If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past 20 or so years, you would know steam is the biggest video game network of all time. This wasn’t always the case; however, there was a point in time where the only way to play games was to either get a physical copy for a game console, or to not play games at all. How did it go from physical to digital in so little time?
To begin, steam wasn’t technically the first (nor will they be the last) to sell digital games. The people who really pioneered this was a company named gameline. As the name might suggest, it allowed you to buy games over a telephone line. It was steam that made it incredibly easy to do though. It was an incredibly simple process, make a free account on store.steampowered.com and be able to buy and play games straight from your own computer. This meant anybody could play video games, so long as they had a good enough computer.
Secondly, steam made the process of selling games incredibly easy. Normally to make a game you would have to belong to development team, you would have to make whatever game everyone else was making: you couldn’t make your own game. Steam changed this, now anybody could: easily make and publish their own game, more games were out and more people could play games, more people want to make games because there’s money in it. Essentially, steam created a positive feedback loop where people could make games, people would play them and more people would want to make games.
Moreover, steam allows all different game engines to be hosted on their app. Normally, people would have to code in C, which is notoriously hard to learn(if they wanted to make their own game) but with steam you could use any engine because it would go directly to your computer. Therefore anybody can make games, as there are a variety of no code engines, most of which that can compile in browser, that require no prior experience.
All in all, the reason for steams massive jump in popularity was due to it’s ease of access, positive feedback loop, and freedom to create games. Now, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without steam, but for many years this was a reality. Perhaps one day a larger, better software will over take steam.