There was a time, in the not too distant past, where Steam wasn't the primo place to buy PC games. Although Valve's storefront always garnered an audience, not even Gabe Newell thought it would evolve the way it has.
No, seriously. In resurfaced quotes from 2011 (thanks, PC Gamer), the co-founder and now main man behind Valve stated he simply didn't think Steam was going to be a defining pillar of games commerce. "There's always this temptation to assume that the way things are today is the way things are going to be," he explained to PC Gamer at the time.
"And having been through this long enough in the games industry, I think I and everyone at Valve know that you're only as successful as what you've done lately," he said. "So the idea that Steam is somehow the answer to digital distribution ignores the fact that every two or three years, something is going to change dramatically."
He pointed to the Wii as a prime example, a console predicated on motion controls that became wildly popular despite many other instances of such tech falling flat on their face, and "social gaming" as another, which I'm taking to mean the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook. Might be even harder to believe, but for a while there, those games were hugely popular and didn't seem like they'd be going anywhere any time soon. How naive we were.
"If you stand still and you're not doing the things that you need to do to be valuable in the future, you're going to be left behind really rapidly," Newell added.
Steam had some competition in those days. EA's Origin seemed a potential player due to the publisher's size, Games for Windows offered a few bigger releases, and GOG was gaining traction as a decent alternative for older projects.
Alas, none could offer the variety and functionality of Steam, and soon Valve's platform would be the biggest in the PC space by some distance. And it seems Newell may have been among the most shocked by that.
