Gabe Newell says no-one in the industry thought Steam would work as a distribution platform—'I'm not talking about 1 or 2 people, I mean like 99%'
Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary saw Valve doing a Valve: The game received a massive surprise update, adding new commentary and integrating the two episodes, alongside adding a whole bunch of enhancements. It also dropped a two-hour documentary about the making of the game, and the background of Valve's existential legal battle with Vivendi, which features all sorts of digressions into the studio's multifaceted thinking, and the possibly unforeseen consequences: Most notably, the creation of what would become the de facto PC gaming platform Steam.
Steam launched in 2003, initially as a way for Valve to automatically ship updates to players of its existing games. «Gabe [Newell] in particular, he had a pencil sketch of an idea in his head of what would become Steam,» says Erik Johnson. «But it was clear with Team Fortress Classic and then Counter-Strike that fundamentally the thing we were really attracted to was the ability to ship content directly to our customers.
»I mean, there was a set of business goals that ended up being part of Steam. But fundamentally it was a bunch of game development goals that it was servicing that was so attractive to us."
Newell may have had some idea of where he eventually wanted this thing to go, but Steam wasn't initially being built to distribute games: Until someone had a lightbulb moment.
«We ended up going out and finding this company called Applied Micrososystems,» says engineer Yahn Bernier. «So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model but then there was this epiphany that, 'Hey, it's just bits. Why don't we just download whole games this way? You guys go off and do it.'»
Steam would eventually begin selling third-party games in 2005. But well before that point Valve had made the major decision that Half-Life 2, which would release in November 2004 and was easily the most-anticipated PC game of its era, would require Steam to
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