Steam

About

Steam is an internet-based digital distribution, digital rights management (DRM), multiplayer, and social networking platform developed by Valve Corporation. Steam provides installation and automatic updating of games on multiple computers and community features such as friend lists and groups.^[1]

History

Shortly before 2002, Valve began development on Steam. On March 22th, 2002, at the “Game Developers Conference”, Steam was revealed to the public as a solid distribution network. In January 2003, Steam was first made available for beta testing during the beta of “Counter-Strike 1.6”. On September 12th, 2003, Steam was officially launched following a successful beta test period. In 2004, “Half-Life 2” was released and became the first game to require installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail copies. The first third-party games began to appear on Steam in 2005, followed by an announcement from Valve that it had become profitable due to highly successful Valve games.

Features

Steam’s primary service is to provide downloadable games and other software the user possesses in their virtual software libraries to their local computers as game cache files. In September 2007, Valve launched the Steam Community website. As of February 2015, there have been 13 million accounts on the site and 150 games have been made available. In September of 2008, a year later, Valve began support for Steam Cloud, a service that can automatically store saved games and related custom files on Valve’s servers, which can be accessed by users from any machine running the client. Major updates came in late 2011 and much of 2012, such as the additions of the Steam Workshop and Steam Greenlight.

Highlights

There are many running gags and jokes within the Steam userbase. After Valve introduced Steam Reviews, which enabled users to post their reviews and opinions on the game, many satirical user reviews began spreading around the community in 2013. Also noting that none of Valve’s titles have the number “3” included, with the exception of “Half Life 2: Episode Three”, people have started to joke about Valve (or more specifically, Gabe Newell) being unable to count to 3. Even the annual discount events that take place on Steam, in which many prices are temporarily lowered, has become a running gag as many Steam customers tend to overspend and make impulse purchases.

Traffic

On the “Alexa” network trafficking site, the Steam Community website has a global ranking of the 301st most popular site as of February 2015^[2], which also ranks #196 in the United States alone. There are 4.96 daily pageviews per visitor and almost all visitors are male.

Search Interest

External References