MS and Yahoo linked with Steam originally
Valve went it alone...
Valve Software, Half-Life developers and overlords of the Steam content delivery network, pitched a pre-release Steam concept to both Microsoft and Yahoo, both firms declining involvement in the ground-breaking platform before Valve went it alone.
"You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft… and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam," marketing boss Doug Lombardi told GI.biz.
"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," the executive explained.
"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 is of course perhaps more famous now as a publishing platform, than simply a way of keeping Counter-Strike up to date. The service boasts nearly fifteen million users, and larger publishers have found themselves struggling to catch up with the groundbreaking service.
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