steam may have had humble beginnings as
that program that for some reason even retail copies of halflife 2 had to have
installed alongside but it has since grown into the primary way that people
purchase games for their PCS with steam sales now accounting for roughly 50 to
75% of the total PC gaming Market such a
huge chunk that some have argued that steam's virtual monopoly on game
distribution could stifle competitive Innovation but no matter how you feel
about it there is no denying that valve has refined steam into a powerful
platform with a lot to offer Gabe new
and valve created steam more or less out of necessity when they noticed that they
would be inundated with problems every time they needed to update one or more
of their online games by creating a platform with the ability to
automatically update games valve minimized the downtime that the gamers
would experience so that they could keep playing without having to worry about
navigating to the developer website download the latest patch to blah blah
blah hopefully it's up this time however despite being the norm today valve
certainly made at least a few Gamers steaming mad by imposing online
authentication and DRM requirements to play games especially since steam was
still pretty buggy around the time that halflife 2 was released in 2004 often
buckling under the stress of heavy traffic and crashing games as a result
but much like John Stamos steam just got
better with age and after they smoothed out their client server networking
architecture valve started making agreements with third-party Publishers
to diversify steam's game catalog Beyond
its own titles and as more and more Publishers began adopting the digital
distribution model the SU success and profitability of steam grew prompting
valve to roll out a host of new features for the platform like cloud storage for
you to save your online profile achievement list to reward your gaming
instant messaging so you could easily keep in contact with your gaming friends
and perhaps most notably the addition of community-based networking groups and I
mean they turned it into a freaking social network recognizing the
importance of its Community valve launched Steam Greenlight in 2012 as a
way for users to help choose which games
were added to the service with green light developers are able to submit
information about their projects including early demos so users could
pledge their support for the games that they want to see made available on Steam
sort of like your sixth grade science fair only the winners get their projects
published on Steam instead of some crappy School newsletter however for the
steps that green light seemed to be making in the right direction there were
certainly some steps backwards and some
developers became notorious for pandering to the community by offering
free copies of the game upon release in exchange for thumbs up effectively
gaming the system valve has committed to replace green light with something else
that's entirely user-driven but given that they've never been particularly
Speedy about releases it still feels like we could be waiting for that for
some time so then what else is in store
for the future of steam well thanks to a partnership with HTC valve plans on
getting into VR in a big way recently
the HTC Vive the first steam VR headset
was shown off with a handful of demos including a level based on Portals
aperture science lab there's also a huge number of Steam games that already have
the necessary code to work with the other VR headsets like the Oculus Rift
and valve has said they'll be releasing an open-source API so that developers
can make their games and other applic compatible with steam VR and given that
valve tends to couple new technology releases with Flagship game releases
maybe we can hope that the Vive will Herald the coming of the long awaited
but never confirmed not even confirmed they were even really working on it
halflife three probably not but you can
go ahead and get your hopes up anyway speaking of Hope if you were hoping I
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