It’s good that Microsoft did not get their hands on Steam (Link in comments)
It’s good that Microsoft did not get their hands on Steam (Link in comments)
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[https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-last-of-the-independents](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-last-of-the-independents)
Interview with Doug Lombardi from 2008. Even RealNetworks turned down Valve, and they specialized in online streaming and distribution.
Steam was originally planned to automatically update, provide matchmaking, antipiracy and anticheat for games, including Half-life 1. Valve later added a store to it. Half-life 2 was the first game sold on Steam.
Well, Yahoo also tried to buy Google, but didn’t
Nobody knows what’s gonna happen.
If you were that smart, why didn’t you buy bitcoins in 2010?
Easy to point out mistakes now when we know everything.
Everybody turned down Steam at first. Imagine buying your CDs for Half-life 2, which we positively knew to contain absolutely everything necessary to play it, but then, having to install a separate program to launch it. It was outrageous. Then, the game turned out to be insanely good, so most just installed Steam, many more great games were added to the platform, the crazy sales started to happen and the rest is history.
I would argue that steam is so good precisely because they don’t have a big corp “brother” overseeing their operations. It’s the only way how you can place end-user experience above anything else.