If it wasn’t for Steam, Valve’s game distribution service, PC gaming may very well have died out by now, or would at least exist as a crippled shell of its former shelf, rather than the thriving scene it is today. Right now Steam has 3,000 games in its catalog, and 75 million users with as many as 7.5M using it at one time.
But that wasn’t always the case. Originally, Valve conceived Steam when they were running into problems trying to issue update patches for one of their biggest hits, Counterstrike. They turned to RealNetworks, Yahoo and Microsoft to try to pay them to develop a client that would solve these problems, but were refused and ultimately were forced to build their own service.
Steam officially debuted in 2002, and Half-Life 2 was the first ever title to require the installation of the service before play. The arrival of Steam brought with it questions about ownership of digital games, with many players concerned about their ability to own and access a file, rather than a disc.
It was in 2005 that Steam really began to take off, opening up to third party developers after proving profitable for Valve’s own games. By the end of that year alone, the service had 13 million accounts and 150 games.
Steam has been in the news a lot lately, as the console market searches for a way to emulate what Steam has done for digital PC game distribution. Before Steam, it was standard practice to buy discs to install PC games, but the distribution service made that all but obsolete, which is why you rarely see box PC games sold any more. Even Steam’s competition has embraced the model, which is why other distribution mechanisms like EA’s Origin or Ubisoft’s Uplay exist today (though fans haven’t embraced those nearly as much as they have Steam).
But the model continues to elude consoles at present, which is partially why Valve announced their plans to develop a “Steam Machine” that’s a physical box that will be able to play any Steam game on a TV, and will use a new controller designed by Valve themselves.
But even ahead of release, Steam Machines don’t seem to be the as the golden ticket to Valve entering the PC market. PC players like their gaming rigs, which they’ve invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into already. They also like their mice and keyboards, which would make the switch to a control odd to say the least. And the capability has always been there to hook up PCs to TVs if the player really wants to. And for console players, there will be few, if any exclusive Steam Machine games, and the system costs at least as much, if not more so, than current gen consoles like the PS4 or Xbox One.
And yet, consoles are begging for some form of Steam themselves, as evidenced by this week’s Steam Summer Sale, an annual event that offers deep, deep discounts on popular games across the service. Titles are marked down 70, 80 or even 90% off their original price for a limited time, and these kinds of sales are what drives many people to continue being avid PC gamers.
Though consoles certainly try to keep up with periodic sales across PSN and Xbox Live, they simply have nothing to match these sort of deep, deep discounts that Steam offers. Sony and Microsoft are pushing for digital distribution, yet they’re not giving players a reason to consider it other than saving them a trip to Gamestop. A new game will cost $60 either way, with little hope of a steep discount to come.
The only data we don’t have for Steam are the sales figures for the games sold on the service, as Valve is notoriously secretive about those numbers, and only they and publishers known how well games sell there. It’s what’s led to an unreliable reporting system when new game sales are being considered, because there’s never any access to Steam data, even though it’s a huge part of the PC market, if not practically the entire thing for many games.
Steam is reliable, cheap and easy to use, which has led to its complete dominance in the PC distribution market. It’s not the only game in town, but it is without question the gold standard, and everyone should be able to learn from its successes.
Steam will continue to dominate the PC scene, and depending on how well the Steam Machine does, could be taking over living rooms soon enough.
[Photo via Valve]
