A boxed blockbuster requires an online account to play

What happened

Anticipation for the game had been extraordinary, sharpened by a long delay and a theft of unfinished material that became a news story of its own. What buyers found when they opened the box was a disc that would not run until the machine had contacted Valve's servers and bound the copy to an account. On launch day the servers struggled. People who had queued at midnight sat waiting, and the complaint that they had paid for something they could not use was widely and loudly made.

The game was received as a landmark, praised for its physics-driven puzzles, its restrained storytelling and the expressiveness of its characters. That reception is precisely why the activation requirement mattered. A title people badly wanted became the vehicle for a condition they did not, and a policy that would have sunk a lesser release was tolerated because the alternative was not playing it. Millions of Steam accounts were created in a matter of weeks.

Two decades on, the arrangement is unremarkable. Games install through accounts, update themselves, and check entitlements without anyone thinking about it, and many players regard the convenience as worth the trade. The objection raised in 2004 has not gone away either: an account can be lost, a service can close, and a copy that depends on a company's continued cooperation is a different kind of possession than a disc in a drawer.

The world at the time

Copy protection in 2004 usually meant a serial number on the manual or a check for the disc in the drive, methods that were annoying and easily defeated. Publishers were alarmed by piracy on newly fast connections. Steam had existed for a year and had attracted more irritation than users.

What it changed

Steam's growth from this point was rapid and it became the central marketplace for computer games. Other publishers imposed their own activation systems, some of them far more intrusive, prompting a long argument about what buyers actually own. The debate resurfaced whenever a service shut down and took purchased libraries with it.