A Brief History of Steam

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Everything you need to know about Steam's storied history

There’s no question that Steam has become an ubiquitous part of PC gaming. Some have hailed it as the savior of PC gaming, while others have seen it as more of a necessary evil. Whether or not you’re a fan, Steam is here to stay. Its massive storefront contains over 4,500 games, and some 125 million people actively use the service. The question we’re trying to answer here is this: How the hell did Steam get to where it is today?


It all started with an announcement at GDC 2002, where Valve first unveiled the digital distribution platform that we now know as Steam. Valve originally pitched it as a service that would provide an easier way for gamers to update their games, but the company’s obvious motivation was to create a digital storefront for PC games. Gamers could purchase CD copies of their favorite Valve games—at the time, Half-Life and Counter-Strike—and register those CD keys with Steam. Installing a game from a disc would speed up the installation process, but the CD would no longer be necessary with the advent of digital DRM.

The iconic, all-green Steam UI. Photo by willxcore.

Gamers were obviously nonplussed by what they saw as a dishonest attempt to lock them into a single platform. Games sold on Steam were protected by DRM that required gamers to log into their libraries to access registered games. Think back to late '90s and early 2000s, and it’s hard to stomach not being able to swap discs with friends (or in the case of games like StarCraft, simply guess CD keys at random). Add in the fact that the client required online authentication—with a convoluted offline mode available as a sort of back-of-box bullet point—and a multitude of client-crashing bugs, and Steam was a hot mess. Its ugly green UI wasn’t helping things either.
Skip forward a few years and Valve has managed to smooth out most of the service’s bigger problems. Crashing isn’t as frequent, and the client was more than usable. Steam had gotten to the point in 2005 where it could plausibly replace retailers like GameStop, EB Games, and Best Buy as a point-of-sale for PC games. Valve established its very first distribution deals with third-party publishers that same year, and for the first time, independent games like Darwinia were available on the platform. Strategy First was one of the very first—no pun intended—bigger publishers to sign on to Steam.

A 2004 post on Geek.com covering the release of Half-Life 2 with a snippet of the debate brewing in the comments.

By 2004, Half-Life 2 graced the world with a stunning caveat: gamers would be required to register and install the game through Steam, even if the game was purchased in physical form at a retail store. If the hubbub surrounding Steam wasn’t already big enough, gamers were outraged that the hotly anticipated game would be unplayable independent of Steam. The usual fears—launch woes, problems authenticating, and issues registering CD-keys—were warranted, but after the initial hiccups, Steam was well on its way to becoming the ultimate platform for PC gamers.

Badges are an evolution of the achievement system and they’re entirely unique to Steam. Gamers collect trading cards and complete event-related activities to earn and collect badges, XP, and levels.

As the years went on and the trove of games available on the platform increased, Valve implemented new features that solidified Steam’s role as the ultimate system for gamers. Steam Cloud provided a way to store and access game saves across multiple systems, while Steam Achievements helped PC gamers get some sort of parity with the Gamerscore metric popularized by the Xbox 360. Steam Community expanded upon the friends list and chatting system by establishing groups with group chats, and Valve even added voice-call support to the client.
2010 was an important year for Steam because the classic green skin was replaced with a more modern design that also acted as a starting point for the Mac and Linux clients that were released later that year. The UI change was followed by a slew of additional features like Steam Workshop, Big Picture mode, non-gaming applications, and more recently, Steam Greenlight.

Steam Workshop, now with over $57 million in payouts since its inception.

The important thing to notice here is that Valve hasn’t sat on its laurels with Steam. It’s in a position now where it can do pretty much whatever it wants with the huge audience that it’s attracted. After all, its only competition exists in the form of significantly smaller services like GOG.com and EA’s Origin. Instead of milking the cash cow for all it’s worth, the company has also been doing what it can to expand the experience for gamers—although the business implications of each of these moves is obvious. Steam Workshop provides endless user-created content for a whole host of games available on Steam. These downloadable files range from maps for Counter-Strike Global Offensive to hats and skins that users vote on for Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.
More recently, Valve has pushed Steam even further into our lives with SteamOS and the SteamOS-powered Steam Machines. These rigs aim to provide a gaming experience akin to console gaming in a small form factor PC, running a Linux-based operating system that provides easy access to Steam. It's an interesting expansion of Steam.

Steam Big Picture Mode is Valve's 10-foot UI for the living room.

If you think that Valve is immune to backlash, however, think again. Fast forward to today, and Valve has recieved a lot of criticism over its idea to allow for the monetization of mods. Many users think that mods should be free, and that if anyone should be getting the lion's share of the profits, it should be the modders and not the game developers that don't contribute to the mod. Valve has since reversed its stance, stating that it had good intentions with the system, but didn't execute well on the implementation.

Despite the seemingly endless resources of Valve, Steam.com is one of the few things that remains outside its grasp.

One thing we’re still curious about Steam is why Valve hasn’t gobbled up the Steam.com domain. It’s still sitting pretty at www.steampowered.com, which is a bit weird considering the absolute popularity of Steam. Then again, Steam.com’s pretty clear that it’s not for sale—see the picture above.


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