Steam Proposal First Rejected by Industry Giants

A top Valve official said that the company approached - and were rejected by - giants Microsoft and Yahoo to build Steam before forging ahead by themselves.

Doug Lombardi, Valve's vice president of marketing, said other companies kept rejecting the idea of building the platform. "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.'"

Today, Steam stands as a major distribution platform and community network as more and more publishers release titles both old and new on it. The follow-up to the hit 2007 PC title S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will in fact debut on Steam.

It caters to more than 14 million accounts and sells more than 300 titles.

Source: Gamesindustry.biz