I think it probably had more to do with having a store that worked well, games that had good prices, and most importantly: Good customer service. The only other service that comes close is GOG, and that’s mostly because of their DRM free policy.

I’m aware that there are community features on Steam, and some people must use them. There are stickers, profile pages, trading cards, and all kind of other things that I mostly ignore, but that other people must be using. But, I don’t think I’d ever call myself a member of the Steam community.

On the other hand, there are communities for games on Steam. The game-related forums and mod workshops are essential parts of some of the Steam games I play. I don’t post much in the forums, but I definitely use guides that other people post there.

What I think makes Steam work is:

• fair and honest prices, often with sales and discounts
• any DRM they use is something that normal users don’t notice – you really notice the difference when you end up with a Ubisoft game, even if it’s on Steam.
• updates that just work, so the next time you start the game it’s a new version and you don’t have to do anything
• a store that seems designed to sell you games you’ll actually enjoy playing, not one that pushes you to buy things that will make them the most money
• a client that makes it easy to play games with your friends, using a consistent interface, if you choose to do that. If not, they don’t try to push you to do things with friends.
• a decent review system that they’ve mostly managed to prevent people from gaming

I guess some of those, like playing games with friends, or even reviews could be seen as community features. But, I don’t feel like I’m “part of the steam community” when I play games with friends. We just happen to be two people playing a game using the same launcher. As for reviews, I don’t trust Steam reviews more than say Metacritic or Rock Paper Shotgun. I actually trust the “community” less than a good reviewer. There are admittedly some features of the Steam reviews that are useful, like saying how many hours someone has put into a game next to their review. I just mostly use the Steam reviews as a way to avoid buying something that’s a complete stinker because it looks interesting and is on sale.

GameStop had a Steam competitor? Where? When? They have an online store that you could buy physical shit through. When and where did they ever have a digital store you could download from?

Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.

Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.

I don’t know anyone who uses Steam for the community features.

Steam works because it’s easy. Full stop.

Impulse early on used to be as good as Steam and it had extra software in it to download like Stardock Fences that I liked. I felt it a bit infuriating that Stardock didn’t seem to see its potential and then the same for gamestop. It had Demigod and a handful of other games. It was a successor to Stardock Central. Stardock digital storefronts predated Steam but Stardock didn’t have the right vision compared to Valve and GameStop didn’t after buying Impulse

It was still mainstream to say PC gaming was dieing until like 2014 so I guess no surprise how little so many companies wanted to invest in a PC platform but that’s what makes Valve special. When PC gaming shelf space was disappearing in brick and mortar and old guard PC game studios were calling the platform a dead end (Epic), Valve was building up Steam as a relatively small company long before they had their live service sugar daddies in TF2, CSGO, and DOTA2

Then Valve again with Steam on Linux. Steam Linux share hits 5% this year in 2026. Steam Linux went into public beta 2012. They’ve been working on Linux for at least 14 years and it’s starting to look like it’ll pay off

I wanted Impulse to succeed as well because I thought PC gaming needed numerous major desktop client storefronts to save PC gaming. Turned out Valve would improve Steam beyond anyone’s expectations and doing that with anemic competitor challenges to push them