But your timeline is wrong there. DRM already existed, it was all over the place on PC games. Digital distribution was barely there.
Steam's innovation was to wrap the DRM into a full-on digital distribution platform. This is a good couple of years before Microsoft put one of those on the Xbox 360, and many years before they made full price games available on it. It's before the Apple App Store. Before World of Warcraft (although in fairness after EverQuest). Before Netflix. Before Spotify. It's before anybody was tying your digital "purchases" to a persistent account.
There's no reflection of PC value on other publishers not having their own take on Steam, Valve simply came first, before anybody else on any market or any platform. They were not the first to point out that curbing rampant piracy was as much about making the commercial alternative more convenient as well as more secure, but they were the first ones to implement it (poorly) and to improve fast enough to actually realize that idea.
They invented games as a service. Ground up. Day one. They are the prototype for digital distribution worldwide.
For the haptic feedback? No, it's a mechanical screw with a physical stop to keep it from turning at the right time. You can see it disassembled here. The sensor may be a hall effect sensor, I don't actually know, but once again, the patent isn't about drift.
Watching that video gave me flashbacks about how much of a pain in the ass these are to disassemble, too, which is why I have several of these with stick drift issues just gathering dust instead of actually repairing them.
I mean, that's fair enough, I suppose. Like I said elsewhere I've had more problems with the PS5 controllers than the Switch ones, but my guess is this is luck of the draw. Some people just don't like the Joycon form factor, and that's also fair. I have some wrist issues and split controllers are amazing for my specific issues, so I'm very on board with the design for very specific reasons.
FWIW, I suspect a lot of the issues people report with those things are down to connectivity, not build quality. The BT antenna in those is terrible and it's being power starved to run on their tiny batteries. I've used literally hundreds of Joycon at one point or another and rarely seen legit stick drift, but I've had controllers where in a noisy environment just your hand grip could make the connection get all flaky. What the Switch does in that scenario seems to be to just hold your stick position and call it a day, which isn't great.
No, I read the whole thing, including that line, but that's entirely editorializing from the reporter. The quotes from the actual patent are pretty clear, machine translation word soup aside.
You being nitpicky made me go dig up the full patent, which makes it even clearer: "(...) The intensity of the magnetic field can be designated from the application. Thus, it is possible to perform flexible control in accordance with the application".
I don't blame the commenters for not going that extra step, though, that's just me being fastidious. I do blame the reporters focusing on stick drift because mah clicks for not reading the patent properly, though.
EDIT: For what it's worth, I find the idea of a stick being full of ferrofluid or whatever else they're using for this to be... likely finicky and potentially messy and fragile, depending on how much you need in there to make it work properly. This sounds intriguing and weirdly high-tech, but if you made me bet I wouldn't feel comfortable putting money on this showing up on a Switch 2 just yet. Could be wrong, though.
Besides all the roguelikes people mentioned, Omikron: The Nomad Soul from Quantic Dream has you possess a different body each time you die, which comes with different conditions. The idea was then reworked much more extensively for Watch Dogs: Legion, where you play as a whole resistance movement you can expand via recruitment and jump to a different member upon death.
It is absolutely amazing that nobody seems to have clicked through to the actual article.
So for all the "just use hall effect sticks" people, the patent is apparently not just for a solution to drift but also a way to add variable pressure to sticks, kinda like what Sony does to triggers.
It took me like fifteen seconds to read deep enough to find that.
For what it's worth, I think it could be interesting, especially if applied in a Nintendo-like way, bur proprietary stuff like that tends to go underutilized. You know, like the triggers on the PS5 controller.
But those things can be true at the same time. Yes, PC gaming was in a rough spot before Steam solved DRM and digital distribution. Absolutely physical PC games were struggling with no alternative and Microsoft sure wasn't figuring that out.
But Steam's success was to transition PC gaming to an all-DRM-all-the-time quasi monopoly built around removing PC game ownership from the table altogether.
I'm just as fine with both of those statements. In the real world things rarely are complete positives or negatives, despite our cultural need to take sides on stuff. This entire thread started with a tongue-in-cheek joke about how controversial Steam was at launch, which is an undeniable fact. People get weirdly defensive about it, though.
The biggest difference between Steam and others is that people tend to recognize Apple's weirdness about the App Store or the downsides of Spotify or Netflix, all of which pulled off similar moves. Steam, though, still manages to present itself as a bit of a plucky upstart that is with you on this thing against the big bad publishers, which is kind of nuts.
I mean... would it? Indie devs not only existed before Steam, but typically have a hugely contentions relationship with them. I haven't forgotten all the growing pains about races to the bottom through sales, arguments about curation and the entire Greenlight fiasco.
I'd give them credit for pushing indie devs enough to get Nintendo to stop being annoying to work with, but that was Microsoft pushing Sony which in turn pushed Nintendo. Steam is background noise in that process.
Valve solved the issue of PC piracy in the way Netflix solved the issue of TV and movie piracy: by creating a convenient service people liked to use that is significantly more hassle free than digging through shady websites. If they hadn't figured it out, the next-in-line big store that happened was GOG, which is coincidentally a DRM-free storefront that grew as a reaction to Steam. I don't know what the CD Projekt Deck would have looked like, but we at least would have gotten a third sequel of a game series, so there's that.
Look, Valve people speak a very specific way. It takes a while to wrap your head around what they mean.
The quote you're giving me is Valve-speak for "we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don't add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform".
And yes, those things do apply to Steam. You absolutely don't own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you're actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup. This is itself a breach of Steam's EULA and not a service they provide. It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool and, while there is a "Offline Mode" you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.
The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam's DRM is, in fact, DRM because it's crackable is kind of shocking. It's a testament to their PR, for sure, but also to their ability to do long term moves due to being a private company. It didn't take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM, but it did take a competent CEO with no shareholders in his way to deploy that strategy.
But that doesn't mean it's not DRM or games-as-a-service. It absolutely is. Valve invented or perfected DRM, online distribution, battlepasses, monetized UGC and, technically NFTs. The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.
It matters because it's there. If it was meant to not be DRM it... wouldn't be DRM. That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.
In practice, the DRM matters because it discourages keeping a backup of fully owned game files. On GOG it's trivial to backup offline installers, which are provided explicitly (and I do keep a backup of games I only own on GOG, by the way). Steam explicitly limits your access to your games and how you use them, presumably to support a secure microtransaction environment within the Steam platform. That'd be the "ensures the Steamworks features work" bit in that text.
That's extremely nontrivial for Steam, for the record. Disputing the ability to drive separate MTX under Steam is why several major publishers ended up withdrawing for a bit until they realized it's not commercially viable and Steam is effectively a quasi-monopoly on the PC platform.
I'd argue the "illegal things" fit my definition because, again, you do not lose access to legitimately purchased things for doing those things in the physical world.
Likewise for banned bought-and-sold accounts, of which there are some examples online. Selling things or telling someone your credentials is not illegal, the only basis to remove access to the account on that would be the EULA.