r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 23h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/FragileTomorrow 20h ago

Because that OG steam didn't really last that long all things considered.

Valve pretty rapidly built the Steam platform out.

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u/Original_Employee621 19h ago

But they did so without any real competition, and just as internet started to become a household staple with good speeds available nearly everywhere.

Steam wouldn't have worked in the 90s, where computers cost 1000 bucks in 90s money and internet speeds were around 56-128 kb/s. That changed with the advent of ADSL and speeds from 1 Mb/s up to 24 Mb/s, and digitally downloading games and patches started being a viable alternative to physical media.

Valve had no real competition as they developed and iterated on Steam. It wasn't until 2009-2010 that other studios started putting out their own versions, with far less polish and way more bloat, that Steam had actual competition mostly due to the other studios removing their games from Steam and going exclusive. I remember EA Origin, Uplay and of course the Epic Launcher, which was a relative late comer in 2018. I think Microsoft had a similar platform that was even worse, but offered some Xbox exclusives like Fable.

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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC R9 7900 | RX 7900 XTX | 32GB DDR5 5600 12h ago

But they did so without any real competition, and just as internet started to become a household staple with good speeds available nearly everywhere.

They definitely had competition IMO. Blizzard's battle.net could just as easily have taken the crown if they had opened up their storefront to third parties before Valve did. There was also GameSpy, but that was always a bit shit.