Steam is the biggest digital PC games marketplace and has been for several years. It was launched in 2003 as the brainchild of Gabe Newell and his company, Valve, with the intention of providing updates and patches for Valve’s games. Since then, it has grown astronomically and become the go-to platform for developers and publishers to share their games with gamers. However, the original plan wasn’t as wholesome and was driven by frustration. Interestingly, it wasn’t even called Steam back when it was being conceptualized.
The origin of Steam was discussed by YouTuber Indie Game Joe during his very first podcast episode with guest Minh “Gooseman” Le (linked below), the co-creator of Counter-Strike. Le spoke about his early days at Valve and working with Gabe, recalling some of the eccentric habits that Gabe had. He then went on to talk about how Steam came to be, revealing that the idea was born out of frustration and a desire to not work with publishers directly.
Le explained that back when Valve was working with Sierra, the publisher of Half-Life, it was “such a bad experience” for Gabe that he didn’t want to deal with publishers anymore. That’s how he came up with the idea of a digital marketplace, with the initial concept being peer-to-peer file hosting. However, that didn’t work out because Valve could not solve the security issues. Furthermore, Steam was originally called Grid since that represented all the peer-to-peer connections.
However, the idea of a digital marketplace was met with doubt. Le went on to state that because of slow internet speeds, downloading a game seemed preposterous. But they did not anticipate how rapidly internet speeds would progress, and it has been eye-opening to see how far Steam has evolved.
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