Gamestop’s probably pretty steamed.

Remember when people used to buy their music on disks? Haha, man that’s so 1990’s. Nowadays, we just download our jams off of iTunes, right? Well why not do the same with games?

This is what Valve, everyone’s favorite gaming company, was thinking when they came up with their Steam platform in 2003. Steam is a unique content delivery system that can be downloaded for free and allows you to buy, download, and play games at your leisure. While I’ve already posted about things like Steam Cloud, it’s often overlooked exactly how revolutionary the Steam platform itself is. It’s changed the face of computer gaming. It starts with a large community focus, allowing you to create an account and get the platform for free, create a personalized home page with your own profile picture and nickname, and a friending feature which allows you to add people as friends, chat with other users, or even create unique groups for people to join. With over 25 million users and 21 available languages, it’s attracted some big-time names in gaming, like Activision (Call of Duty, Tony hawk, Guitar Hero), EA (The Sims, Rock Band, every sports game ever), and LucasArts (Star Wars games and, uh, more Star Wars games).

The store itself is quite attractive as well. It’s incredibly organized and expertly laid out, allowing you to sort by genre, price, or just search for titles, which is a good thing considering how big it’s become. Steam boasts a library of over 1,000 games available ranging from big-name titles like Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 to unknowns like Time Gentlemen, Please! And no, I have absolutely no idea what that last game is, but I’m totally playing it now.

Steam is more convenient, less hassle, and has no extra cost, so why hasn’t it been done until now? Well, probably because before 2003, it couldn’t have been done. Downloading a game off the internet takes a lot of processing power which computers didn’t have, not to mention that the majority of a game is usually saved on the disk, which is why you need the disk to play even after you’ve installed something. Steam has to put the entire game on your hard drive. This takes enormous amounts of space which wasn’t readily available until fairly recently. It still takes much longer than normal. I recently bought Mass Effect 2 and it estimated it would take 6-7 hours to download it when it probably would have been ready in maybe 2 if I bought a physical copy.

These problems are becoming more and more minor, however. While Steam started as just a platform for Valve games like Half-life and Counter-Strike, it has since become a viable option for all kinds of games due to improving hardware. Cable and DSL internet connections are lightning fast and my hard-drive has just under 600 gigabytes. I have around 40 games installed through Steam and that only fills maybe a quarter of the space. As Steam becomes more and more popular, people are starting to choose computer games over the console counterparts. PC’s finally catching back up to the consoles with downloading games as the main weapon, and I’ll be leading the charge.