Medlawlit blog 6, Getting Steamy
My part of this team project is about the game distribution platform known as Steam. Steam was created by the Valve Corporation in 2003 for the purpose of selling and distributing their own games, most notably Half-Life 2. The valve was a games company formed by ex-Microsoft employees, most notably Gabe Newel. Valve revolutionized the first-person shooter genera with the original Half-Life and their Source engine. Valve made and published several games for the PC market, but they felt like there should be a reliable place to purchase valve games digitally. Thus, Steam was born. And it was one ugly looking baby
Now, a software that sells exclusively one publisher’s games
is all well and good, but Valve was ahead of their time. not satisfied with
selling just their games, they partnered with a few other publishers and developers
so that Valve could sell their games on the platform. The steam platform would
also host and allow users to download the third party games right to their computer,
no disk required. This was a turning point in PC gaming. Because now there was
no need to fuss with CDs or Floppy disks to play your collection. You just click
a button, watch it download, then play it. this is how Steam took off. Over the years Steam redesigned itself.
ditching the butt ugly military green for a slick and cleaner blue. Valve would
also make more deals with other third-party developers, making it so you could
get just about any game on PC on steam. And the best part is that there are
constant sales, making hundreds of games much more affordable. Summer and
winter sales are the banes of wallets everywhere.
In recent years, several other publishers have taken notice
of Valve’s success and decided to copy it. most of them removed their products
from steam and built their own platforms to sell them on. Most notably there
was EA origin, which was just about the only place you could get EA games on PC
for the longest time (though now EA games are available on steam again) more recently,
there was the Epic Games Store which stirred up a bit of a fuss by purchasing temporary
exclusivity, keeping hot products off of steam for half a year or more.
Steam is one of PC gaming’s dominant platforms. It has
hundreds of thousands of games available, makes selling your game easy, and is
a good way to make online friends. However, Steam was practically a monopoly
until Epic Games made their platform to try and take a bite out of Steam’s user
base. And the ease of publishing the games leaves a pretty low barrier for con
artists and lazy developers to slap together a bunch of free assets and push it
out claiming it to be an original work.
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