Steam: The Little Engine That Could

Posted by fuzzwobble on Apr 8, 2011 in Shooter, Uncategorized | 2 comments

It’s one of the most utilized and enjoyed programs in the world: Steam.

Steam was a rather niche program for the longest time, so many gamers didn’t even realize its importance to the game industry until around 2007. So where did this symbol of digital distribution and indie game promotion come from? Well, that’s a story of trials and hurdles that often goes unappreciated.

Valve was enjoying the great success of Half-Life in 1998 and was being lavished with praise from the community for its release of mapmaking tools and a supported SDK [tools and information for the development of third-party games based off of an engine]. The SDK was received by many wide-eyed fans, who proceeded to make a multitude of mod games unsurpassed in number to this day.

It was commonly joked amongst gamers that when you purchased Half-Life you were purchasing dozens of games, since you only required Half-Life itself to have access to a large selection of single-player and multiplayer mods.

Snap the Delorean‘s clock forward to 1999: Counter-Strike’s beta has been released and is an overnight success. Valve offers to partner-up with the developers of the mod and they oblige. In the year 2000 (dramatic 80s music here) Counter-Strike 1.0 is released to the public. It is one of the most popular multiplayer games of all time, and through it many more copies of Half-Life are sold, to the point of Valve releasing Counter-Strike as it’s own game.

[Note: The Counter-Strike standalone game could run mods in a fashion similar to Half-Life. It was effectively just Half-Life for 'CS fans']

Welcome to Steam in in the earlier 2000s. Well, okay, I admit that this is SLIGHTLY exaggerated.

Skip forward again to 2001 and Valve is listening to the community. Many mods are popular, but the fans lose connectivity if they don’t maintain the latest copy of the mod they are using at the time. This wasn’t the only problem; cheaters (hackers) were running rampant and the anti-cheat systems of the time were banning people based upon their ‘WONid’ [World Opponent Network Identification], a virtual CD-key which acted as a registration number for a player. The main concern with this approach was that the hackers had figured out several ways to acquire the CD-keys of legitimate players (either through stealing or key generation) to obtain innocent players’ WONids, causing the loss of their games (or at least, their games being declined multiplayer access to large networks who shared ban lists). Valve decided it was time to create front-end software that would be compatible with future releases to deal with this problem, and the first steps towards Steam’s production began.

Valve’s intentions were rather noble; a system which automatically updated games, prevented piracy and halted hackers in their tracks. Unfortunately they struggled to get the project off the ground; upon approaching many developers to commission the production (including Microsoft, Yahoo and Realnetworks) they were turned away. The concept simply didn’t appear profitable.

Valve finally put their foot down and started independent production on the software in late 2001. A few names were thrown around (including Gazelle… yeah, I have no idea where that came from) before the program was called ‘Steam’.

Mid 2002 comes around and Counter-Strike 1.6 is ready for beta testing. Valve decides: this is the right time. They release Counter-Strike 1.6′s beta exclusively over the Steam program. Rumours spread that the program’s name ‘Steam’ was coined when the servers struggled to handle the stress of constant access and downloading prior to the front-end software’s initial release, but they were neither confirmed or denied (but were joked about by Valve representatives). Steam’s primary function at this time was to streamline game patching.

Over the next couple of years Steam grew in use. It provided front-end [operation before launching a primary game or program] matchmaking, updating and, eventually, a reliable counter to the growing annoyance of hackers. Unfortunately the software was considered buggy, unreliable and plain painful to keep updated; it would crash randomly, it would sometimes refuse to patch itself and it had issues with alt-tabbing out of games. The most famous of these bugs was the issue of Half-Life’s sound bugging: the game’s sound would completely crash upon alt-tabbing; if you did so intentionally, a third party program popped up or Windows forced your program to tab out, which was common at the time.

Steam wouldn’t be accessed by third-party games until the release of Half-Life 2 in 2005. Half-Life 2′s popularity was considered phenomenal; it was considered the “game of the year”, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘must have’ due to its innovative gameplay and in-game physics. Not only was the game popular, but it also happened to run on what was dubbed ‘the Source engine’ which was built specifically to interface with Steam. Game developers sprung at the chance to have their product advertised-by-affiliation. Smaller game companies and third-party developers began releasing downloadable games and demos over Steam.

Valve began to finally see a return on their investment. They began patching out problems with the Steam client with a new, focused zeal. Several of the major problems which hampered Steam were patched out and the program would become more streamlined. The program found itself with a more functional friends list, browser, game library and store. It also stabilized its capability to synchronize with games which were not intended to interface with Steam, allowing you to run them off of your Steam game library.

In 2007 the program finally gained popularity. Key developers (such as Eidos and Capcom) began online distribution of their games across Steam. Valve would see a major backlash from several key sectors of the game industry, who claimed that online distribution was designed to “steal money from important links in the industry”, such as distributors and stores. These claims were put to rest when game designers and producers across the world leaped to the defense of the software, claiming that it was the key to breaking the stagnant culture of game production.

Gamers all over the world now rely on Steam not only to play the games they love, but to also protect them as their own. The software also offers companies the opportunity to sell their older classic titles to a wide audience for Steam exclusive discounts (which are appreciated by gamers everywhere) as well as partnerships with LAN centres through the Valve Cyber Café Program. When you stack the aforementioned benefits up with the friends list, browser, game library, demos and free multiplayer weekends: Steam is the must-have program for gamers the world over.

So there you have it. Steam was only ever conceptualized for the benefit of Valve’s consumers, had to be produced by the developers themselves, ran at a loss for several years, required constant maintenence and patching, needed an obscene outlay of hardware and bandwidth to operate and was demonized by the industry’s media; but it pushed through all of its problems to become what it is today.

Kudos to you Valve. Kudos.

If you are one of the few gamers on the planet who have yet to download Steam, you can do so at http://store.steampowered.com/about/. The program is free, of course, as Valve always intended.

That’s all, TTYL!