Why and how did Steam get so big?

Steam put themselves at the forefront of the pc digital gaming scene. Before them I don't think there was a place for pc gamers to regularly go and buy games digitally. but i may be wrong I wasnt a big pc gamer when steam first released.
 
Untalkative_Bunny said:
Private company not run by greedy business school grads.
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this is so true (and sad because most game clients and devs are just this...)

zero shift said:
What made Steam so bad in its early years?
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"delete clientregistry.blob"
the friends list was ALWAYS (seriously!) down for the first 2-3 years
the steam client was very limited and primitive compared to today
there was no store or anything like that, it was just some DRM tacked on to our half life with no benifit or reason for the player other than their patching system I suppose...

they took down WON to force cs/hl/dod etc players to switch to steam wether they wanted to or not, which combined with the clientregistry.blob bug caused a lot of frustration

Now steam is pretty sweet functionality wise, all we need now is to be able to resell/give away games we have activated then DD will actually BE the future
 
Solid Games, Solid Support.
They actually GIVE A FUCK about games and gamers..

It's what happens when a company is run by young people who love what they do.
 
KrM DeLorean said:
It's what happens when a company is run by young people who love what they do.
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Has more to do with them being privately owned and flush with cash before Steam was ever a thing. EA can't see further than the next quarterly financial report, whereas Valve has a good idea of where they want to go in the next ten years.

Valve is what happens when you gather top flight talent and give them free reign to work on what they want. The output is sporadic, but glorious. It is never made with maximizing short term revenues or huge whizzbang dudebro advertising in mind. It has to be a great product, because those products withstand the test of time. A lot of Valve's games are permanently inside the Steam top 50 sellers list, despite some of them being nearly ten years old.

That's part of why it is so humorous to see the dismissive attitudes towards SteamOS and Steam machines. Valve is playing a long, long game there, just like Steam. Even John Carmack mused that he thought Steam was crazy when they approached him, so it'd be silly to doubt Valve again.
 
The sales got me in the program and then Workshop sank its teeth in. Workshop is awesome. Then instant screen uploads and community forums for each game, list goes on.

It started simple with awesome sales on great hardware and ballooned from there.
 
for me it was originally counterstrike/half life. but then i created a new account a few years back because of their library, the sales and the convenience.
 
I was really hesitant to adopt steam for a long time. I got it with HL2 but hated the online requirements, hell I couldn't play HL2 for a week because my internet at my new place wasn't set up yet. Then in 2008 my account got suspended for 3 weeks, for a reason I haven't discovered to this day. It took a long time after I got my account back that I wanted to risk my bought games being taken away from me because some monkey at Valve screwed up.

I think it was steamworks in retail games that pushed me over. I was buying retail PC games well after the orange box came out, and as I bought more retail games with steamworks like FEAR 2, skyrim, deus ex etc my steam collection grew. Then sales started to catch my eye and it just snowballed. Once the service goes from 'this annoying program I need to play X game' to 'this service on which my game collection resides' then they have you.

I mean, the community and auto-update features are hard to live without these days. Hard to believe that only a few years ago if you wanted a patch for a PC game you had to go hunting for it, now you just click a button (or let the game update itself). I know a few guys who never paid for a PC game in their lives until steam sales, and now they don't pirate anything anymore. Maybe because they still haven't played half the shit they bought in the last steam sale. Everyone has a point where convenience outweighs the price of admission, even if they have no regard for legality or supporting devs.
 
I blame the Orange box, but what do I know?

Someone had to become the iTunes of games, if there was no Steam it would be Google, Apple or another publisher. Valve seems to have just positioned the product properly at the right time. I imagine it wasn't easy.
 
i think steam was a "right place at the right time" kind of thing. it just got everything right, only it didn't pay off until nearly a decade later
 
Never had good support off steam.

Multiple times I've sent them queries and had a generic cut and paste reply.

Where as if they'd took the time to read the question I'd have got s completely different answer.

One of the worst being : as I was a Steam early adopter, my default currency was USD. Despite living in the UK and having respective billing address there.

Not so much a problem early doors but as the platform evolved and security got tighter, I suddenly couldn't buy games/spend my wallet funds.

Can't remember exact error but something along lines of wallet doesn't match payment currency etc.

Took around 6/7 emails to get it sorted, most of which was me going back and saying read my original bloody email!

Tried to phone them at one point - yeah. They don't like you trying that
 
Firstly, Valve correctly anticipated a market need (a way for PC gaming to escape retail's suffocating grip) and positioned themselves to take advantage of it. After that they simply outclassed their competition in every way.
 
Counterstrike series.

If you wanted to play online, Steam was necessary. And a shit-load of people were playing on line throughout the 2000's.
 
I still remember when I sort of lost track of Steam for a while...and then came back into it a few years later, maybe 2006-2007ish? and saw: "wait...you can buy other, non Valve games on Steam now? WHAT?"

$2000 later...
 
MasterOfPastures said:
Once Gabe retires, though.... the uncertainty begins.
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This seems to be a common sentiment but if you read/listen to interviews with Valve employees who aren't Gabe it's clear that even they realise that Valve is in the enviable position it's in today because of the consumer-orientated philosophies and, to a lesser extent, flat company structure. If Gabe were to hand over the reins to, say, an ex-EA CEO, sure, there'd be cause for concern, but they're going to go to a Valve veteran who has an acute understanding of the company culture, such as (but far from limited to) Doug Lombardi or Erik Johnson.
 
from my perspective: sales, sales, sales, discounts, sales, 75% off, sales, indies, sales. they take the 'long tail' theory seriously.
 
When Valve pushed CS and all their games to Steam. When they released the Orange Box in Oct. 07 and finally the sales. The sales was the biggest catalyst to get more people on board.
 
I might be wrong, but being devs of some popular games really helped them for starters and then they just hit all right buttons: supporting moding community, adding metagames, and most importantly sales, huge sales is still main attraction of steam, I think.
 
Words not always need be spoken...

T7D11tD.jpg
 
The bigger question is why haven't anyone improved on Steam yet? I'm talking primarily about the UbiSoft launcher/storefront (does it even have a name?) and Origin. All they had to do was match the functionality and features of Steam and then improve on some of it's faults and they'd be good, but no.
 
Can someone post the appropriate gif here? The one WWE gif with the guy swooning over this super bulky guy (Steam) with words written all over it, until he faints at "Gaben"
 
Roshin said:
The bigger question is why haven't anyone improved on Steam yet? I'm talking primarily about the UbiSoft launcher/storefront (does it even have a name?) and Origin. All they had to do was match the functionality and features of Steam and then improve on some of it's faults and they'd be good, but no.
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A publisher will always be at a disadvantage with a service like this, since it's going to be difficult to convince another publisher to pay their direct competition for selling their games. Ubisoft and EA have some deals going but one look at the front page of Origin store will make it quite apparent why this isn't very appealing.
 
Steam was shit at the beginning and greatly improved since, now some people would still say it's shit, but it managed to make one thing extremely right : provide some sort of copy control for devs/publishers, while making it the less intrusive possible, and sometimes even beneficial for the consumer.

Also, yeah, sales, and the overall discount-heavy economy that they somehow created really helps.
 
Price and convenience is why Steam can dominate. You have those two things locked down and you can make pretty much any product a success.
 
Roshin said:
The bigger question is why haven't anyone improved on Steam yet? I'm talking primarily about the UbiSoft launcher/storefront (does it even have a name?) and Origin. All they had to do was match the functionality and features of Steam and then improve on some of it's faults and they'd be good, but no.
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You're thinking of Uplay. As for Origin, well, this was EA's roadmap when the service launched EADM was rebranded as such:

originroadmapv4sre.jpg


I've taken the liberty of crossing out what EA has yet to actually release(1)(2)(3):

originroadmap2xbsxk.jpg


(1) While some of EA's mobile games requrie an Origin log-in, there's no actual Origin mobile app.
(2) Achievements finally went live last May, but there is no reward system.
(3) While you can link your Facebook account to your Origin account, there are no social benefits tied to this.
 
It was quality.

I had Steam since day one.


That said I didn't use it for anything but valve games until 2008 when I bought Fallout 3 digitally for the convenience of it. Then it hit me how great steam was, and I now have 200 or so games on the service. It gets better all the time.


And sales. Sales.
 
LegoArmo said:
Gabe is cuddly and loveable. The success is all because of his smile.
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I came here to see this. Not disappointed.

Anyway. Personally Steam became so big due to many reasons.

You can play the games you own on any computer. There is no DRM which locks your content to one machine or only allows installations on 3 machines at the same time. Also, the support is really good. The account security is also very high - for example and comparison my online-banking account security is a joke if I see SteamGuard and everything.
Then you have the internal server browser, the forum, the social aspect with profiles and friendslists, the workshop, user generated content, the store, the sales, the market - and the indie bundles. Hats.

Steam is a very handy all-in-one package with heaps of cheap games.

//disclaimer - neither I'm working for Valve nor I will get 3 dollar for this post
 
Well, I think a large part of it is being first to market (with a huge initial base thanks to forcing it on everyone who wanted to play some really popular games). Once you have that inertia, the rest is continuous refinement and not messing up.
 
Durante said:
Well, I think a large part of it is being first to market (with a huge initial base thanks to forcing it on everyone who wanted to play some really popular games). Once you have that inertia, the rest is continuous refinement and not messing up.
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I think this is it. Valve's games helped by giving it a base to start from, and third party software and Steam sales took it from there.
 
IMO, it was down to the death of PC games in retail stores. For years PC game shel space was getting smaller and smaller until in the mid 2000s, it was practically non existant aside from The Sims and other shit. Suddenly, with steam, PC gamers didnt need retail anymore, and here was all the games you could ever want, available to download, at prices cheaper than retail. All patches, updates, etc were delivered automatically, all your games were neatly organized under one account, on one program. Im of the firm belief that if steam hadnt come about when it did, PC gaming wouldve all but died out. Now its in its renaissance and its fucking glorious
 
Morokh said:
Steam was shit at the beginning and greatly improved since, now some people would still say it's shit, but it managed to make one thing extremely right : provide some sort of copy control for devs/publishers, while making it the less intrusive possible, and sometimes even beneficial for the consumer.

Also, yeah, sales, and the overall discount-heavy economy that they somehow created really helps.
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It's easy to forget now, but circa 2004 - around the time Half-Life 2 came out - Steam was in a pretty rough state, and generally an unpleasant nuisance to use when you wanted to play a Valve game. In a sense, it's fortunate they had such a critical and commercial success in Half-Life 2, because I'm sure the popularity of that game forced a lot of people to adopt it. To Valve's credit, however, they've evolved the platform immensely within the past 10 years, to the point where it's become an indispensable service if you have any interest in playing games on PC at all. As someone who was personally pretty hesitant on the idea of digital distribution in the beginning, I know they've long since sold me on it, to the point where I now own over 150 games on Steam, including some great ones that I probably would never have given a chance were it not for their sales. At this point, I probably have more interest in Valve as a service provider than a game developer.
 
Bo said:
Microsoft left a vacuum to fill. Apparently building a new gaming platform and managing the old effectively is a hard thing to balance.
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Imho the real Trojan horse wasn't hl2, it was the orange box. Between tf2 and portal, as well as hl2 +ep1 +ep2 and the thing being an incredible bargain already, that thing had legs.

Also, want that around the time they had their more user friendly redesign? Sales might have started that year or the year after.
 
Jam_Sandwich said:
Never had good support off steam.


One of the worst being : as I was a Steam early adopter, my default currency was USD. Despite living in the UK and having respective billing address there.
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I had that when I first started, but it was wonderful as the games where very cheap compared to my local currency. But then it changes to Euros :(.
 
I think the Orange Box and the success of PopCap games (Peggle Extreme led to huge Peggle sales) and some indie games (like Audiosurf) following it made Steam a relevant marketplace in the eyes of most publishers. I still remember the day my friend persuaded me to pre-order the Orange Box on Steam.
 
They filled a need in the market better than anyone else. Digital distribution of games, with a unified instillation and patching service was something the market desperately needed at the time, people wanted to be able to easily download content online. Valve saw the need and launched Steam to fill it. It also allowed them to offer additional services to entice gamers that pirated games want to buy them from Steam instead. This included things like automated patching, friend lists and other community features, low prices etc. They made buying games more convenient (in most cases) than pirating them or buying them retail. They backed that up by collecting a deep and diverse catalog of content in one place, and constantly iterated on new and better features like steamworks, improved community features etc. They also had their own games Steam exclusive on PC to drive early adoption, and later with more and more steamworks games they have made it into a standard for PC games.

Or in other words they delivered what the market wanted how and when they wanted it. Even if they didn't know they wanted it at the time.
 
Steam got big because it was forced on the huge Counter-strike (and other Valve games) community. Also Half-Life 2. Steam was also the first digital store to do big sales on games, although it is no longer the best as Amazon sales are better these days.

Liquid_Bike said:
They have never tried to screw people over in order to make a buck. They genuinely seems to care unlike the EA's and Activisions of the world.
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This is wrong. Steam fucked over lots of European consumers back in December 2008 when they decided that all prices will be displayed in Euros and converted as 1$=1€. Some will say "blame the publisher", but this bullshit pricing change also happened on Valve's own games. Back then one euro was over 1.50 dollars so all prices went up by 25-50% depending on how much tax you paid before the change.
 
Hellcrow said:
I had that when I first started, but it was wonderful as the games where very cheap compared to my local currency. But then it changes to Euros :(.
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Yeah, Steam definitely got me on board (as in I started buying all my games from them) very early with dollar pricing while Euro was extremely strong. That has since changed but at least we have sales, and personally I'm in a better position financially so I don't really care anymore.
 
I think the main factor was primarily out of need.

The retail space pretty much abandoned PC gaming in the mid 2000's. Microsoft pulled it's support for PC gaming shortly after the Xbox 360. I mean it still existed in theory as GFW but Microsoft was so half assed with it that it might as well have never happened. I would walk into these big box stores at the time and see nothing but Sims expansions, Blizzard bundles and a bunch of random games being sold in the PC section of the store. The PC market was primed for something else to take over. There was actually a time where the idea of PC gaming being dead was seen as something that could actually happen because of how shitty retail support for it was.

What people forget though (and still do to this day) is that there is a significant number of PC gamers that approach PC gaming is a fundamentally different animal from console gaming. It's not just HD versions of console ports. There are entire genres spanning dozens and dozens of games that have been successes on PC's but have made very few dents in the console space and Steam happened to step up to the plate when everyone was stepping away.. Europa Universalis for instance is a franchises that is 17 years old. This type of game will never work on a console, ever. ARMA will never work on consoles. The original Rainbow Six will never work on consoles (I realize they made ports of them but they are severely gimped to an extent where they might as well be different games). Nobody in retail was touching these types of games in 2005. Steam embraced it and sort of won the PC market by default.

Other major thing? Valve releases almost nothing but killer apps. When Steam was first introduced, Valve made it so that the three most popular online multiplayer shooters required Steam - DoD, CS and TF Classic. In addition to those three, they also made the entire Half Life series dependent on Steam and they also made the most anticipated sequel of all time require it as well. This would be like if Sony nabbed Madden, COD, GTA, Naughty Dog games and Halo as exclusives.
 
Sanke__ said:
The same way itunes did...

Magic

and being first
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Nailed it.

It's amusing how people try to squeeze "but it's better" into it. It might be, but it is not decisive at all, many Steam users have never heared about alternatives. (and gog.com is both better/more comfortable, but one can argue that since it completely lacks DRM aspect publishers won't use it with new games)
 
String of big exclusive steamwork games. Not pissing too many people off. Events that people like.

The only other site I can think of that does similar is good old games but their exclusive games are not new ones.
 
When steam was released, I would never have used it if I didn't have to for CS/DoD and all the other mods. This is what got (or maybe forced) a substantial userbase in the first place. I honestly don't know anyone not playing those specific games and using steam, let alone buying some kind of games on this platform (if that was even possible)
also there was quite some rage on forums about the service (which used to be somewhat unreliable) back then

I bought HL2 despite it required steam, and those awesome sales didn't catch my attention till way later
OrangeBox sure helped to get more people onto steam (I dind't get it back then)

after this, it was smooth sailing since no other platform could compete with Steams userbase (not even close) and it was the most acceptable DRM out there for most users (and the service improved a lot over the years). Sales helped too later on obviously, but without the initial userbase advantage that got on steam from mostly HL Mods/HL2/CSS etc. this could have been rough
 
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