Valve basically killed the second hand market of PC Games with their Steam keys tied forever to one account. CD Keys was a thing before Steam but only for online games and if you sold the game or lended it out to a buddy the next person could play with same key. Nope too pro consumer thought Valve, made it mandatory for singleplayer games like Half-Life 2. They forced people buying Half-Life 2 to install Steam & create Steam account which at the time was not ready and basically just an early DRM to tie license forever to one account.
Many people could not even play at release, they could not prove they owned what they had bought, cause servers were overloaded so they were locked out of playing an offline singleplayer game on their own computer. Unfortunately that is custom nowadays when big games launch with contrived shitty online service crap forced down gamers throats. Valve basically pioneered that shit among many other douchey moves. They are better than scum like EA & Ubisoft especially these days but far from perfect. So no they all suck to some degree.
Valve basically killed the second hand market of PC Games with their Steam keys tied forever to one account. CD Keys was a thing before Steam but only for online games and if you sold the game or lended it out to a buddy the next person could play with same key. Nope too pro consumer thought Valve, made it mandatory for singleplayer games like Half-Life 2. They forced people buying Half-Life 2 to install Steam & create Steam account which at the time was not ready and basically just an early DRM to tie license forever to one account.
Many people could not even play at release, they could not prove they owned what they had bought, cause servers were overloaded so they were locked out of playing an offline singleplayer game on their own computer. Unfortunately that is custom nowadays when big games launch with contrived shitty online service crap forced down gamers throats. Valve basically pioneered that shit among many other douchey moves. They are better than scum like EA & Ubisoft especially these days but far from perfect. So no they all suck to some degree.