Steam (software)

Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront by Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games, and expanded to distributing and offering third-party game publishers' titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like digital rights management (DRM), game server matchmaking, anti-cheat measures, social networking and game streaming services. It provides the user with automatic game updating, saved game cloud synchronization, and community features such as friends messaging, in-game chat and a community market.

Valve released a freely available application programming interface (API) called Steamworks in 2008, which developers can use to integrate Steam's functions into their products, including in-game achievements, microtransactions, and user-created content support. Initially developed for Microsoft Windows operating systems, Steam was released for macOS in 2010 and Linux in 2012. Mobile apps to access online Steam features were first released for iOS and Android in 2012. The platform also offers other digital content and Valve gaming hardware, including productivity software, game soundtracks, videos and VR headset Valve Index.

The service is the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming, estimated around 75% of the market share in 2013 according to IHS Screen Digest. By 2017, users purchasing games through Steam totaled approximately 4.3 billion, representing at least 18% of global PC game sales according to Steam Spy. By 2021, the service had over 34,000 games with over 132 million monthly active users. The success of Steam has led to the development of the Steam Machine line of gaming PCs in 2015, which includes the SteamOS operating system and Steam Controller, Steam Link devices for local game streaming, and the handheld Steam Deck tailored for running Steam games in 2022.

History

Valve had entered into a publishing contract with Sierra Studios in 1997 ahead of the 1998 release of ''Half-Life''. The contract had given some intellectual property (IP) rights to Sierra in addition to publishing control. Valve published additional games through Sierra, including expansions for ''Half-Life'' and ''Counter-Strike''. Around 1999, as Valve started work on ''Half-Life 2'' and the new Source engine, they became concerned about their contract with Sierra related to the IP rights, and the two companies negotiated a new contract by 2001. The new contract eliminated Sierra's IP rights and gave Valve rights to digital distribution of its games.

Valve was looking for a way to better update its published games as providing downloadable patches for multiplayer games resulted in most of the online user base disconnecting for several days until players had installed the patch. Valve decided to create a platform that would update games automatically and implement stronger anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures. Through user polls at the time of its announcement in 2002, Valve also recognized that at least 75% of their users had access to high-speed Internet connections, which would continue to grow with planned broadband expansion in the following years, and recognized that they could deliver game content faster to players than through retail channels. Valve approached several companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, and RealNetworks to build a client with these features, but were declined.

Steam's development began in 2002, with working names for the platform being "Grid" and "Gazelle". It was publicly announced at the Game Developers Conference event on March 22, 2002, and released for beta testing the same day. To demonstrate the ease of integrating Steam with a game, Relic Entertainment created a special version of its game '' Impossible Creatures''. Valve partnered with several companies, including AT&T, Acer, and GameSpy. The first mod released on the system was ''Day of Defeat''. In 2002, Valve's President Gabe Newell said he was offering mod teams a game engine license and distribution over Steam for .

Prior to the announcement of Steam, Valve found that Sierra had been distributing their games in PC cafes which they claimed was against the terms of the contract, and took Sierra and their owners, Vivendi Games, to court in 2002. Sierra countersued, asserting that with the announcement of Steam, Valve had been working to undermine the contract to offer a digital storefront for their games, directly competing with Sierra. The case was initially ruled in Valve's favor, allowing them to leave the contract due to the breach and seek other publishing partners for retail copies of its games while continuing their work on Steam. One such company had been Microsoft, but Ed Fries stated that they turned down the offer due to Valve's intent to continue to sell their games over Steam.

Between 80,000 and 300,000 players participated in the beta test before Steam's official release on September 12, 2003. The client and website suffered outages and bugs at launch. At the time, Steam's primary function was streamlining the patch process common in online computer games, and was an optional component for all other games. In 2004, the World Opponent Network was shut down and replaced by Steam, with any online features of games that required it ceasing to work unless they converted over to Steam.

In November 2004, ''Half-Life 2'' was the first game to be offered digitally on Steam and require installation of the Steam client to play for retail copies. During this time users faced problems attempting to play the game. The requirement of Steam was met with concerns about software ownership, software requirements, and problems with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the ''Counter-Strike'' rollout.

In 2005, third-party developers were contracted to release games on Steam, such as '' Rag Doll Kung Fu'' and '' Darwinia''. Valve announced that Steam had become profitable because of some highly successful Valve games. Although digital distribution could not yet match retail volume, profit margins for Valve and developers were far larger on Steam. Publishers, such as id Software, Eidos Interactive, and Capcom, began distributing their games on Steam in 2007. By May of that year, 13 million accounts had been created on the service, and 150 games were for sale on the platform. In 2008, more publishers like Ubisoft, THQ, Sega, Take-Two Interactive, Activision, Electronic Arts had partnered with the service, but some games were unavailable or overpriced relative to market outside North America.

In May 2007, ATI included Steam in the ATI Catalyst GPU driver as well as offering a free Steam copy of '' Half-Life 2: Lost Coast'' and '' Half-Life 2: Deathmatch'' to ATI Radeon owners. In January 2008, Nvidia promoted Steam in the Nvidia GPU driver, as well as offering a free Steam copy of '' Portal: The First Slice'' to Nvidia hardware owners. Traditional retail versions of games required mandatory installation of Steam, '' Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2'' from Activision in 2009, '' Fallout: New Vegas'' from Bethesda Softworks in 2010 and ''Dragon Age II'' from Electronic Arts in 2011.

Electronic Arts removed some of its games from Steam because of restrictive terms of service in 2011 and launched ''Mass Effect 3'' only on its Origin service in 2012. Newell stated "We have to show EA it's a smart decision to have EA games on Steam, and we’re going to try to show them that." In 2014, Ubisoft games started to require Uplay to run after launching the game from Steam. In 2019, Ubisoft announced that they would stop selling their future games on Steam starting with ''Tom Clancy's The Division 2'' because Valve would not modify its revenue sharing model, with the company simultaneously announcing a deal with Epic Games to start selling their games on the recently launched Epic Games Store in addition to uPlay (which would later be rebranded to Ubisoft Connect). In May 2019, Microsoft distributed its games on Steam in addition to the Microsoft Store. In 2020, EA started to publish select games on Steam, and offering its rebranded subscription service EA Play on the platform. In 2022, Ubisoft announced that they would return to selling its recent games on Steam after leaving the storefront in 2019, starting with ''Assassin's Creed Valhalla'', citing that they were "constantly evaluating how to bring our games to different audiences wherever they are".

By 2014, total annual game sales on Steam were estimated at around $1.5 billion. By 2018, the service had over 90 million monthly active users. In 2018, its network delivered 15 billion gigabytes of data, compared to less than 4 billion in 2014.

Features and functionality

Software delivery and maintenance

Steam's primary service is to allow its users to purchase games and other software, adding them to a virtual library from which they may be downloaded and installed an unlimited number of times. Initially, Valve was required to be the publisher for these games since they had sole access to the Steam's database and engine, but with the introduction of the Steamworks software development kit (SDK) in May 2008, anyone could integrate Steam into their game without Valve's direct involvement.

Valve intended to "make DRM obsolete" as games released on Steam had traditional anti-piracy measures, including the assignment and distribution of product keys and support for digital rights management software tools such as SecuROM or non-malicious rootkits. With an update to the Steamworks SDK in March 2009, Valve added its "Custom Executable Generation" (CEG) approach into the Steamworks SDK. The CEG technology creates a unique, encrypted copy of the game's executable files for the given user, which allows them to install it multiple times and on multiple devices, and make backup copies of their software. Once the software is downloaded and installed, the user must then authenticate through Steam to de-encrypt the executable files to play the game. Normally this is done while connected to the Internet following the user's credential validation, but once they have logged into Steam once, a user can instruct Steam to launch in a special offline mode to be able to play their games without a network connection. Developers are not limited to Steam's CEG and may include other forms of DRM (or none at all) and other authentication services than Steam; for example, some games from publisher Ubisoft require the use of their UPlay gaming service. Other games required Games for Windows – Live, of which many transitioned to using the Steamworks CEG approach following its shutdown in 2014.

In September 2008, Valve added support for Steam Cloud, a service that can automatically store saved game and related custom files on Valve's servers; users can access this data from any machine running the Steam client. Games must use the appropriate features of Steamworks for Steam Cloud to work. Users can disable this feature on a per-game and per-account basis. Cloud saving was expanded in January 2022 for Dynamic Cloud Sync, allowing games developed with this feature to store saved states to Steam Cloud while a game is running rather than waiting until the user quit out of the game; this was added ahead of the portable Steam Deck unit so that users can save from the Deck and then put the unit into a suspended state. In May 2012, the service added the ability for users to manage their game libraries from remote clients, including computers and mobile devices; users can instruct Steam to download and install games they own through this service if their Steam client is currently active and running. Product keys sold through third-party retailers can also be redeemed on Steam. For games that incorporate Steamworks, users can buy redemption codes from other vendors and redeem these in the Steam client to add the title to their libraries. Steam also offers a framework for selling and distributing downloadable content (DLC) for games.

In September 2013, Steam introduced the ability to share most games with family members and close friends by authorizing machines to access one's library. Authorized players can install the game locally and play it separately from the owning account. Users can access their saved games and achievements providing the main owner is not playing. When the main player initiates a game while a shared account is using it, the shared account user is allowed a few minutes to either save their progress and close the game or purchase the game for his or her own account. Within Family View, introduced in January 2014, parents can adjust settings for their children's tied accounts, limiting the functionality and accessibility to the Steam client and purchased games.

In accordance with its acceptable use policy, Valve retains the right to block customers' access to their games and Steam services when Valve's Anti-Cheat (VAC) software determines that the user is cheating in multiplayer games, selling accounts to others, or trading games to exploit regional price differences. Blocking such users initially removed access to his or her other games, leading to some users with high-value accounts losing access because of minor infractions. Valve later changed its policy to be similar to that of Electronic Arts' Origin platform, in which blocked users can still access their games but are heavily restricted, limited to playing in offline mode and unable to participate in Steam Community features. Customers also lose access to their games and Steam account if they refuse to accept changes to Steam's end user license agreements; this last occurred in August 2012. In April 2015, Valve began allowing developers to set bans on players for their games, but enacted and enforced at the Steam level, which allowed them to police their own gaming communities in a customizable manner.

Storefront features

The Steam client includes a digital storefront called the Steam Store through which users can purchase computer games. Once the game is bought, a software license is permanently attached to the user's Steam account, allowing them to download the software on any compatible device. Game licenses can be given to other accounts under certain conditions. Content is delivered from an international network of servers using a proprietary file transfer protocol. (click "View individual server statistics") As of 2015, Steam sells its products in US and Canadian dollars, euros, pounds sterling, Brazilian reais, Russian rubles, Indonesian rupiah and Indian rupees depending on the user's location. In December 2010, the client began supporting the WebMoney payment system, which is popular in many European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries. From April 2016 until December 2017, Steam accepted payments in Bitcoin with transactions handled by BitPay before dropping support for it due to high fluctuation in value and costly service fees. The Steam storefront validates the user's region; the purchase of games may be restricted to specific regions because of release dates, game classification, or agreements with publishers. Since 2010, the ''Steam Translation Server'' project offers Steam users to assist with the translation of the Steam client, storefront, and a selected library of Steam games for twenty-eight languages. In October 2018, official support for Vietnamese and Latin American Spanish was added, in addition to Steam's then 26 languages. Steam also allows users to purchase downloadable content for games, and for some specific games such as ''Team Fortress 2'', the ability to purchase in-game inventory items. In February 2015, Steam began to open similar options for in-game item purchases for third-party games.

In conjunction with developers and publishers, Valve frequently provides discounted sales on games on a daily and weekly basis, sometimes oriented around a publisher, genre, or holiday theme, and sometimes allow games to be tried for free during the days of these sales. The site normally offers a large selection of games at discount during its annual Summer and Holiday sales, including gamification of these sales to incentive users to purchase more games.

Users of Steam's storefront can also purchase games and other software as gifts to be given to another Steam user. Prior to May 2017, users could purchase these gifts to be held in their profile's inventory until they opted to gift them. However, this feature enabled a gray market around some games, where a user in a country where the price of a game was substantially lower than elsewhere could stockpile giftable copies of games to sell to others, particularly in regions with much higher prices. In August 2016, Valve changed its gifting policy to require that games with VAC and Game Ban-enabled games be gifted immediately to another Steam user, which also served to combat players that worked around VAC and Game Bans, while in May 2017, Valve expanded this policy to all games. The changes also placed limitations on gifts between users of different countries if there is a large difference in pricing for the game between two different regions.

The Steam store also enables users to redeem store product keys to add software from their library. The keys are sold by third-party providers such as Humble Bundle (in which a portion of the sale is given back to the publisher or distributor), distributed as part of a physical release to redeem the game, or given to a user as part of promotions, often used to deliver Kickstarter and other crowd funding rewards. A grey market exists around Steam keys, where less reputable buyers purchase a large number of Steam keys for a game when it is offered for a low cost, and then resell these keys to users or other third-party sites at a higher price, generating profit for themselves. This caused some of these third-party sites, such as G2A, to be embroiled in this grey market. It is possible for publishers to have Valve to track down where specific keys have been used and cancel them, removing the product from the user's libraries, leaving the user to seek any recourse with the third-party they purchased from. Other legitimate storefronts, like Humble Bundle, have set a minimum price that must be spent to obtain Steam keys as to discourage mass purchases that would enter the grey market. In June 2021, Valve began limiting how frequently Steam users could change their default region to prevent them from purchasing games from outside their home region for cheaper.

In 2013, Steam began to accept player reviews of games. Other users can subsequently rate these reviews as helpful, humorous, or otherwise unhelpful, which are then used to highlight the most useful reviews on the game's Steam store page. Steam also aggregates these reviews and enables users to sort products based on this feedback while browsing the store. In May 2016, Steam further broke out these aggregations between all reviews overall and those made more recently in the last 30 days, a change Valve acknowledges to how game updates, particularly those in Early Access, can alter the impression of a game to users. To prevent observed abuse of the review system by developers or other third-party agents, Valve modified the review system in September 2016 to discount review scores for a game from users that activated the product through a product key rather than directly purchased by the Steam Store, though their reviews remain visible. Alongside this, Valve announced that it would end business relations with any developer or publisher that they have found to be abusing the review system. Separately, Valve has taken actions to minimize the effects of review bombs on Steam. In particular, Valve announced in March 2019 that it mark reviews they believe are "off-topic" as a result of a review bomb, and eliminate their contribution to summary review scores; the first such games they took action on with this was the '' Borderlands'' games after it was announced ''Borderlands 3'' would be a timed-exclusive to the Epic Games Store.

During mid-2011, Valve began to offer free-to-play games, such as ''Global Agenda