I think it probably had more to do with having a store that worked well, games that had good prices, and most importantly: Good customer service. The only other service that comes close is GOG, and that’s mostly because of their DRM free policy.
I’m aware that there are community features on Steam, and some people must use them. There are stickers, profile pages, trading cards, and all kind of other things that I mostly ignore, but that other people must be using. But, I don’t think I’d ever call myself a member of the Steam community.
On the other hand, there are communities for games on Steam. The game-related forums and mod workshops are essential parts of some of the Steam games I play. I don’t post much in the forums, but I definitely use guides that other people post there.
What I think makes Steam work is:
- fair and honest prices, often with sales and discounts
- any DRM they use is something that normal users don’t notice – you really notice the difference when you end up with a Ubisoft game, even if it’s on Steam.
- updates that just work, so the next time you start the game it’s a new version and you don’t have to do anything
- a store that seems designed to sell you games you’ll actually enjoy playing, not one that pushes you to buy things that will make them the most money
- a client that makes it easy to play games with your friends, using a consistent interface, if you choose to do that. If not, they don’t try to push you to do things with friends.
- a decent review system that they’ve mostly managed to prevent people from gaming
I guess some of those, like playing games with friends, or even reviews could be seen as community features. But, I don’t feel like I’m “part of the steam community” when I play games with friends. We just happen to be two people playing a game using the same launcher. As for reviews, I don’t trust Steam reviews more than say Metacritic or Rock Paper Shotgun. I actually trust the “community” less than a good reviewer. There are admittedly some features of the Steam reviews that are useful, like saying how many hours someone has put into a game next to their review. I just mostly use the Steam reviews as a way to avoid buying something that’s a complete stinker because it looks interesting and is on sale.
GameStop had a Steam competitor? Where? When? They have an online store that you could buy physical shit through. When and where did they ever have a digital store you could download from?
Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.
Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.
Also, it’s just well thought out tech. Can play it like a controller. Touch screen is good. Customisable controls and the track pad for mouse based games is chefs kiss.
Its nice to own. Nice to play.
This is the same reason why Netflix was good to start. It answered the service problem. Now with the fracturing, licensing, pricing, blah, blah that’s no longer the case
Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.
As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.
I remember in the early days I tried out several different services trying to do the same thing as Steam. None of them really worked. I would have been willing to run multiple apps for different games back then, but each one individually made me go “Eh, too much hassle.”
Actually, I dropped Steam as well in the early early days. The technical problems I ran into were so unacceptable that I had resolved to boycott them forever. Couldn’t say no to all of the bangers they were putting out, though, so I came back to try again and they had gotten much better.
Same thing happened with music too, music piracy cratered with the success of Spotify.
I don’t know anyone who uses Steam for the community features.
Steam works because it’s easy. Full stop.
He steam community forums are a disaster 😅
Eh ‘community’ is like the least important reason why I use Steam. It’s just easy to buy, organize, and play your games with friends with a minimum of fuss or resource strain on my PC. I’m sure some people are into the community features but at the same time I feel gaming C-level execs always think that is more important than providing a good, easy-to-use product.
Reviews too! Steam has a frequently used and frequently useful user-submitted reviewing feature.
Reviews are a “community” feature, and it’s remarkably hard to build a review feature people want to use that is actually valuable.
In context it seems like the “play your games with friends” part of your comment is what they were getting at, and less about the forums and such. For me at least, that’s a big draw. I’ve hyped remote play together a lot, but it’s a huge reason I prefer steam. I can also share my library with several other people, so buying a game there is like buying it for a few of my friends too. I think that’s the stickiness he’s referring to.
But Steam also had friends lists, messaging, playtime stats, and those little popup notifications about what your buddies were playing. “What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community,” Kuperman argued. “They established a stickiness to it, that people came back because it was Steam.”
Alright, I just have a knee-jerk reaction when any execs talk about ‘community’ that it’s normally something I have no desire to engage with. However, I see what you mean in this context!
and play your games with friends
Thats part of what “community” is.
Regardless, just because it’s not your reason for using it doesn’t mean it’s not a major factor in why it’s successful in general.
Yeah I get that from the other comments. I just don’t consider playing games with IRL friends part of community but I get it. I was thinking more of the almost universally reviled community forums.
“and play your games with friends with a minimum of fuss or resource strain on my PC”
I think that is more in line with the community aspect being quoted. The way people talk about Steam. The ease of jumping into games with friends, either through “Join Game” features, or private servers. The support for modding and hosting, especially with earlier Source engine stuff (Half-Life and Gary’s Mod, etc).
It was more than just a launcher, and that changed the way the larger gaming community talked about/saw Steam.
Impulse early on used to be as good as Steam and it had extra software in it to download like Stardock Fences that I liked. I felt it a bit infuriating that Stardock didn’t seem to see its potential and then the same for gamestop. It had Demigod and a handful of other games. It was a successor to Stardock Central. Stardock digital storefronts predated Steam but Stardock didn’t have the right vision compared to Valve and GameStop didn’t after buying Impulse
It was still mainstream to say PC gaming was dieing until like 2014 so I guess no surprise how little so many companies wanted to invest in a PC platform but that’s what makes Valve special. When PC gaming shelf space was disappearing in brick and mortar and old guard PC game studios were calling the platform a dead end (Epic), Valve was building up Steam as a relatively small company long before they had their live service sugar daddies in TF2, CSGO, and DOTA2
Then Valve again with Steam on Linux. Steam Linux share hits 5% this year in 2026. Steam Linux went into public beta 2012. They’ve been working on Linux for at least 14 years and it’s starting to look like it’ll pay off
I wanted Impulse to succeed as well because I thought PC gaming needed numerous major desktop client storefronts to save PC gaming. Turned out Valve would improve Steam beyond anyone’s expectations and doing that with anemic competitor challenges to push them
More like “what Steam did not do better than everyone else…”
Shot themselves in the foot?
Why would the loser of a competition have insider info about what the winner did to win? Doesn’t make much sense.
Often the loser of a competition knows more about the competition than someone who wasn’t involved in the competition.
But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be honest about why they lost, maybe not even honest with themselves.
