The Half-Life 2, published in 2004, was a critical step in transforming Steam into a huge digital rights management (DRM) system covering the PC games. The original Half-Life was released many years before this historical development and in 1998. At that time, Monica Harrington, the co -founder of Valve and the marketing manager of that time, shared a memory that completely changed his approach to DRM.

In his speech during the Game Developers Conference, Harrington recently told the back of the scenes of this change. According to PC Gamer, Harrington shared that in his speech that his nephew received a CD-Rom Printer with the money he saved for school supplies, and then sent him a cute letter of thanks that expressed him the happiness of copying the games and sharing them with his friends. However, this “innocent” letter was quite enlightening for Harrington. He said that this new technology could start a whole new era for a computer game piracy, and that this has the potential to spread throughout generations.

First steps against piracy

Harrington said that copying computer games at that time was tried to be blocked by only one CD switch verification system. When Half-Life was released, the complaints of the users who said that their games did not work in the forums came up. When the Valve team examined these complaints, it reached a very interesting result; None of the users complaining about the game was understood. This showed that the verification system achieved its purpose in the first stage.

But this verification method soon remained in the classroom: Many people interested in computer games in the early 2000s found that it was quite easy to skip Half-Life’s CD key verification system if the right code is known. However, these initial efforts were the basis of the more robust DRM system that Valve would implement with Steam in the future.

Another important point that Harrington mentioned in his speech was the difficulties of Valve’s initial period. In particular, the rights problems experienced with retail publisher Sierra, almost Half-Life 2 brought to the point of interrupting the development process said. Such problems further strengthened Valve’s desire to provide his own control in the field of digital distribution and drm.