all my bought games. I'd become so disgusted with the advent of Steam and what it meant, that I just gave up buying PC games altogether, especially as I had real trust issues. I just decided to stick with the games I already had plenty of. Later I did obtain lots of abandonware games or run copies of friend's disc in virtual drive programs.

By the time I was re-introduced to GOG (could not use them originally due to modem speed and no faith in purchasing online at that point, not even setup for it), I'd long since stopped bothering with friend's discs and cracked exe files. So to me GOG were like a breath of fresh air, and no need to bother getting games any other way. I could survive without the games not available at GOG, and sometimes I just had to wait for them to turn up at GOG. I've got more than enough games to go on with. Eventually, with a far better web speed I entertained the idea of Steam again, and even made a very low priced purchase of the Valve Collection and over time a small handful of other very cheap games at Steam. And in the last couple of years especially, the number of free games from several stores has been huge, so I'm not left wanting for much ... though a few AAA games I am missing would be nice ... but not with DRM ... unless free.

I don't reckon I will be able to play all I've gotten, just once, before I die.

You've got that backwards.

If not for the success of Indie games via sites like Itch.io, I doubt Steam would have even bothered. Just like they did not bother with old games, until GOG were successful with them.

Eh... I agree on older games, I don't remember those ever being a thing on Steam until after GOG started. However indie games were absolutely big on Steam before I ever heard of itch.io or GOG started selling them. Early stuff like Braid and Wold of Goo were absolutely Steam staples.

Could you please provide exact threads on r/pcgaming & r/pcmasterrace to understand you better?
Both are huge to figure/find out what you mean...

indie platforms were DEFINITLY a thing becfore Steam made indies big.
Some may not have existed before, but others did and they grew about the same time as Steam did. When indies became more popular, Valve brought them to Steam as well.

What Steam changed, was that people became more organized. Before Steam, indie devs would be present wildley spred on forums, exchange their works there (there were indie communities in the late 80s, long before Steam). The idea of a common platform to actually sell stuff was, what Valve introduced, but it took some time until these communities would go 'public' to say so. After all many of them wanted to be the outsiders, the ones who would oppose the big companies.

I remember differently, and Greenlight, when Indies became more of a thing on Steam, started a year before itch.io
But Indiegames definelty were available on Steam before they opened the floodgates. They were just a lot better curated, and crappy games did not really have much of a chance to be released. Before Greenlight, if a game was released on Steam, you could at least expect some level of quality, similar to today's curation on GoG.
Terraria for example was released more than 10 years ago, more than a year before Greenlight started.
And while there actually was a physical release for Terraria, that was a lot later, and without Terraria's success on Steam unlikely to exist.

Another thing that i forgot about though was payment. At least in Germany.
Credit cards are *still* not all that common in Germany. They were even less common ten years ago.
Steam was one of the few online stores that allowed payment without a credit card, by allowing them to pull money directly out of your account.
With services like Paypal that is not all that important anymore though, but even 10 years ago, that made games conveniently available that you otherwise had no reall chance to buy, or were only available at exorbitant import prices.

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