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Valve first came up with the Steam Hardware Survey more than 20 years ago because it wanted to know what specs it should target for Half-Life 2 (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The meat of this "article" is literally just a transcript of the developer commentary segment.

[–] glimse 26 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The video is over two hours long so get ready for bits and pieces to be turned into full articles for the next 6 months

[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I remember someone asking on another post whether we'll get an article for every single line of the HL2 documentary.

Yes, yes we will.

^((and since I haven't watched it I don't mind that much))

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Nowadays publisher just say "buy a new PC" when being asked about specs.

Fuck them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

You could attribute it to Crisis being so popular for not running on typical hardware

But optimizing a game is a waste of money when the majority of sales occur before release

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

That's not really true. A good high end PC can still last a solid 5+ years of the latest releases if you're willing to stop running everything at max settings.

That's pretty much exactly how it was back then too...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

How did this work? The way I remember it HL2 was pretty much the first game on Steam. I remember it being really controversial because you had to install Steam to play the game even offline and people didn’t like that. It was like the original Rockstar Social Club.

How did the survey exist early enough for HL2 to be developed around it?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

My steam account is from September 2003. A couple weeks after its launch

CS 1.6 and generally HL1 and mods were the first (replacing WON for multiplayer matching)

[–] Schal330 9 points 4 weeks ago

I remember installing CounterStrike before Steam, and then an update forcing Steam install, it was around the years Warcraft 3 came out. I'm sure it was a thing before HL2

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I thought steam was out before that. I thought I recalled installing steam and thinking man this server browser sucks compared to Kali.net / browser at the time. Had all sorts of problems playing hl one based mods multiplayer before hl2 came out. Of course they fixed everything and it was amazing for a long time (mp server browser in hl based games). I’m pretty sure steam was out for quite a bit before hl2 dropped.