Steam just turned 20 years old, and Valve is celebrating
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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All of Valve’s games are on sale today — because Steam is 20 years old. The company’s got a cute walk down memory lane to help celebrate, too. But don’t go looking there for a history of Steam itself… perhaps because Steam was originally a tad controversial?
It’s easy to forget: many PC gamers hated Steam at launch.
When it launched 20 years ago today on September 12th, 2003, it seemed like Valve was trying to take away our multiplayer server browsers and our DVDs. 2004’s Half-Life 2, which required Steam to play even if you bought a physical disc, made Steam look like a glorified piece of DRM.
And why pay Valve, many game publishers asked themselves, when they could build or buy their own digital distribution platforms like EA’s Origin or Ubisoft’s UPlay instead?
But Half-Life 2 and its mods turned out to be a massive hit that PC gamers couldn’t ignore — and deals Valve cut with publisher after publisher quickly made Steam the de facto PC game platform.
Twenty years later, the last stragglers are still coming into the fold, like EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony and allies. Square Enix has fully returned. Even Blizzard is putting games on Steam as of earlier this year. Meanwhile, Epic has given away millions upon millions of dollars in free games to boost its upstart Epic Games Store, and yet it’s still struggling to compete with Steam’s momentum.
Today, Valve says the “ultimate goal” of Steam was “to give any game developer a way to reach their players
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