Steam turns 20 today: "We've had to try a lot of different things over the years"

rockpapershotgun.com:

The first time I heard of Steam it was, as you might expect, in conjunction with the release of a little FPS called Half-Life 2 back in 2004. You needed Steam to access it, whether you bought the digital version or a retail copy. Given relative unfamiliarity with digital distribution, the nascent status of broadband internet in the UK and US, and the much greater importance of physical game sales at the time, this caused quite a stir. I remember being alarmed by an op-ed over on GameRevolution.com that held forth at length about the risk of conflicts between Steam and other software, if players were outright required to leave it running. How quaint those anxieties seem today - the day of Steam's 20th anniversary. And yet, there's nothing quaint about Steam's ability to shape the field in which it operates.

Between 80,000 and 300,000 players participated in the Steam beta test before its official release on 12th September 2003. In January 2023, the service scored a concurrent activity record of 33 million users. That's greater than the population of Venezuela. For many players, Steam is simply the air we breathe. Open rivals like the Epic Games Store have so far failed to make much of a dent, while alternatives like the wonderful Itch.io have carved out a niche that is essentially predicated on not competing directly. Steam's rise has also been the transformation of Valve from a video game development studio into a sprawling retail empire. The company relied upon releases such as Counter-Strike and to a lesser extent, Half-Life 2 and the Orange Box, to drive early sign-ups, but the idea that Steam still needs Valve the developer the way Valve need Steam is a fading memory.

It's equally bizarre to think that Steam was once