Steam is a digital distribution website that sells and manage games on their portal. You can Signup as a user and create your gaming account. This is used to manage your digital purchase, validate your game, install latest updates and patches, buy in-game upgrades, and most of all you play with other members from the world. Make new friends, create gaming groups and play online together. Your skills, perks and in-app purchases are your bragging rights to your friends and other players.
Why Steam was build?
When people used to play online or join groups, they needed IP Address, Nearest Location for better ping, and Personal Server as Game Admin who will host the online gameplay among known groups. This was limited to friends and known people who played same game at shared / specific time interval. The gaming community was growing but there was no platform for distribution and meet up place online on single server service. In the later time, GameSPY was build to list the name of servers who are hosting a game online. These servers and online websites filled the gap.
Valve is a gaming company who required regular patches and were facing issues while playing online. Due to regular patch and build a better service, Valve company approached big companies to motivate them to build a online gaming service. Vavle started their own service and registered for gaming engine license and started Steam to distribute the games online legally. Steam was beta version, and finally after testing, it was released with their TOP Game known as Counter Strike 1.6. Vavle Online service received a huge traffic and were unable to handle them with a smooth gameplay.
Steam’s main purpose was to distribute game patches to all online players at once. Steam was indirectly promoted by the game HALF LIFE who made the Steam community popular. There were lots of issues around the world but still the effect of games on players didn’t affected STEAM but instead their sales were rising.
Popularity of STEAM:
By rise of Internet Gaming, Online PC Gaming many game developers and publishers started flooding steam’s online portal. Millions of users signed up for their accounts and Steam became a center of game distribution online. Steam and Vavle published free-to-play games which was the main cause of their popularity. VALVE introduced API interface known as SteamWorks which integrated lots of more user friendly features which were supporting the modern gaming community. This is how players, game developers were buying game mods and in-app items to promote sales and keep the community interestingly hooked to steam gaming community.
SteamWorks projects were promoting creativity and pushing more and more users to develop games. Students and Teachers were using these interfaces to share and distribute their content to the community and showcase their talent. Students were sharing their projects to other members and bringing their ideas to life. With the rising challenges and unauthorized gaming mods, players were trying to hack gameplay and win over other honest players. So, Steam build VAC service to monitor and kick players who were cheating with other players. This build more trust among players. Steam promotes games during Black Friday days and bring more sales by giving huge discounts.
Steam has also introduced STEAM OS, Steam Consoles, Steam VR and Steam Link. Steam machines are designed to played with Steam Controller and allowed players to play games in their Living Game. The Steam controller is designed in such a way that players do not have to create any game profiles but use them like a directional pad and mouse tracking built in steam controller. Such great projects were introduced by Steam but still unable to drive sales. Steam major competetiors are Microsoft XBox and Sony Playstation. Steam VR is also giving competetion to Oculus VR Technology.
VR space is still being developed and coming future will tell where Steam will land from just being a Patch Updater to such a spectular gaming world and community. Steam is not progressing alone with other companies are also in que to build the future of gaming such as EPIC Games, Origin, and Discord Community.