Steam: Microsoft and Yahoo’s Loss, Valve’s Gain
By Shawn on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:03 PM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games, Microsoft, Valve
The strategic errors and shortsightedness of one company often end up greatly befitting another. Take for example Valve’s Steam digital distribution service. When Valve first came up with the concept, it presented the idea to both Microsoft and Yahoo. Neither company saw the potential that has now been fulfilled by Valve’s Steam service.
Valve’s VP of marketing Doug Lombardi described the situation to GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview.
“You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft…and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam,” he explained.
“We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later.
“We went around to everybody and asked ‘Are you guys doing anything like this?’ And everyone was like ‘That’s a million miles in the future…We can’t help you.’”
Steam handles Valve’s products and many others with over 300 available titles and over 14 million accounts; all at a time when the games industry is pushing towards digital distribution.
Now if only Valve could understand that a worldwide distribution digital download program shouldn’t be selling games in North America Only we’d be on to something.