Windows Store ... the biggest threat to Steam yet?
By John Callaham



In 2004, Valve took a huge gamble by offering people a chance to purchase and download its long awaited first person shooter Half-Life 2 via a new service called Steam. The wild idea was that some gamers would rather sit at home to purchase the game rather than drive to a retail store and buy the game on a disk in a box. When it launched, Steam took more than a few knocks from critics who felt that the service was full of issues and bugs.

Rather than just abandon the project, Valve took the notes to heart and slowly Steam's features began to be improved. It later added more games from Valve's library of titles and in 2005 it added its first third party games to its storefront.

Fast forward to 2012. Steam now has well over 1,000 games in its download library with more being added every weekday. It has 40 million registered users and has had a total of 5 million concurrent users at one point this year. Valve's Steamworks tools, which add features like achievements, multiplayer leaderboards and anti-cheat measures, are also being used in hundreds of PC games.

More to the point, Steam has pretty much saved the PC game industry. Retail revenues have dried up as fewer and fewer stores sell physical boxed PC game products in favor of console games. Steam led the way for PC games to be sold primarily, and often exclusively, via digital download. It has given a number of independent game developers a chance to reach a worldwide audience with their products without having to deal with traditional publishers.

Steam currently has a number of competitors to its business, including Gamefly's PC game download service (formerly Direct2Drive), Impulse (bought by GameStop in 2011), GamersGate and most recently Origin from Electronic Arts. While all of these services have had some degree of success, Steam is still the clear leader in terms of its massive number of users.
ShareShiz Reviewed by ShareShiz on . Windows Store ... the biggest threat to Steam yet? Windows Store ... the biggest threat to Steam yet? By John Callaham Rating: 5