Steam has been around for twenty years – update

Valve’s gaming platform Steam will be available for exactly twenty years on September 12. Since then, Steam has become and remains the largest game store and launcher platform, with over ten million concurrent users worldwide at peak times.

In honor of Steam’s twentieth anniversary, Valve has made available a special retro badge, which according to SteamDB has been given to hundreds of thousands of eligible accounts since September 10. Furthermore, Valve has not yet done anything to celebrate the milestone.

Source: Valve/Dreamer

Steam was released on September 12, 2003 after a short beta phase. Valve initially released the gaming platform as a way to more easily distribute and update its own games. Half-Life 2 became the first game to be released digitally through the platform in late 2004, while a physical copy of the shooter also required installation through Steam. Starting in 2005, Valve began offering third-party games through the service.

Meanwhile, Steam offers hundreds of thousands of games from various developers and publishers through the platform. On an average day, around thirty million people use the platform simultaneously, while at peak times around ten million players are actually playing games simultaneously. This makes the platform by far the largest when it comes to online game stores and launchers. In recent years, competitors such as the Epic Games Store have been trying to recruit developers and users, for example by offering better conditions.

Update, September 13: Meanwhile, Valve has a blog post on Steam released with a summary of all major events on the platform. It shows that, for example, the first Steam sale took place in December 2007, that the Steam Workshop went live from 2011 and that gamers could get their money back from 2015. Each year also includes the most popular games released that year, accompanied by a unique game interpretation of popular memes from the relevant years. Finally, the gaming platform’s client temporarily has the characteristic green UI again.