How Valve Beat The Giants
Valve outlasted Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft in the first big fight over PC game downloads, and it didn’t do it with sheer size. It did it by making people want to come back. That’s the view of Larry Kuperman, a veteran of the distribution wars who helped build Impulse, the store GameStop later acquired and shut down.
Speaking at this year’s Game Developers Conference, Kuperman traced Steam’s advantage to choices that felt unconventional at the time. “The idea was coming up to all of us,” he said, noting that early on “Steam really began as a visual way of finding your Counter-Strike server.” Plenty of rivals were in the mix—he name-checks Paradox’s GamersGate—but Valve moved faster on a pivotal front.
That front was selling other companies’ games. “The idea of selling games, and then selling third party games, didn’t seem intuitive at the time,” Kuperman said. “You’re a game company, why are you selling other people’s games? That was a hard thing to understand. But Gabe really had a great vision, coming out of Microsoft.” Valve turned Steam from a utility into a storefront where everyone’s releases could sit together, and that breadth mattered.
Community And Stickiness
The catalog wasn’t the whole story, though. Kuperman argues that Steam’s real edge was social. Friends lists, messaging, playtime stats, and those subtle pop-ups showing what your buddies just launched all stacked up into something you wanted to be part of. “What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community,” he said. “They established a stickiness to it, that people came back because it was Steam.”
Convenience helped, too. Both Steam and Impulse let you redownload purchases without much fuss—hardly a guarantee back then. Some stores even limited redownloads; one 2008 GamesPlanet receipt capped Fallout 1 and 2 re-downloads at six times each. When you remove anxiety around access and put your friends one click away, you build habits. Steam made those habits pleasant.