From updates to a store
Valve needed a reliable way to deliver updates and fight cheating. When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, Steam was mandatory and many players disliked it. From 2005 it also sold games from other publishers, and digital distribution gradually replaced boxed games.
What Steam does
- Sales, player reviews and recommendations.
- The Workshop for sharing mods and maps.
- Proton, which runs Windows games on Linux. The Steam Deck is built on it.
- Invitations to playtests, for example for Deadlock.