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.
Opening The Gates For Indies
Kuperman points to one more factor that he considers decisive: a low barrier to entry for developers. In the 2000s, the retail bottleneck could crush anything unusual. “If you did not get a retail buyer to pick up your game,” he recalled, “If your game wasn’t at Walmart, GameStop, three or four retailers, you were done. You didn’t make a game. Games that were kind of unusual and quirky, that broke them.”
Steam loosened that choke point. “Steam’s philosophy of, anybody can put their game on it—for a price, but it’s not a significant price—that really changed the gaming world,” Kuperman said. “I think that probably the biggest thing that you can say about Steam is that, for a number of indies, it kept their company alive when they would have otherwise gone under.” Access didn’t guarantee success, but it finally gave oddball projects and small studios a real shot.
GOG’s Quiet Lifeline
Even with Steam’s dominance, Kuperman is quick to credit another storefront for a different kind of rescue. His current claim to fame is at Nightdive Studios, the preservation-focused team behind modern remasters, and he says the studio wouldn’t exist without GOG. “If it wasn’t for GOG, there would have been no Nightdive,” he said. “GOG was the one that put System Shock 2 up and really started our company, and that goes to our friend Oleg [Klapovskiy].”
That perspective rounds out the picture of the era: Steam built the default social home for PC gaming, while GOG provided a haven that could revive classics and seed new ventures. “These are relationships that we’ve had for years, but I don’t think people realize just how important they were,” Kuperman added. “I think Good Old Games is something that when you look at the history of games during this time, that they deserve their moment in the sun and the spotlight on them.”
Seen from 2026, Valve’s win can look inevitable. It wasn’t. Giants had money, catalogs, and marketing muscle. Valve combined a store with a place to hang out, reduced friction around ownership, and opened the door to creators who’d been locked out by retail. Put those together and you don’t just sell games—you build habits and identity. Or, as Kuperman put it, people came back “because it was Steam.”
Plenty of stores now chase the same playbook with achievements, profiles, curated shelves, and community hubs. The question is whether anyone can match Steam’s mix of access and belonging without reintroducing friction elsewhere. Discovery gets tougher every year, and developers still need a platform that both welcomes them and keeps players engaged. If history repeats, the next winner won’t just stock more games; it’ll make people feel like they’re coming home.
