Slightly Agitated

[Balck]

Nope.  Access to the game is through steam keys.  

[Grim DeGrim]

Steam is great. 10 years... In fact, it is near the only platform I use for game purchases.

[Thomas Blackwell]

I edited the title as it was too long and slightly distasteful. I'm sorry to hear you're upset, but look forward to meeting you upon the waves when you do finally get out to sea.

[De Ruyter]

Steam is great. 10 years... In fact, it is near the only platform I use for game purchases.

I can second this aswell, I've been using steam as my primary method of buying games since 2005.

I'm very happy that these games are allowed on steam at all nowadays.

[Sophist]

Times have changed and technology has advanced. I've been gaming on the PC since 2003 and never remember a game that charged a daily subscription let alone a per hour one. If a game company tried to pull a stunt like that today they would be laughed at. I guess they could get away with charging $10 per hour back in the 90's because online gaming was still in its infancy.

 

Indeed. I think there were a couple main factors at work back then. 1) Bandwidth was a lot more expensive, and just wasn't as available as it is today. For the most part everything was driven off of provider hosted networks (GEnie, AoL, Delphi, Compuserve, etc), and they charged a lot for access. Moreso for gaming because it ate up a lot of their very limited bandwidth.  2) System resources. Back then hardware was still quite expensive, especially server side systems (this was when "good" NEC desktop monitors ran $4,000, and an 80 mb hard drive was $750). So for a gaming company to host an online game they typically rented system space from someone, and that wasn't cheap.

 

And as you rightly note, the entire genre was in its infancy then so there wasn't the huge player base to pull revenue from.

 

Things have certainly come a long way over a rather short period of time.