[sylens]

And downloading patches often meant waiting in a queue at places like FilePlanet for an hour or two, then downloading it at a snails pace

[Arrath]

I absolutely do not miss "download button roulette" on cnet or whatever site it was where it you had the joy of playing "which of these 3 banners saying 'DOWNLOAD NOW' is actually the download button and not a sketchy ad that will ruin your day"

[yomlica8]

And then manually applying them. If the game was old enough you might need to apply multiple patches, something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve was going with this was the future.

[dpkonofa]

Oh god! Fileplanet. That also reminds me of "Download managers". They were literally apps that would search for the same file from multiple places so that it could try to part the download up and then combine the file at the end. It was like BitTorrent before BitTorrent.

[duckmysick]

I remember getting game patches from CDs that came with the game magazines.

[theLiminator]

Haha I totally forgot about that aspect of the Internet

[deelowe]

Yep. That's essentially why "the cloud" became a thing.