If Steam didn't exist, another company would've carved out a space in it anyway by free market economics. GOG could've been big if they actually capitalized well on their momentum.

All I hear is "What if Valve Steam never existed, and instead Microsoft Steam did!?"

Let me ask you properly this time. What did Steam save PC games from? Bigfoot?

Same here! :-)

GFWL wasn't "the main platform for PC games" at any point though. In fact it didn't even launch until 3 years after Steam (2007). Lookup the list of GFWL titles on PCGW to see fewer than 100 games (out of 100,000 PC games ever made) ever used it and very few of those were GFWL exclusives. That digital game stores sprang into existence post-broadband uptake was a given, however the launch of Steam itself in 2004 didn't specifically "save" anything with early 2000's gaming as 1. There never was an early 2000's PC gaming slump to begin with and 2. You still couldn't even buy most 2004-2007 non-Valve AAA games like Far Cry 1, Oblivion, etc, on Steam until they were belatedly added in 2008-2010.

At the end of the day (and subject of the thread), it's disingenuous to portray Steam as some "Consumer Champion Against Unwanted Clients" when that's literally the whole 2004 Steam 'Origin Story'. Whether people like Steam or not, their store was invented on forcing the use of a client for HL2 and their biggest growth period (typically 2009-2013) came precisely from "bait & switching" discs in retail copies (aka, forcing the use of a client...) so they can't exactly turn around to other game developers and say "Hey, don't do what we did (twice over)"...

From becoming a niche market. How do you think PC gaming would have survived and become mainstream without Steam from the PS3/360 era onwards?

I don't think so, because you only buy old games here and you're probably not the only one. :-D

Jokes aside, look at the annual sales of Steam, Epic and GOG and you'll see clearly.

For me, GOG can be a niche and be in third place (?) as a digital distributor, as long as it remains DRM-free, I'll buy here.

Read AB2012's post again. Very carefully.
Just read all their posts!

Absolutely!
How did you come to that conclusion?

The only positive thing I would like to say to Valve is their contribution to the further development of support for Linux as a gaming platform.

At this stage it's clear you have absolutely no clue whatsoever what you're talking about re: 2000's era gaming. Early 2000's franchises like Age of Empires sold +15m copies on disc alone and Diablo 2 was even awarded a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records 2000 edition for being "the fastest selling game to date". The exact opposite of "niche" as you can get... Steam also didn't invent "cross-platform" games, and cross-platform games also predate Steam. Eg, Thief Deadly Shadows and Deus Ex 2 (Invisible War) both came out a year before Steam was invented.

The real "Niche" PC gaming era was like the 1970's to 1980's where PC's were so expensive many people gaming on something that wasn't a console at the time bought a much cheaper 8-bit micro-computer instead (eg, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari). PC gaming has been mainstream since the 90's. I remember going from 80s to 90s decade at school, console kids playing mostly 2D platformers / beat-em-ups / racing games went from seeing PC's as weak in the 80s to positively drooling over Doom and the rise of FPS's in the 90s... Half the stuff you're claiming credit for "Steam 'saved' PC gaming, Steam invented cross-platform games, etc" is completely made up nonsense. What put a PC in almost every house (including previous console-only homes) by the 90's was the advent of the Internet.

So we have an answer here huh. Former Microsoft Employee Gabe's launcher saved PC games..... FROM BECOMING A NICHE MARKET LOL


I didn't realize how utterly stupid this sounds until now.

PC but more specifically Windows and the games scene it garnered was never under any risk of going niche. Not after Doom, not after that trash heap called GTA. Not after literally anything.

This is making up a boogeyman to justify a launcher headed by who who is now yet another billionaire scum.

I was playing Final Fantasy 11 on a PS2 console, a few years after the millennium, in the year of 2002.. online of course (this game is online only) together with PC gamers, at a time Steam did not even exist... so the myth "Steam invented cross platform" is definitely a blatant lie. It was basically the first cross platform PC and console MMORPG, and Steam did not exist.

My gaming experience is way older than Steam and its "new age kiddies"... so be aware of that fact.

Again, I'm talking about the PS3/360 era and onwards. Piracy was a big problem on every platform, but it was by far the biggest problem on PC. Just because there were a few games that sold exceptionally well on PC, doesn't mean that it would have survived for long. Games like Crysis, Gears of War flopped on PC because of piracy. SiN Episodes only received one out of the planned nine episodes because of piracy. Steam made PC gaming more convenient. Before you bought a physical copy that required a disc every time you wanted to play a game legally, there was no summer sale, winter sale, spring sale, so on and so forth, and updating games weren't as automatic and simple. PC gaming became niche in around 2006, and Steam saved it slowly but surely a few years later.

So - you were the problem all along?
Well, I guess, we all have to thank you then, for giving Steam its raison d'etre.

Back in those old days the console market was simply stronger, so, PC games did barely hold a candle against. We can argue its reason... but fact is... consoles was still using discs those days and it did not stop them from being bought. Actually the whole "disc less matter" was mainly a Steam invention which was slowly even dragging the consoles along. Nowadays the new age gamers consider "disc less gaming" that supreme... even the consoles need to tag along, else they may slowly become wiped out.

The true invention from Steam is probably the large scale "disc less" and at the same time account bound gaming, i assume. Which was slowly... on par with consoles, adding all of its features such as DLCs, achievements and even more, adding the kind of convenience the majority of PC gamers do not want to miss anymore. Although on consoles the convenience is even bigger, because every game "works out of the box" which is not the case for every Steam game. Still, on consoles there is less versatility, for example on modding. Both platforms are usually DRMed... so no difference here.

Reality Check - Steam never "cured" piracy at all. People just moved from pirating disc games to pirating Steam games. And they still do today... You remember that Ubisoft CEO claiming "PC has a 95% piracy rate"? He made that comment in 2012 - 8 years post-Steam, only one year before the PS4/XB1 era started, and it included the large-scale pirating of Steam games throughout the whole PS3 / XB360 generation...

Nothing became niche about PC gaming at all in 2006. It was just a continuation of previous years. Far Cry sold great in 2004, FEAR sold great in 2005, Oblivion sold great in 2006, Bioshock sold great in 2007, Mass Effect sold great in 2008, Dragon Age Origins sold great in 2009 (inc still being released on disc), etc. You're simply making up fake historical revisionist 'facts' and telling yourself what you want to hear.