Not only were they first, but Steam as a service never stood still and allowed any competition to catch up. Since day one they have been so far ahead of any other digital distribution service. Steam Community, Steamworks, the market, Big Picture Mode, Steam Cloud. They've never stopped implementing features - and now they have Family Sharing and In-Home Streaming on the horizon.
Why and how did Steam get so big?
- Thread starter Alphahawk
- Start date
Steam really streamlined what PC gaming was doing and made a decent and functional hub for the games that immediately connects you with other players.
Basically, there was nothing in the market like it so it had a monopoly. It also didn't help that everyone who ever PC gamed ever got the OrangeBox.
Basically, there was nothing in the market like it so it had a monopoly. It also didn't help that everyone who ever PC gamed ever got the OrangeBox.
As evereyone has already said:
Sales
Ease of buying games
I think they biggest thing is what it did to favour buying games over stealing them. Before a developer would release a game and that was it with little or not updates post launch part from fixes.
CS Source, CS Go, TF2, Dota2, early access receive content updates all the time makes it way more difficult to pirate their games if you want the latest content. I know Dota 2 and TF2 are f2p now but TF2 didn't use to be.
I wish more devs would do this, the only people who end up pirating the game or who don't have the cash for games or diehards.
Sales
Ease of buying games
I think they biggest thing is what it did to favour buying games over stealing them. Before a developer would release a game and that was it with little or not updates post launch part from fixes.
CS Source, CS Go, TF2, Dota2, early access receive content updates all the time makes it way more difficult to pirate their games if you want the latest content. I know Dota 2 and TF2 are f2p now but TF2 didn't use to be.
I wish more devs would do this, the only people who end up pirating the game or who don't have the cash for games or diehards.
The first Trojan horse was Counter-Strike 1.6, the second Trojan horse was HL2, the one that really nailed it in there was TF2. Ever since then major Steam-only PC releases have just piled on top like Call of Duty and Skyrim.
Zeyphersan
Banned
Honestly, moreso than anything else it was a willingness to give up some control. The biggest asset Steam has in the digital distribution space versus Sony and Microsoft is that they let third-party stores (Amazon, GreenManGaming, etc) sell keys that are only redeemable on a Steam account. Even if they didn't have cloud saves and community workshops and all this other fancy stuff, that's what let them flourish. They can put on some great seasonal sales (and they do), but allowing others to sell their keys creates a competition in sales. How crazy is that? Some seasons Valve has the best sales, sometimes it's Amazon, sometimes it's Greenmangaming. Valve could have the best damn sales anywhere in the world, but without that key aspect of creating competition in pricing, I don't think they would have expanded nearly as fast or as efficiently.
CecilRousso
Member
You make software development sound trivial. It isn't.
TerryWogan
Member
There was nothing like it 10 years ago when it launched. It launched as a digital delivery system and store for Valve games. If you wanted to play Counter-Strike 1.6 or the latest (at the time) version of Day of Defeat, you had to install it. Those games had huge player bases. Then Half-Life 2 came along with Steam as a requirement. That was also huge. Big install base, nothing else like it available. Then they built from there by adding non-Valve games to the store.
LeeRoyBrown
Banned
This, CS 1.6.
CS 1.6 ----> Steam --->HL2, CSS beta, DoD source, etc ---> 3rd party games
This is a really common sentiment, but it's kind of historical revision imo. Direct2Drive was the bigger store back in the day and had much wider publisher support long before Valve did. But D2D sucked and eventually steam didn't.
PastorOfMuppets
Banned
Any potential competitor to Steam has a huge mountain to climb:
1. It must have a killer app. Valve packaged nothing but Hall of Fame caliber games with Steam. Half Life 1 was already considered one of the most influential FPS ever at the time Steam was released, Counter-Strike was free and the most played online FPS with Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic not that far behind and the most anticipated sequel of all time was packaged with Steam. Now I'm sure Mass Effect 4 or Dragon Age 3 will be decent games but as a PC gamer, I see them as console ports first and they don't scream system sellers to me.
2. Steam allows people with no creative talent to subsidize game purchases through their metagame. You can sell items you pick up off of CS GO, TF2 or various games with trading cards for Steam wallet funds. There's a way to turn that into real money if you want to jump through a few hoops or you can just use them to subsidize future game purchases. Valve literally rewards people for playing games - including games not published by themselves.
3. The time to jump into the market would have been around 2006-07ish at the very latest, before Steam sales became a huge internet meme. Now Steam is pretty much synonymous with PC gaming with GOG filling the niche of the the guys that sell classic games. Just look at the amount of people on NeoGaf that (incorrectly) think of Steambox as the 4th "console". Greenmangaming and Amazon are great - but they are just retailers and most of the games they sell have to be activated on Steam anyways. The Steam ecosystem right now is so robust and polished that trying to compete with Steam in 2014 would be like trying to create an iPOD alternative in 2007 when the iPhone was released (incidentally, Microsoft tried this with the Zune in 2006).
Rawket Lawnchair
Member
During the late 00s many games forcibly installed Steam on your computer for installation (Empire Total War in my case). Moreover, the option to install the games from the disc was hidden away in menus, and you ended up downloading the whole game from Steam's servers.
On top of that, Steam's offline mode seemed to not work correctly back then and sooner or later you had to login again.
The sales during summer and winter 2010 were something pretty new and exciting at the time as well, and after a while everything took its course.
On top of that, Steam's offline mode seemed to not work correctly back then and sooner or later you had to login again.
The sales during summer and winter 2010 were something pretty new and exciting at the time as well, and after a while everything took its course.
Yeah, I've also talked about this before, the fact that developers can generate Steam keys for free and distribute them however they see fit is extremely important. I don't think it's significance can be overstated. It's e.g. the reason why kickstarter projects can always easily promise Steam keys for everyone, but not DD copies on other platforms.
Ubi may be jumping on this train (selling Steam keys itself, that is). It'd be all the more wise when you consider that every internally-developed Ubisoft title since AssCreed 2 has Uplay integration even on Steam, so not only would Ubi see 100% of the revenue from a purchase but it's also not abandoning the peddling of Uplay.
snoopeasystreet
Member
Yeah it's certainly a huge, awesome thing that doesn't get more praise. This combined with indie bundles (and in particular humble) means that anyone who's even only sorta into PC gaming probably has left over games that they pass onto friends, pulling them into the ecosystem too.
MaximoffZero
Banned
It seems like with digital media there's always one outlet that completely crushes the competition. For music, it's iTunes. For movies, it's Netflix. For games, it's Steam. It's an interesting phenomenon really.
Perhaps more interesting though is that they all achieved their respective positions the same way: They were early to the party and provided extreme ease of use and affordability.
Perhaps more interesting though is that they all achieved their respective positions the same way: They were early to the party and provided extreme ease of use and affordability.
Well.. Hl2 and Counterstrike were the Dota and League Of Legends of today. Of course they are pretty different, but back then there was not much besides those big titles. They helped to build acceptance among the people and it worked.
Now its cheap keys and high user comfort. Cant think in any way of abbandoning Steam now.
Edit: was already mentioned, darn.
Now its cheap keys and high user comfort. Cant think in any way of abbandoning Steam now.
Edit: was already mentioned, darn.
Cizeta-Moroder
Banned
How does this work? Steam handles all the download traffic without getting any compensation? I'd also imagine there are finite permutations for keys.
Guerrillas in the Mist
Member
I'm assuming it's a courtesy thing, just like how Steamworks integration is completely free for developers, while GFWL came with various costs. Valve earn so much money from Steam and their games in any case that doing stuff like this is purely beneficial from a PR viewpoint.
More importantly, it assures people end up within the Steam enviroment.
For the smallest keys I know (4*4 alphanumeric) there are around 10^43 permutations. Those are around 10^33 keys per living human
samurai1226
Member
I remember when steam came out and valve changed that cs1.6 wasn't playable without steam anymore, everybody hated steam. But if you wanted to play Half-Life ², later release CS games, Team Fortress 2, etc you had to use steam, so they really could build up a huge playbase.
This also further distributed Trojan horses to consumers, exposing more and more of them to Steam through the other stores. A few even refused to sell Steamworks games for a while, but all of them gave up.
The closest thing Valve could have had to a competitor was Impulse, which came out around that time as Impulse, though it existed as Stardock Central before them.
Stardock lacked #1, and that combined with limited vision and resources did them in. GalCiv 2 was an excellent game, but it's no TF2 or HL2.
In an ironic way, Steam's dominance really helped the current Stardock- because the Steam-only folks never had to suffer through Elemental War of Magic (and that game is what effectively did in Impulse, Stardock decided to sell it off because Brad Wardell wanted to make good games instead of run a good service, and felt Stardock couldn't do both, and Gamestop made an offer too good to refuse)
Going into alt-history, I always wondered if an Impulse/Gamersgate merger between Stardock and Paradox spun off into its own company would have been a viable competitor. I do think such a thing would have butterflied away GOG, though CD Projekt would still have done what it's doing, it would just be on the main DD services.
When you think about it #2 is a pretty huge one almost nobody talks about. It's one area where Origin and UPlay aren't even fucking close. No digital distributor is really.
Even with #1, the only two companies I can think of who have hits big enough to singlehandedly sell clients are Blizzard and Riot, and neither seems to have ambitions to build distribution services. EA has tried this with Battlefield but it hasn't really worked, They'll try it again with Titanfall. Blizzard and Riot are pretty much content being the last two PC-developers on the face of the Earth who don't need Steam.
Cizeta-Moroder
Banned
For the smallest keys I know (4*4 alphanumeric) there are around 10^43 permutations. Those are around 10^33 keys per living human
What about non-humans like JaseC?
IMO, Steam is primarily responsible for not just saving PC gaming, but helping it flourish again.
Prior to Steam, pubs were starting to just give up on the platform due to a) rampant piracy, and b) nobody was buying games due to 100 different permutations of borderline insane copy protection.
Steam gave publishers a reliable, easy DRM method and games distribution platform tied up in one.
While people like to crap on Origin and Uplay, the fact of the matter is that Steam showed them how it was done. Dealing with Origin and Uplay is far better than what both companies tried prior.
As a result of this, the selection of PC games we have to choose from has never been better. Even genres that had been dead for years like the dungeon crawler (Legend of Grimrock, Might and Magic X Legacy) are seeing a resurgence because of these digital distribution platforms. Those games would have never seen a retail shelf, but are enjoying very good sales to incentivise other pubs/devs to create games too niche to sell any other way than digitally.
Steam does not get enough credit for the enormous uptick in quality PC games coming out, IMO.
Prior to Steam, pubs were starting to just give up on the platform due to a) rampant piracy, and b) nobody was buying games due to 100 different permutations of borderline insane copy protection.
Steam gave publishers a reliable, easy DRM method and games distribution platform tied up in one.
While people like to crap on Origin and Uplay, the fact of the matter is that Steam showed them how it was done. Dealing with Origin and Uplay is far better than what both companies tried prior.
As a result of this, the selection of PC games we have to choose from has never been better. Even genres that had been dead for years like the dungeon crawler (Legend of Grimrock, Might and Magic X Legacy) are seeing a resurgence because of these digital distribution platforms. Those games would have never seen a retail shelf, but are enjoying very good sales to incentivise other pubs/devs to create games too niche to sell any other way than digitally.
Steam does not get enough credit for the enormous uptick in quality PC games coming out, IMO.
The bandwidth costs per game are pretty insignificant compared to the profit per sale, so they can recoup those costs as long as a small number of those users end up buying a game. It ends up being worth it just by encouraging more people to install (or log into) Steam.
10^33 keys for 10^33 region-specific apps!
PastorOfMuppets
Banned
What Valve gives back to its users through the open market place is more valuable than anything any one else does in video games right now. The closest thing is PS+ free games if you subscribe to their service. Steam literally allows you to make money by playing video games. It's not a lot but if you have a large library like a lot of the early adopters do, it's enough that you can subsidize a few games out of it - more if you do it during a sales event. A couple years back there was a sales event where completing certain achievements gave you the chance of winning coupons and free games. Valve doesn't do this out of kindness; all this stuff provides incentives for people to stay within the Steam ecosystem.
Consoles sort of imprison their users into using an ecosystem by imposing a paywall on a lot of things that are free on PC. You can't do that on PC because people can tell you to fuck off - that's what happened with GFWL. As a result, Valve actually has to provide people with some added value to their service and not just treat it like another layer of DRM like Origin and Uplay basically are.
charlequin
Banned
Yes, why indeed hasn't somebody taken a service that took at least four years (and tons of money) to build up into a decent state and just cloned a strictly better version of it? I wonder.
Gog is the only Steam competitor that can make an even somewhat reasonable claim to being "better" than Steam, and even then they weren't a competitor until recently and the lion's share of customers would probably consider their advantage (DRM-free releases) much less relevant than their downsides (no unified client or automatic patching.)
Yep.
Technically, but not meaningfully. 12 character keys with 36 possible characters each is something like a million million million possible keys.
D
Deleted member 22576
Unconfirmed Member
Probably has something to do with their tireless effort to please me as a user.
I've also made and spent probably 8 dollars through trading cards so far. Thats almost an entire copy of FEZ for free.
I've also made and spent probably 8 dollars through trading cards so far. Thats almost an entire copy of FEZ for free.
Consumer surplus egged on by a private company run by the worlds most awesome gamer and game tech enthusiast. Making money is only part of the goal.
It's easier to build a kingdom when you're not worried on paying off the lords every 3 months, and have a CEO only worried about inflating stock and cashing in before the bubble bursts.
It's easier to build a kingdom when you're not worried on paying off the lords every 3 months, and have a CEO only worried about inflating stock and cashing in before the bubble bursts.
dragonbane
Member
Half Life 2. DAT Trojan horse. Sure worked for me, Gabe you magnificent bastard!
Even valve store support is horrible. More my fault, but still! Ordered an Aperture Science mug, received a Black Mesa cup instead. Rep asked for a pic of it and I agreed, but then camera broke. Then someone around the house broke it and trashed it without my knowledge. By the time I had access to a camera again, I was too late and told about the prior accident. No pic no mug, I assumed they have some inventory log. Now, I sit here broken with a Mickey Mouse mug. Dem da breaks.
Anyways, I remember steam being big for CS players for 1.6. Then HL2 released and The Orange box later took off. At that point the client was still horrible and only a few games were purchasable. But the year later I started noticing sales, was hooked by the time L4D released.