Steam

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Steam is a video game distribution and content sharing platform owned and operated by Valve Software, a corporation founded in 1996 who rose to fame through franchises like Half-Life and Counter-Strike. Steam was announced in 2002, with a beta test in the first half of 2003 and then a public release September of the same year. Since then approximately 9 12 24 30 35 million people concurrently use Steam at peak times, with some days in excess of 10 14 25 33 40 million.

Vital signs

Stable, as Valve has stated that due to their privately owned nature there's no stockholder pressure to perform. Not too likely to die in the future unless there were a long series of catastrophic mistakes within a short timespan, considering the revenue generated from seasonal sales and microtransactions in Valve-published games.

It was reported by a redditor who deleted their account that there would be contingencies in place to ensure games published on Steam would remain playable in the event of Steam being shut down or Valve going under.[1] This could entail redemption of codes on other platforms like GOG.com or as far as an official Steam cracker to make games that require the operation of Steam no longer require it, but the means for recovering games is unclear.

If Valve were to go out of business the primary area of concern would be the Steam Community, as it likely holds many hundreds of terabytes of data, possibly even a few petabytes at worst.

Steam Users' Forums

One of the largest vBulletin forums in existence, reported to be carrying 1.3M threads and 13.8M posts, also commonly referred to by many as Steam Powered User Forums, or SPUF.

Steam Discussions on the Steam Community have instilled a small dose of concern amongst some as they were concerned SPUF would be killed off at any point. The only saving grace at the moment is that Valve employees still post on SPUF from time to time even a couple of years after "SPUD" was introduced. These concerns would still be valid if there was a change of mood and SPUD suddenly became the only supported forum.

On 2017-05-15, Valve suddenly pulled the plug on SPUF as was feared.[2] After users were upset about the sudden closure, Valve restored access to the site temporarily the following day, and outlined a closure date of 2017-06-05:

SPUF End of Life June 5th, 2017[IAWcite.today]

Yesterday these forums went down, and we quickly heard from many of you that you wished there had been some warning so you could save off or archive some of the content here.

You were right that we failed by not communicating that the forums would go down and giving you a chance to save off content. As such, we’ve now restored access to the forums, but we won’t be able to continue to support them long term. They will go down permanently on June 5th, 2017. We encourage you to save off any posts or content that you find valuable in that timeframe or to migrate them to Steam Community Discussions.[3]

jmccaskey of Valve acknowledged that they screwed up by not giving notice initially.[4]

URL Structure: (all number parameters increment normally.)

Note: For the forums, log in to set a Thread Age Cut Off different from the forum default. Or append &daysprune=-1 to the URL (no login needed then).

Steam Greenlight

A component of the Steam Community, Greenlight is a way for indie developers to submit their games (for a $100 fee) to let the wider community vote on whether their game should be accepted on to the Steam store.

On 2017-02-10, Valve announced that Steam Greenlight would be replaced by Steam Direct at some point in Spring 2017.[5] On 2017-06-06, Valve put up a message on Steam Greenlight reading that "Greenlight is no longer accepting new submissions and voting has been suspended. Starting June 13, Steam Direct will be the new path for developers to bring their game to Steam." On 2017-06-13, Steam Direct was officially released.[6] Steam Greenlight is currently read only. After Greenlight pages can not be viewed and the user owner can’t not be viewed.

Steam Workshop

The Steam Workshop is a service that allows users to share user-made content and modifications for video games available on Steam. New levels (Maps), art, assets, gameplay modifications (mods), or other content may be published to or installed from the Workshop depending on the title. The workshop service was extended for use for any game in early 2012. It contains more than a million creations over various titles, most created by users. [7]

The Steam Workshop requires the use of the Steam API [1][2] to directly download Workshop Items as users use the Steam app to download them directly into the game folders.

Archives

A list of apps with workshops can be found at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ajaxgetworkshops/render/?query=Alphabetical&start=0&count=3000[IAWcite.today] as HTML in JSON.

Numbers updated 2024-02-06

References