Valve have made a free booklet about the origins of Steam and the Steam Deck
Valve have produced a teensy digital booklet about the history of Steam and the Steam Deck as they prepare to introduce it to potential customers in the Asia-Pacific region. The 50-ish-page guide to everything Steam Deck also features a rundown of Valve’s relatively short history of manufacturing hardware such as the Steam Link and Steam Controller, and the Valve Index VR headset.
You can read the digital version of the Steam Deck booklet in English here, but it’s also been translated into Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Korean. It’s an interesting potted history of Steam, the Deck and Valve in general. However, when the RPS team was discussing the booklet this morning, Alice0 had a rummage in her files and managed to find Valve’s very first press release about Steam from way back when the storefront was first announced at 2002’s GDC. In it, Valve detailed how they envisaged it working for PC owners, and aww, it's all quite quaint in 2022:
WHAT CAN STEAM DO? Once you've installed Steam, all of the following features are available on your desktop and while you're playing Steam games.
EASY AND FAST ACCESS TO GAMES
After installing Steam, you'll have instant access to Valve's full library of games. And when you choose one to play, you don't have to wait for the whole thing to download -- you can start playing in a matter of minutes.
AUTOMATIC UPDATES
Say goodbye to game patches forever--they're a thing of the past. Steam will keep all of its games up-to-date for as long as you want to keep playing them. No more hunting for download sites just to get up and running!
INSTANT MESSAGING, EVEN IN GAME
Keep in touch with your buddies through "Friends," Steam's instant-messenger. It even works while you or your
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