Steam has been THE distribution platform for PC games for years. If you want to buy a new game, in most cases, you will end up on Steam – no matter if it’s a small indie game or the latest AAA blockbuster with Game of the Year
-potential. However, much of the gaming industry apparently did not think this was possible, reports Gabe Newell, the head of Valve.
What does Gabe Newell report? In a documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Gabe Newell also talks about the beginnings of Steam (via YouTube). At Valve, the idea came up at some point that entire games could be downloaded through Steam.
Subsequently, the company made the decision that Half-Life 2 would require Steam to play at its release in 2004 – even for buyers of the physical version.
Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell also appears in commercials for kitchen appliances:
A year after the release of Half-Life 2, in 2005, Steam then offered games from third-party developers for the first time. However, a large part of the gaming industry apparently saw no potential in this, and many companies believed that Steam’s endeavor would fail, Newell reports:
It was a very strange time. I don’t think people understand how often we went to people and said: ‘No, you will be able to distribute software over the internet’ and people said: ‘No, that will never happen.’ I’m not talking about one or two people here. I mean, 99% of the companies we talked to said: ‘That will never happen.’
Companies believed players only wanted physical copies
Why did companies believe in a failure? Gabe Newell explains in the documentary that many companies believed that players simply did not want to buy their games through a platform like Steam.
The argument was that players wanted physical copies of the games they purchased. However, Newell replies: “Retail sales are not the goal, right. They are actually an obstacle, they are someone standing between you and the customer.”
Ultimately, Gabe Newell was proven right, and game developers worldwide not only offer their works through Steam but also through numerous own launchers and stores. Be it Epic Games, Ubisoft, EA, or Activision-Blizzard, nearly every major developer or publisher has its own distribution platform.
Yet despite Steam’s massive success, Valve was once very close to bankruptcy, as Newell also reports in the Half-Life documentary. At that time, the company was battling a lawsuit over the rights to Counter-Strike: Gabe Newell shares that Valve was once close to bankruptcy
