If you want to ask the question on today's exam paper, the question is: Describe the big companies that you know of in the game industry. I wonder how everyone will answer?
In China, we may think of Riot, which has the phenomenon of the recent MOBA game "League of Legends"; may think of Sony, the home console god PS4; may think of Nintendo, which brings countless joys to players; and may think of Blizzard Entertainment (Blizzard), which has famous game works such as "Warcraft" and "Overwatch".
Whatever the final answer, it cannot be denied that Valve, who sits on steam as a gold mine, is definitely one of the best answers to this question.
Maybe Valve is not familiar to everyone, but I believe that anyone who has experience with online gaming will know Steam. If someone doesn't know Steam yet, it's easy to understand, and netizens will understand the analogy: Steam is an e-commerce platform that sells games.
Of course, in addition to selling games, Steam also includes a variety of different functions: the trading market for game virtual items, social networking, post-performance updates after game release, prevention of plug-ins, and so on. These features have brought Steam a huge number of users over the years, making it the world's largest computer gaming platform today.
So, what is Steam's past and present life?
It's not easy to be human, and it's even harder to make games
Valve's creators Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell (G Fat), who were originally Microsoft employees, left Microsoft and began their game startup in 1996.
In fact, neither of them had experience developing games, but they managed to assemble a great team to make Valve's first game, Half-Life. Eventually, they approached Sierra Online to fund their release of Half-Life.
Half-Life was officially released in 1998, causing a sensation in the game industry at the time, the game was very popular, and it also set the best sales record at the time, and further established Valve's gaming path.
Play with heart, solve problems with heart
After Half-Life, Valve also launched well-known games such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, which are familiar to veteran gamers, and one of the things in common is that they are both multiplayer online shooters. Experienced players know that this means that they need to update the map, weapons, props, skins, anti-plug-in programs and other correction files frequently, but in addition to finding their own upgrade files, the updated server is too crowded is also a big problem.
In order to solve this problem, Valve began to conceive of a game platform that would allow the game to be automatically updated, anti-cheat, and anti-piracy (they did not join the online purchase of games at the beginning), and they initially proposed a cooperation plan to Microsoft and Yahoo, but they were rejected. Finally, they took matters into their own hands and officially launched Steam in 2003.
Cultivate into positive results
Valve also began lobbying other game makers to collaborate on trying to sell third-party games on Steam, which finally came to fruition in 2005. In 2005, Steam's classic game "Half-Life 2" was supported by many third-party companies, and its virtual version sold more than the retail version, which not only brought wealth to Valve, but also symbolized the success of Steam.
Since then, after years of development, more and more game companies have begun to discover the feasibility of Steam, including id Software, Eidos Interactive, Capcom and other large companies gradually joined, so that Steam has become the world's largest online game platform.
At this point, Steam, which has made many players lose their wallets, has initially improved, and has also become the first online game platform that has successfully combined many functions such as game sales, management, community, anti-theft, anti-plug-in, etc., and has written a strong stroke in the history of games.