What keeps us coming back to a platform that feels like it’s held together by duct tape and sunk cost?
Steam is a disaster. We all know it. It looks like a dashboard from 2011. It acts like it was designed for CRTs. Half the features are buried in menus you forgot existed. It’s slow. It’s cluttered. It’s a landfill of fake games, Early Access corpses, asset flips, and live service updates nobody asked for.
And yet here we are. Every day. Opening the client. Scrolling the front page. Buying more games we won’t play.
Because as bad as Steam is, it’s also the only thing holding PC gaming together.
The UI is an Overgrown Forest
Steam’s interface isn’t just old. It’s cluttered, confusing, and full of leftover features nobody asked for. It’s a mess of overlapping menus, filters that don’t work, and tabs that change layout without warning. It’s like someone started building it in 2005 and never stopped adding bits to the same pile.
You open your Library and immediately regret it. The left-hand sidebar is overflowing with stuff you forgot existed. You scroll past abandoned Early Access projects, free-to-play games you installed once, and the same three titles you’ve moved in and out of categories for a decade. The filters are useless. “Installed” still shows things that aren’t. “Recent” includes games you haven’t touched in six months. The categories you made years ago? Broken. One is empty, one has thirty games it shouldn’t, and the rest are duplicates that won’t go away.
Then there’s the Store. You expect chaos, and Steam delivers. The homepage is a barrage of random promotions, Early Access warnings, wishlist pop-ups, and sponsored junk. You scroll through rows of games you don’t want, only to be offered more games you already own. Nothing loads in the right order. Nothing links where it should. The front page is a roulette wheel that shouts at you.
Click through to a game and it somehow gets worse. You’re met with autoplay trailers, Twitch embeds, and ten screenshots before you get to the description. The actual text explaining the game is shoved halfway down the page, behind feature boxes and user review graphs that tell you everything except what the game actually does. Try to find the system requirements and you’ll need a torch and a crowbar.
The settings menu is buried under layers. Some options are in the Library, some are in the client, and some are locked to each game. Nothing’s intuitive. Nothing’s in the same place twice. You try to fix something, and you end up on a forum post from 2012.
And then there’s Big Picture Mode. That thing still exists, technically. It runs like a broken kiosk interface and looks like it was built for a resolution that doesn’t exist anymore. Valve gave up on improving it years ago and moved on to the Steam Deck UI, which is somehow both better and also not available unless you install a separate OS.
Steam’s UI isn’t one interface. It’s the history of every design decision Valve never deleted. The whole thing limps forward because we’re used to it, not because it works.
Discoverability is Dead
Steam gives you tools. You can set tags. You can block genres. You can list what you like and what you don’t. And none of it does anything. You still get recommended games with tags you’ve already disabled. You still see titles from categories you’ve marked as ignored. You could blacklist every word in the dictionary and the algorithm would still throw a farming sim at you with anime thumbnails and AI-generated description text.
Scroll the store for five minutes and you’ll see the pattern. Dozens of throwaway games, all priced just low enough to slip under the radar. Some of them are fake. Some are clones. Some are cobbled together in two days using premade assets and a menu screen copied from something better. They exist to waste your time. Some exist to mine trading cards. Some exist because someone needed to flip a few sales to test a feature.
Steam doesn’t filter them. It doesn’t even seem to notice. The front page is filled with sponsored clutter and endless variations of the same five game types. Survival crafting with AI bears. Low-effort horror with the same mannequin rig in a different hallway. A roguelike card battler that promises thousands of combinations but delivers a loading screen and a crash log.
Meanwhile, the good stuff gets buried. Games made with actual effort. Weird, interesting things with no ad budget and no chance. You find those titles on accident. Maybe a friend sends you a link. Maybe you catch a trailer in the middle of a YouTube rant. Maybe someone mentions it on a Discord server and you go looking for it yourself. But Steam won’t surface it. It’s not popular enough. It’s not tagged correctly. It doesn’t fit whatever loop the store’s current logic is using.
The search is no help either. Type the exact name of a game and it’ll still show you five unrelated titles first. Type something vague and the algorithm panics. You might get the right result. Or you might get a list of things from 2014 that happen to have the same word in the publisher name.
The only sure way to find a game on Steam is to already know what you’re looking for. It’s a terrible way to run a storefront. It punishes curiosity and rewards brand recognition. You end up buying more sequels because they’re the only things you can actually find. Everything else slides off the page.
Steam doesn’t reward quality. It rewards momentum. Once a game gets picked up by the algorithm, it sticks around. If it doesn’t get that push early on, it sinks. There’s no human intervention. No staff picks. No front page curation with actual thought behind it. Just data points and automated lists repeating the same cycle every time a sale starts.
For all the noise about personalisation, the platform treats everyone the same. It wants you to click the thing that already has a thousand reviews. It wants you to buy the same game everyone else is buying. Because it’s easier. Because it’s safer. Because if it goes wrong, nobody at Valve has to explain why they picked it.
Steam is a platform built by engineers, not curators. And the result is a store that sells you what’s popular, not what’s interesting.
Fake Games, Scam Games, and Ghost Games
There are thousands of games on Steam that shouldn’t be called games. They exist to take up space, fool the algorithm, or farm a handful of sales from unsuspecting users. You’ve got idle clickers that don’t even pretend to offer mechanics. You’ve got asset flips where someone dragged a Unity demo into a new folder, changed the logo, and called it a release. You’ve got low-effort visual novels that use AI-generated art, stock music, and the same plot as a mobile ad.
Steam lets all of it through.
There’s no real approval process. If the file runs and doesn’t break the law, it goes live. That’s the bar. Some titles are clearly scams – games that crash immediately or never open at all. Others are functional but meaningless. They’re not broken in the technical sense, but they’re still a waste of time. Fake storefront images, misleading trailers, completely mismatched tags. You buy what looks like a strategy game and get a reskinned mobile idle title with no interaction and a pop-up asking for a positive review.
A lot of them are just grey market fodder. Games priced absurdly low, sold in bulk, designed to be bundled or traded. The goal isn’t to entertain. It’s to exist long enough to be harvested for trading cards or bundled into giveaway sites. A few hundred sales here, a couple of key requests there, and they vanish. Some even reupload the same project under a different name. New cover, new screenshots, same files.
And Steam lets them stay. Because Valve doesn’t check. If it meets the most basic standards, it stays up. If it gets flagged, it might get pulled later. But the money already changed hands. Valve takes their cut either way.
The worst offenders aren’t just lazy. Some are dangerous. There have been games with hidden crypto miners, games that install junkware, games that redirect to phishing sites. It’s rare, but not rare enough. And you can’t count on Valve to catch them quickly. Reports take days. Refunds depend on how fast you notice. Most users never do.
You end up doing the sorting yourself. You become the filter. You check reviews. You scroll the forums. You run the title through Google just to make sure it wasn’t made in three hours by someone who’s already uploaded twelve other clones. And every time you do this, you wonder why the platform isn’t doing it for you.
Because buried under all this junk are actual games worth playing. Small team projects. Solo devs with weird ideas. Games that don’t have marketing money but still try to offer something real. And they get lost. Pushed out by the noise. Hidden between “Horror Scare Pro: Toilet Edition” and whatever AI nonsense someone threw together in a browser.
Steam should be better than this. It’s not a new platform. It’s not struggling. It’s not a startup fighting for growth. It’s the biggest digital storefront in PC gaming history. And it’s filled with landfill.
We all end up scrolling past the same titles over and over. The same $0.79 shovelware. The same suspiciously named asset flips. The same projects with fake developer names and blank community tabs.
And somehow, the store keeps growing. Not with quality. Just with more.
Steam Reviews Are a Mess of Noise and In-Jokes
Steam reviews are supposed to help. That’s the idea. Real feedback from real players. Honest reactions to the actual experience, not curated marketing nonsense. And sometimes, they’re useful. But most of the time, they’re noise.
Every game has a wall of “Recommended” reviews with jokes, single-word statements, or recycled memes. “Crab.” “Game has gun.” “I fell down a hole and died 10/10.” The same stuff repeated across thousands of pages. You try to scroll through and get a sense of the game, but you just end up reading the same joke twenty times. It’s less a review system and more of a meme feed.
Then you hit the opposite extreme. Reviews that treat the platform like a therapy session. Paragraphs of deeply personal stories about how this fishing simulator helped someone through a breakup. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help anyone decide if the game is worth buying.
There’s also the fake balance problem. Steam lets you leave a review after a couple of minutes. And it lets you rate the entire game with a thumbs up or down. So you get people who played for five minutes, left a negative review because the tutorial annoyed them, and never touched it again. Meanwhile, someone with 600 hours and every achievement might leave a thumbs up that says “Yeah it’s alright I guess.”
And the “Most Helpful” system doesn’t filter based on insight. It just counts votes. So the reviews that float to the top are usually the funniest, not the smartest. You’re trying to decide if the game has decent mechanics, and instead you’re reading about a guy who played it while drunk and accidentally set his houseplants on fire.
Steam’s own metrics don’t help. You’ve got “Overwhelmingly Positive,” “Mostly Positive,” “Mixed,” and then whatever happens when a review bomb hits. There’s no nuance. No weighting based on hours played, recent activity, or whether the game has been patched. One bad update can tank a rating for months. And developers can’t do anything about it except watch.
That’s before you even get to review bombing. Some of it’s protest. Some of it’s organised chaos. Sometimes it’s targeted because a developer tweeted something. Sometimes it’s just because the game added paid skins. Valve says it filters “off-topic” reviews, but the damage is usually done long before they step in.
Then you’ve got the games that dodge criticism altogether. Developers that bribe players with in-game rewards for a thumbs up. Bots that flood the review section. Updates that erase earlier problems but never shift the score. Games that coast on nostalgia and get recommended just because they’re “better than nothing.”
And let’s be honest, most people don’t read them. They glance at the score, check the first two lines of the first three reviews, and click “Add to Cart.” The review system looks deep, but it functions like a gut check. It gives the illusion of research while pushing you toward the same decision you were already going to make.
The reviews aren’t useless. But they’re not reliable either. They’ve become part of the platform’s theatre. Funny. Loud. Distracting. Sometimes insightful. Rarely honest in a way that matters.
If you’re lucky, you’ll find a review that tells you what the game actually is, how the systems work, what the pacing feels like, what kind of bugs are still kicking around. But more often, you get 3,000 people saying “This game cured my depression” and 500 saying “It deleted my save file and made me sterile.”
And you’re supposed to figure it out from that.
The Storefront is Manipulative and Broken
Steam Sales used to mean something. You planned around them. You built a wishlist in the hope that your favourites would drop in price. You checked the front page each day to see what rotated in. It felt like a real event, even if you had no money. Now? Now it’s just background noise.
Everything is always on sale. Every week has another themed sale. Strategy week. Simulation fest. Crafting celebration. Survival showcase. Nothing feels special anymore because you know it’ll be discounted again in a few weeks. The excitement is gone. The urgency is gone. It’s not even about saving money anymore, it’s about resisting the noise.
Wishlists used to help. Now they’re just inbox spam. You get the same game on sale five times in one month. The email says “80% off” and you still don’t care because you’ve seen it so many times before. The discount means nothing when it’s applied by default.
And then there are the bundles. Half the time you don’t even know what you’re buying. Base game? DLC? Extra content that isn’t actually content? You try to figure out what’s included and end up scrolling through five layers of add-ons with three different editions and an upgrade path that makes less sense the longer you look at it.
The Deluxe Edition is the new scam. It’s the same game, with a PDF artbook and some low-bitrate soundtrack files they threw into a folder. Sometimes it’s locked pre-order content they resold. Sometimes it’s a skin pack that used to be free. Either way, it’s dressed up to look like value when it’s just the same game for more money.
Steam doesn’t guide you. It doesn’t recommend based on quality or long-term support. It just shows you what’s on sale and shoves a discount tag on top. The assumption is that the lower the price, the better the deal. But that’s not always true. Some games go on sale just to bait reviews. Some drop price so often that nobody buys them at full cost anymore. Others pad their price before the sale just to show a bigger number crossed out.
The whole system is built to push decisions. It doesn’t care if you’ll play the game. It cares if you’ll buy it before the timer runs out. That’s why the countdowns are everywhere. That’s why there are “weekend deals” and “midweek madness” and “publisher spotlights” and “event discounts” that all blur together. They don’t want you to think. They want you to click.
Even the front page reflects this. It’s packed with flashy promotions, rotating banners, and themed categories that change by the hour. One minute it’s horror week. Next it’s anime sale. Then it’s a racing game bundle with half the content missing because the rights expired. You stop checking because it all looks the same.
It’s a system that burns itself out. Constant sales mean nobody pays full price. And when nobody pays full price, developers raise the full price so the discount looks better. So the cycle continues. You see a game you’re interested in and think, “I’ll wait for the next sale.” Because you know it’s coming. Because it always comes.
Steam could fix this. They could limit the frequency of discounts. They could offer better filtering tools. They could stop inflating bundle pages with junk. But they won’t. Because the chaos works. People keep buying.
The sales aren’t celebrations anymore. They’re just noise. You scroll past 300 titles, don’t buy anything, and come back next week to do it again.
Early Access is a Graveyard
Early Access was meant to be a good idea. A chance to support developers before their game was finished. You get a rough version, help shape its direction, give feedback, and watch it grow into something great. That was the pitch.
But somewhere along the way, it became a dumping ground.
Now it’s a section of Steam filled with half-finished projects that never got past their first patch. Games launch with placeholder menus, missing content, and performance issues that would make a PlayStation 2 weep. There’s no timeline. No roadmap. No real sense of progress. Just a “buy now” button and the vague promise that it’ll be better eventually.
And maybe it would be if the developers stuck around.
But too often, they don’t. You buy in, wait a few weeks, and the updates stop. The forums go quiet. The last patch note says “Thanks for all your support!” with no follow-up. You’re left with an unfinished game that never worked properly in the first place. Sometimes it’s still playable. Sometimes it’s broken forever. And Steam doesn’t refund you because it technically “ran.”
The problem isn’t just that some games are bad. It’s that the platform treats all of them the same. A two-person dev team with a real plan is shoved next to a shovelware asset flip wearing a fake development roadmap like a disguise. You can’t tell which is which until it’s too late.
You leave a review pointing this out, and someone replies, “It’s Early Access, what did you expect?” As if the label is a shield. As if launching a product in an unusable state is fine because they admitted it was incomplete. That defence is everywhere. It’s used to excuse everything from missing features to game-breaking bugs to total radio silence.
And the longer a game sits there, the more it fades from memory. Steam stops surfacing it. The community forgets it. The only thing left is the skeleton of a project nobody finished and nobody talks about. Sometimes the devs admit it’s abandoned. Sometimes they quietly remove the roadmap from the store page and hope you don’t notice. Most of the time, it just lingers. Not dead. Not alive. Just… there.
And Steam lets them all stay. Because the sale already happened. You bought it. You played twenty minutes. That’s the end of it. Valve has no real system for cleaning up. No meaningful visibility rules. No hard limit on how long something can rot in Early Access. The only requirement is that it still launches.
Meanwhile, the handful of devs actually doing the work get buried under the weight of all this. They post regular updates. They respond to feedback. They build proper games. But they have to fight against the stigma of being labelled “Early Access.” Because when people see that badge, they assume the worst.
That’s the real damage. It’s not just about bad games. It’s about how many players stop trusting the process entirely. You see “Early Access” now and your first thought isn’t hope, it’s hesitation.
It didn’t have to be like this. Steam could’ve added more requirements. They could’ve introduced stages. They could’ve removed abandoned projects after a certain time. But they didn’t. Because that would mean stepping in. That would mean drawing lines. And Valve doesn’t draw lines.
So Early Access stays wide open. No oversight. No clean-up. Just a wall of games in varying states of collapse. Some worth your time. Most not. And you don’t find out which until it’s too late.
Steam Groups: Dead Forums with a Login Button
Steam Groups were supposed to be communities. A place for fans of a game, a genre, or a niche interest to talk, organise events, and actually be social. They launched in 2007 with all the excitement of a proper forum replacement. But that was a long time ago. Now they’re ghost towns.
Most group pages are abandoned. You visit one and find a pinned announcement from eight years ago. A recruitment post from a now-defunct clan. Maybe a “weekly event” thread last updated in 2019. The discussion tab is filled with spam, broken links, and unanswered questions. Nobody’s moderating. Nobody replies. You’ve stumbled into a digital mausoleum.
Valve hasn’t improved them. They haven’t updated the layout. They haven’t added tools. They haven’t removed broken features. They just left it all in place and walked away. You can still create a group. You can still post announcements. But it’s like shouting into a collapsed building. There’s an echo, but nobody’s there.
You might still join one by accident. Some multiplayer games auto-add you to their group when you launch for the first time. You get a pop-up that says “you’re now part of this community” and then never hear from it again. Some developers used to use it to post updates. Most don’t bother anymore. They’ve moved to Discord, Twitter, or just abandoned public updates entirely.
The strange part is how many games still link to their group page. It’s a button in the UI. A line on the store page. You click it out of curiosity and it opens a wasteland. The last post is a support request with zero replies. The events page is empty. The chat is offline. It’s embarrassing.
Steam could’ve done something with them. Added more moderation tools. Better discovery. Integrated group events into the platform properly. But instead they’ve let the system rot. It’s there for legacy reasons. Not because anyone’s using it.
And yet, people still join. You still see the numbers tick up. Tens of thousands of members in the biggest ones. But it means nothing. They’re not talking. They’re not meeting. They’re not sharing anything. The only activity is passive. People join and forget.
Steam Groups are like old forums left open because nobody remembered to close them. They’re still there, technically. But they’ve stopped being useful. They’re a leftover part of Steam’s past. One more piece of the interface that exists out of habit rather than purpose.
Steamworks, Achievements, and Features Nobody Asked For
Once upon a time Steam was just a store, now it wants to be a platform. A service. A complete ecosystem. But most of the extra features it pushes feel half-baked, outdated, or ignored. They’re relics from a time when Valve thought Steam could be its own version of Facebook with games bolted on.
Take cloud saves. In theory, it’s a brilliant idea. Play on your desktop, pick up on your laptop, no lost progress. But it’s not reliable. Some games use it. Some don’t. Some say they do and still lose your save because they sync the wrong folder. There’s no clear standard. No warning. You find out the system failed when the game boots up and you’re back at the tutorial.
Then there’s Remote Play. Again, great concept. Stream your game to a friend. Play local co-op over the internet. But when it works, it’s a miracle. Most of the time it doesn’t. Inputs lag. Streams stutter. The interface barely explains itself. You spend longer configuring ports than actually playing anything. It’s not intuitive. It’s not stable. It’s not fun.
Achievements were supposed to add replay value. A reason to try different tactics or complete strange objectives. Instead, most of them are junk. “Start the game.” “Press jump.” “Look at the menu.” They flood your feed with pointless notifications. Some games pad their achievement count with hundreds of meaningless tasks just to show up in “100% Completion” groups.
Then there’s the Points system. You get Steam Points for spending money. You use them to buy profile backgrounds, animated avatars, and chat stickers. In other words, you’re rewarded for shopping with digital clutter. You can’t trade them. You can’t do anything meaningful with them. You just stockpile them forever. Thousands of points. No one cares.
Badges and trading cards? They’re still here. Still tied to random game activity. Still mostly used by people trying to level up their profile for reasons nobody can quite explain. If you’re not a collector or someone flipping cards for pennies, the whole system is invisible. It doesn’t improve your games. It doesn’t improve the store. It just adds noise.
Community profiles are filled with options. You can showcase your favourite games, achievements, reviews, and screenshots. You can set a custom background and choose a theme. But nobody visits them. The only time anyone sees your profile is if you beat them in a game and they want to check how many hours you’ve played. Most users leave theirs on default and never touch it again.
Valve keeps these systems around because they’re already built. Because someone, somewhere, uses them. But they don’t evolve. They don’t improve. They just sit there, taking up space in the client, occasionally crashing when a game tries to sync something it shouldn’t.
It’s not that any one of these features is terrible. Some of them work in specific cases. Some people like them. But together, they weigh the platform down. They make it harder to navigate, harder to trust, and harder to care. Steam’s extras don’t add value. They add bulk.
And none of them feel maintained. Valve launches a system, throws it into the wild, and walks away. If it breaks, it breaks. If nobody uses it, too bad. If someone finds a way to abuse it, maybe it’ll get patched. Eventually.
Steam doesn’t need all this stuff. It needs a store that works. A launcher that’s stable. A recommendation system that isn’t broken. Instead, it gives you glitter for your profile and badges for clicking buttons.
That’s not value. That’s busywork.
Valve Doesn’t Talk Anymore
Valve used to feel like a studio with faces. You knew the names. You saw interviews. There were blog posts with a bit of attitude. It felt like people were behind the machine. Now? It feels like no one’s home. Steam runs, but nobody seems to be in charge.
They don’t talk about changes. They don’t explain decisions. They don’t clarify policy. Entire sections of the store are overrun with junk and scams, and the company says nothing. Discovery breaks? Silence. Review systems get abused? Still silence. The only time they emerge from the bunker is when lawyers force their hand or they’re launching a new gadget.
And even then, it’s vague. A hardware reveal. A cryptic developer update. A beta announcement with zero documentation. You see a new button appear in the interface and wonder whether clicking it will fix something or delete your library.
For the most part, Steam just… runs. It updates itself, applies new filters, rotates front page deals, and occasionally crashes for no reason. When things break, there’s no comment. When features disappear, there’s no warning. You find out what changed by comparing notes with other users or trawling forums full of guesswork.
It’s not that Valve is doing nothing. Clearly someone is pressing buttons somewhere. They roll out new APIs. They integrate backend systems. They test new ideas in the Steam Deck OS. But none of it feels connected to the storefront. None of it feels like it’s coming from people who use the thing the way we do.
You’d think the biggest PC platform in the world would have a proper feedback loop. A roadmap. A user voice system. Something that shows they’re listening. But there’s nothing. Just the platform, quietly reshuffling its parts in the background while everyone pretends it’s fine.
Compare that to almost any other major service. You get updates. You get patch notes. You get devs responding on forums, on social media, in videos. Valve does none of that. They don’t attend. They don’t post. They don’t engage.
They haven’t fallen behind, they’ve opted out.
And that would be fine, if the platform wasn’t full of holes. If the store wasn’t overrun with shovelware. If Early Access wasn’t a disaster. If reviews weren’t broken. If the UI wasn’t a relic. But it is. And Valve’s silence turns every problem into a permanent feature.
The longer this goes on, the more you realise: this isn’t a company that’s struggling with communication. It’s a company that doesn’t think it needs to communicate. Steam works well enough. People still use it. So why fix anything?
That’s the attitude. Let it run. Don’t touch the pipes. Just keep the lights on and let the money roll in.
And somehow, we’re still here. Using it. Complaining about it. Watching the front page change while the people behind it stay invisible.
And Yet… We Still Use It
Because what else are you going to do?
The Epic Games Store still feels like it was cobbled together in a weekend hackathon. It’s got no forums, no user reviews, and no real sense of community. You log in, claim a free game, and close it. It’s functional. Barely.
GOG is great for old games and DRM-free builds, but it’s niche. The selection is limited. The ecosystem is small. You don’t go there to browse, you go there when you already know what you want. It’s a specialty shop. Not a daily driver.
Origin and Uplay? Please. The punchline writes itself. Even EA and Ubisoft seem embarrassed by their own platforms. Half the time they redirect you to Steam anyway, and the other half you’re stuck dealing with account logins, failed activations, and launchers inside launchers inside launchers.
Xbox Game Pass is solid if you’re fine with rentals. It’s a subscription service. You don’t own anything. Titles rotate in and out with little warning. Mods are locked down. Game files are buried under layers of protection. It’s good for testing, bad for building a library.
So Steam survives. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s everything else. It’s the only place where you can buy the vast majority of PC games and mostly trust that they’ll work. Maybe not perfectly. Maybe not at launch. But the download will finish. The install will complete. And if the game is unplayable, the refund system won’t fight you too hard.
You know where everything is. You know how to organise your library. You know the quirks. You’ve built routines around them. Steam is baked into your daily gaming life. It’s the launcher. The background app. The patcher. The social platform. The marketplace. It’s not one thing. It’s the default.
We complain about it. We write long posts about how bloated and broken it is. We point out the fake games, the scammy sales, the useless features, the silent devs. And then we open it again the next day. Because we’re not going to dig through five other launchers just to find a patch note or a working version.
Steam is too big to ignore. Too messy to replace. Too familiar to walk away from. It’s the digital equivalent of a bedroom you’ve lived in for twenty years. The wallpaper’s peeling. There’s stuff under the bed you haven’t touched since 2011. The windows don’t shut properly. But it’s yours.
So yeah, it’s a mess. But it’s our mess. …and if you made it this far, join our Steam Group!
What do you love about Steam that you’d never admit out loud, and what’s the one thing they should’ve fixed ten years ago?
