History of Computers - Steam

Introduction

Steam is a digital platform and store for PC gaming released on September 12, 2003. Steam is the largest dedicated platform for PC gaming with several million people playing games at any given time.

Overview

Steam was created by Valve on September 12, 2003, as a means of updating and preventing cheating easier on Counter-Strike as well as providing developer content more efficiently. As Steam evolved it transformed into a platform for thousands of games and became a large part of PC gaming. Steam, along with purchasing and storing games, allows for both text and audio chat with friends, community forums, trading in-game items between friends, and much more. Steam is free to download and register an account but requires the user to spend five dollars somewhere on Steam in order to use many features regarding friends.

Significance

Steam was the first software to bring many different features of online gaming to one package, including automatic downloads, text and voice chatting with friends, a free client, an online game store, and more. This revolutionized the way games were downloaded and played on computers.

Citations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)

https://store.steampowered.com/about/

https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-versions/

https://digit.hbs.org/submission/steam-the-itunes-of-video-games/