Valve’s Steam storefront is now the go-to marketplace for games on PC. While initially controversial on launch, the beloved PC gaming platform has now grown to be an inseparable part of PC gaming, but its creation all comes down to Gabe Newell’s bad experience with game publishers.
In an interview Indie Game Joe, Counter-Strike co-creator Minh Le—who worked at Valve during the creation of Steam—revealed that Valve’s experience with Sierra publishing Half-Life. Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike was not pleasant and resulted in numerous issues back in the late 90s.
“I think Gabe was the guy who said, “F**k these publishers”, the Counter-Strike co-creator explained. “Sierra was publishing Half-Life… but working with Sierra was such a bad experience and it left a really sour taste in Gabe’s mouth that he just wanted to say, ‘F**k it, I never want to deal with publishers anymore’.”
Le explained that employees at Valve were not entirely certain that the release of Steam was going to go well. When the marketplace launched, players had to use it to play Half-Life 2, but with slow internet speeds, there was a large worry it simply wouldn’t catch on.
“A lot of people at Valve, a lot of my co-workers, we were like, ‘is this even going to work?’” the Counter-Strike icon said. “Because this was 2001, 2002. In 2002, peoples’ internet was not very good, [it was] very slow. So we had these physical stores where you had to go and buy your games. Back then, I would say everybody was just buying the game. There was no such thing as downloading games. Everybody’s internet was so slow. We were like, ‘It’s taking me a day just to download Half-Life, this is not gonna work.’”
Le admits that he was proven wrong, saying that “watching Steam’s evolution has been really eye-opening”. While the internet was becoming more important and better than ever, the detractors simply didn’t “anticipate the speed at which the internet would grow”.
Steam has since become an inseparable part of PC gaming. While there are other options available, there is simply little want for most PC gamers to move outside of the platform. In fact, there’s abject hostility towards some other PC gaming platforms these days.
Along with discussing the formation of Steam, Le also explained that Gabe Newell was a colourful character to be around. In fact, the Counter-Strike lead explained that the iconic Valve founder once spent months engaging in Mongolian Throat Singing across the Valve offices, much to the annoyance of others.
