Today, Steam is such a popular PC gaming platform that it has faced lawsuits over monopoly claims. But for 20 years, almost no one believed that anyone would need the service at all.
In a recent documentary dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, the company's CEO Gabe Newell talked a little about the first steps in the development of the service. Initially, Valve intended to use it simply to send game updates, not to distribute them. However, at some point, the developers decided that this way they could download entire games.
The first test sample was Half-Life 2 itself, which required the Steam client to install. The decision was controversial — many players were not happy with this condition. But in the end, Gabe Newell defended it against the rest of the team. Nevertheless, many companies did not believe in the future of Steam and refused to provide copies of games:
I don't think people understand how many times we would go to people and say, «No, you will be able to distribute software over the internet» and have people say, «No, it will never happen». I'm not talking about one or two people. I mean like 99% of the companies we talked to said «It will never happen. Your retail sales force will never let it happen». But also people would say, «Users aren't gonna want this... people want physical copies». There were so many bad faith arguments that were being made. Retail sales is not the goal, right. It's actually an impediment, it's somebody who sits between you and the customer.
In the end, Valve's strategy worked, and over time, Steam has grown into the best place for PC games as we know it today.
Valve recently lost one of its veterans — designer Greg Coomer, whose likeness was used for Gordon Freeman's model, left the company and is rumored to be joining Microsoft. Meanwhile, activists in the US have accused Steam of distributing «extremist content».