Steam is an online digital distribution service run by Valve Corporation, originally started in 2002 as a way for them to deliver their gaming content direct to consumers, and as a means to automatically provide patches for their games. The service was eventually opened up to other publishers and developers. The system caused controversy, as it was the first system whereby a game had to be activated, and this had the knock-on effect of encouraging other publishers and developers to do the same, most notably Electronic Arts, so as to prevent their PC games from being sold on the second-hand market.
Because this process of selling and delivering online cut out game store retailers and game publishers, Valve became involved in a legal dispute with Vivendi Universal, their publisher at the time. Vivendi Universal argued that Valve was going against their publishing agreement.
Search by Features
Currently, many games are available over Steam, and the system has expended in scope enormously in the decade since release. Valve now has several aspects of the Steam service available to third-party developers and publishers. In addition, these and other criteria can be used to search for games.
- Captions available
- Full Controller Support
- Mods {require HL1)
- Mods (require HL2)
- Includes Source SDK
- Partial Controller Support
- Steam Achievements
- Steam Cloud
- Steam Leaderboards
- Steam Stats
- Steam Trading Cards
- Steam VR Support
- Steam Workshop
- Valve Anti-Cheat enabled ("VAC")
Search by Type
Entries in the Steam Store can be further searched by type:
- Games
- Videos & Trailers
- Demos
- Mods
- Packs
- Downloadable Content
- Guides
- Software
Search by Tags
Games be also additionally be searched by "Tag", of which can be considered a selection of what genre(s) a game falls into. The following are available:
- Action
- Adventure
- Casual
- Free to Play
- FPS
- Indie
- Massively Multi-player
- Racing
- RPG
- Sci-fi
- Shooter
- Simulation
- Strategy
Note: Singleplayer and Multiplayer are also entries in this field, however, this functionality is a duplicate of the next section, and is to be treated as a side effect of the Tagging system being opened up to players to define.
Search by Number of players
Games can also be searched via the type of gameplay they offer with other players:
- Co-op
- Cross-Platform Multi-player
- Multi-player
- Local Co-op
- Single-player
Search by Languages
Steam supports a number of non-English languages, and allows games to also be searched using this as a criteria. The following are supported to be used in this way:
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- Greek
- German
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean1
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Russian
- Romanian
- Simplified Chinese
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Traditional Chinese
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
1Korean is listed twice, possibly in error.
External links
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