What is steam ?

Those of you who have stumbled on our site without any knowledge about modern gaming might be wondering, what is this Steam ? It's a huge community and network where game developers can publish their games and sell them online as well as in stores, Steam is also called a "game platform" since all the games sold on Steam can only be ran through the program itself. Game developers contact steam saying they wish to sell their game and give them their price. Steam puts a little on top the price and adds the game to their marketplace, where all users can buy the games and then download them digitally without having to wait for shipping or anything of that nature. Currently, steam has over 2000 games in it's marketplace and they range from $1 to $201...

So what exactly makes Steam so popular ? It has hundreds of millions of active users and thousands of game developers requesting that their games would go on Steams marketplace. Their secret involves the amazing community that they've managed to build. Steam is ran by the company Valve who made one of the first popular and massively played multiplayer first person shooter game : Counter Strike 1.6.
During the release of that game they started building Steam. The game was based on teams and players needed a way to communicate and share their strategies, tips and tricks. Steam solved that issue : they implemented an instant messaging system in the program and soon a way to call your steam buddies via computer using a microphone, similarly how Skype is at the moment.

They had a few other secrets up their sleeve as well. They soon implemented community forums, where they had separate sections for every game being sold on Steam. Players could sign in there with their casual steam account and talk about what they like about the game, what they dislike, any suggestions or rants. Posting tutorials for different weapons recoil control or even bunnyhopping which came extremely popular after the release of a tutorial in the Steam community forums. Another big bonus that no other game platform had was the customiseable user profiles. You could change your avatar, nickname, add a clan tag or even post pictures of your best game scores. In the profiles you could also see how much the user has played a game, when they last played it and much more interesting information.

Another huge bonus that came with Steam and made it popular after counter strike 1.6 was the clan system. As stated above teamwork was extremely important in a successful game of counter-strike and clans were the solution that. Steam allowed to make groups where the leader could invite certain people, they invited fellow gamers and posted strategies for each map, what route each player should take etc.

Steam also has tons of other features that benefit it in becoming the monopoly within game platforms. Including but not limited to : massive server browser for all games, HLTV which lets you view any server of a game and record it/watch old videos and plenty more.
Steams success will definitely continue and it will get more and more popularity as new generations are coming and most of them are already addicted to video games..