Gadgetory

steam may have had humble beginnings as that program that for some reason even retail copies of half-life 2 had to have installed alongside but it has since grown into the primary way that people purchase games for their PCs with steam sales now accounting for roughly 50 to 75 percent of the total PC gaming market such a huge chunk that some have argued that steams virtual monopoly on game distribution could stifle competitive innovation but no matter how you feel about it there is no denying that Valve has refined steam into a powerful platform with a lot to offer Gabe Newell and valve created steam more or less out of necessity when they noticed that they would be inundated with problems every time they needed to update one or more of their online games by creating a platform with the ability to automatically update games Valve minimized the downtime that the gamers would experience so that they could keep playing without having to worry about navigating to the developers website download the latest patch to boo-boo-boo hopefully it's up this time however despite being the norm today valve certainly made at least a few gamers steaming mad by imposing online authentication and DRM requirements to play games especially since steam was still pretty buggy around the time that half-life 2 was released in 2004 often buckling under the stress of heavy traffic and crashing games as a result but much like John Stamos steam just got better with age and after they smoothed out their client-server networking architecture Valve's started making agreements with third-party publishers to diversify steams game catalog beyond its own titles and as more and more publishers began adopting the digital distribution model the success and profitability of Steam grew prompting valve to roll out a host of new features for the platform like cloud storage for you to save your online profile achievement lists to reward your aiming instant messaging so you could easily keep in contact with your gaming friends and perhaps most notably the addition of community based networking groups I mean they turned it into a freaking social network recognizing the importance of its community Valve launched steam greenlight in 2012 as a way for users to help choose which games were added to the service with greenlight developers are able to submit information about their projects including early demos so users could pledge their support for the games that they want to see made available on Steam sort of like your 6th grade science fair only the winners get their projects published on Steam instead of some crappy school newsletter however for the sets that greenlight seemed to be making in the right direction there were certainly some steps backwards and some developers became notorious for pandering to the community by offering free copies of the game upon release in exchange for thumbs up effectively gaming the system valve has committed to replace greenlight with something else it's entirely user driven but given that they've never been particularly speedy about releases it still feels like we could be waiting for that for some time so then what else is in store for the future of steam well thanks to a partnership with HTC valve plans on getting into VR in a big way recently the HTC vive the first steam VR headset was shown off with a handful of demos including a level based on portals Aperture Science lab there's also a huge number of steam games that already have the necessary code to work with the other VR headsets like the oculus rift and valve has said they'll be releasing an open source API so that developers can make their games and other applications compatible with steam VR and given that valve tends to couple new technology releases with flagship game releases maybe we can hope that the vive will herald the coming of the long-awaited but never confirmed not even confirmed they were even really working on it half-life 3 probably not but you can go ahead 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