Valve boss Gabe Newell has a history of being right about things, probably most famously about Steam itself: Making the platform an integral part of Half-Life 2, when most of the world insisted that digital distribution "will never happen," may be the single most impactful decision in the history of PC gaming. But he was a little bit off the mark eight years later, when he gave us his thoughts on what the future might hold—including, possibly, a world where Steam has been left in the dust by its competitors.
"There's always this temptation to assume that the way things are today is the way things are going to be, 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," Newell told us in an interview back in 2011. "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.
