Steam is a giant in the PC gaming industry and revolutionised both playing games and publishing them. But it wasn’t always this easy to get your games published and in front of players on Steam. We’re starting at the very beginning of Steam’s story and working our way to present day to give a backdrop to the gaming trends we analysed in The Evolution of Steam. First, we need to go all the way back to 2003! 

2003- 2012: Pre-Greenlight Era

It's hard to remember what life was like more than 20 years ago. Finding Nemo and The Matrix Reloaded were in cinemas, Friends was coming to an end on TV, iTunes had just launched and Ugg Boots were the must-have footwear.

On 12th September 2003, Valve launched the digital distribution platform we're all familiar with; Steam.¹ On launch, Steam was not a place to discover new titles, it was the answer to the problems that Valve were having with delivering updates for their own games. Through the Steam platform, Valve could automate the patching process and make sure all the players were on the latest version of a game - there was no storefront and the initial design was the kind of clunky vibe you would expect from early 00s software.^1,2,3

Between 2003 and 2005, the only games you could get on Steam were those developed by Valve, like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. It connected players to allow them to play multiplayer, but there were no profiles or any of the social features we know today. In the early days, Steam was plagued by technical issues and controversy like their overloaded authentication servers locking players out of games they’d purchased, and the fact that you needed Steam to play highly anticipated games like Half-Life 2 which kind of saved the platform in the end.^4,5

In 2005, after Half-Life 2 had driven an influx of new users in the previous year, the first non-Valve titles were offered on the platform. There was even a proper storefront that, by 2006, was home to just under 100 games.⁶ Can you imagine a world where Steam only had 100 games?!

Between 2005 and 2012 the only way you could get your game on Steam was if you were a big name or you were an independent studio with a successful track record. Every single game was hand-picked by Valve who were taking their gatekeeping responsibilities very seriously.¹

2008 saw the launch of Steamworks and in 2010 you could get the Steam platform on macOS as well as Windows.¹

It was all going smoothly until 2012; the start of the Greenlight Era.¹

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2012- 2017: Greenlight Era

Picture this: One Direction are invading the USA, NASA’s rover invaded Mars and Gangnam Style invaded our ears and our bodies.

On Steam, the Greenlight Era began and Valve transformed the platform from a dictatorship into a democracy.¹

As a game developer, you could submit your game to the Greenlight portal with everything you would normally put on a Steam page; a description, screenshots, videos and playable early builds. You know that $100 fee that we pay now? Originally Valve implemented that to combat a flood of false or low-effort submissions and donated the money to the Child’s Play charity. Despite their efforts, low-effort and unfortunately even scam submissions eventually made it through these safe-guards.^1,4

After you submitted your game, the users on Steam would vote for the titles that they wanted to see on the platform and the games that got the most votes would be “greenlit” for Valve to publish them on Steam.^1,4 To be honest, it doesn’t sound like a bad process, and because players voted for the games, you knew that people would be very likely to play your game when it launched. The Greenlight Era feels like it was the beginning of independent PC game developers getting into the spotlight; it’s the reason we have Stardew Valley, Undertale, Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Stanley Parable.

As you can imagine, the library of games on Steam grew very quickly in comparison to the previous 9 years and the platform saw an explosion of new features like the community market where players could trade in-game items for real money.⁴

In 2013, the same year we were blessed with Sharknado, Steam enabled Early Access and allowed users to post reviews of games on the platform for the first time.⁷ In 2014, as the platform started to slowly drown in new releases, Valve had its first attempt at solving discoverability on the platform. They introduced new algorithms in The Discovery Update that transformed the front page of Steam and aimed to help players find games they actually wanted to play.

Despite the Greenlight system seeming like a great idea, submissions were piling up behind the gates between 2012-2017 and there were still fake games getting through to farm sought after Steam trading cards.^1,4

Even one of the founders, Gabe Newell, was dissatisfied with the system, calling it "a bad example of an election process."⁸

So in 2017, Valve did something drastic…

2017- 2020: Steam Direct Era

Valve realised that they’re not a gatekeeper, they’re a bottleneck and hundreds of quality titles were at risk of not being discovered because of the gigantic backlog of Greenlight portal submissions.⁸ So they ditched Greenlight and opened the floodgates with Steam Direct. And so began the Steam Direct Era.⁹

In the same year, I was finishing my microbiology degree and starting a masters in science communication, there was a solar eclipse and Taylor Swift started some celebrity beef with her Look What You Made Me Do music video.

Steam Direct is what we're all familiar with today; a pay to publish platform where all you have to do is complete some tax paperwork, create a store page, and give Valve $100. Valve reviews your submissions to make sure they match their policies and that’s it, your game is officially available for players to view, wishlist and play.

Steam Direct has meant that anyone with a dream of making and publishing a game can now do so, but that’s also part of the problem. In the first 6 months, just over 3,300 games had been released on the platform and in 2018, Valve cast the net even wider, allowing any game with any subject to be released.⁴ "Any game" of course includes not safe for work games with extreme adult themes that are causing controversy on the platform today. In the 8 years following the birth of Steam Direct, over 86,000 titles have been released on the platform.¹⁰

Meanwhile, the discoverability problem that Valve experienced back in 2014 was breaking the chains of The Discovery Update and rearing its ugly head. Despite many updates, I think their recommendation algorithms still struggle to cope with the endless catalogue of games to this day. 

I mentioned before that Steam Direct opened the floodgates, and while thousands of quality titles finally got their chance to see the light of day, quite a few terrible titles also got some air time. We started to hear the terms "asset-flip" and "shovelware" being bandied about and it’s still one of the biggest insults you could give to a game developer; AI slop isn’t quite on the horizon at the start of the Steam Direct Era.

Since 2017, lots of people have criticised Valve for stepping back from their role as platform curator, but I would argue that everyone with a genuine passion for game development has the right to publish their game, especially if they’re willing to risk $100 to give their dream a go! The fee itself has caused a lot of controversy, some say it’s too low, but a higher fee would be a big barrier to small studios.^1,11 You basically can’t win. 

I and many others think that Steam Direct was ultimately a good thing.¹² Yes, there are a lot of releases and it’s hard to stand out, but it means that the game you spent years developing has more chance of being played than it did pre-2017. You can release a real game that people can actually play. I think we take that for granted sometimes.

This isn’t the end, because 2020 served the Steam platform another curveball that no one saw coming.

2020- 2023: Pandemic Era

Technically, we’re still in the Steam Direct Era, but a virus was about to make sure that all we had ever known was ripped away from us.

Depending on where you lived at the time, from March onwards we were all confined to our homes and that’s where things got interesting. Big budget releases fell by 14% while indie releases rose by 25% thanks to the flexibility of smaller studios. 2020 was the first time that more than 10,000 games were released on the platform in one year, but waiting for those games was the biggest audience Steam had ever seen.^13,14

In the first year of the pandemic, sales of games rose by 21% and Steam reached 20 million concurrent players. At its peak in 2023, Steam hosted 33 million concurrent players… that’s 33 million people all playing games in the same place at the same time.^15,16,17

These are huge numbers that sadly wouldn’t last when everyone had to go back to work, but Valve rode the wave of popularity and successfully released the Steam Deck in 2022. This was a significant opportunity for developers publishing on Steam, because if you made your game compatible with the Steam Deck, you might get a chance to stand out and enter the console market without the need for publishing deals.^17,18

In June of 2021, Valve decided to re-brand the Steam Game Festival that started in 2019 to the now beloved Steam Next Fest. The name change cemented its purpose of celebrating upcoming releases, driving traffic to demos and boosting those all-important wishlists.¹⁷

Gaming was a lifeline for many people in the pandemic and more people had time to make the game they had always wanted to play, and release it to share their dream with other gamers. Although, with more people using Steamworks, its shortcomings became increasingly noticeable amongst the game developer community. Like the lack of detailed regional traffic data, which made it difficult to understand where sales were coming from and market games effectively. 

Let’s discuss the Indiepocalypse; a term used to describe the sheer volume of self-published games being released during the Pandemic Era.¹⁹

Everyone was getting quite frustrated with Valve's hands-off approach to discoverability and its heavy reliance on opaque algorithms to surface games.²⁰ People reported sudden, unexplained changes to these algorithms leading to sharp and devastating drops in store traffic, leaving developers feeling powerless.²¹ Many developers also felt that Valve was not doing enough to stem the tide of low-quality games, which harmed developers trying to release innovative work.^19,20,21

More and more people were commenting on the saturation of Steam. While the low barrier to entry was praised for allowing small teams to publish passion projects and create breakout hits, this same openness was the root cause of some markets growing exponentially as developers jumped on trends in an attempt to recreate the success of the break-out hits. Steam Direct had, and still creates a double-edged sword; it provides the opportunity, but makes capitalising on it more difficult. Many developers still feel overwhelmed by the competition that makes this business incredibly difficult without significant effort being put into marketing.

I would argue that the Pandemic Era brought one big advantage; the game developer community is bigger than ever and challenges like market saturation and discoverability have ultimately brought that community closer together. While there are many different attitudes to game development, there are more resources than ever to help anyone make game development into a viable career with an income.

If this feels like a logical stopping point on our journey through the Eras of Steam, you're wrong because the fun doesn’t stop at the end of the pandemic… we haven’t got to generative AI yet!

2023- Present: Generative AI Era & NSFW Takedown

Nowadays, Steam is almost unrecognisable compared to its humble beginnings as a distribution platform for Valve’s games. And while the Pandemic Era was a spicy time, it’s nothing compared to the last two years. Saturation and discoverability are still big challenges, but there’s a new kid on the block; Generative AI.

Since 2023, generative AI has become much more widespread, affordable and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In the last couple of years, AI Slop has succeeded Asset Flip as the worst insult you can give to a game developer.

In June 2023, Reddit rumours were flying about whether Valve was blocking the release of games containing AI generated elements which then turned into “VALVE HAS BANNED GAMES THAT USE AI”.²⁷ The panic was real. So real that Valve released a statement to Eurogamer detailing their feelings around generative AI, stating that ”while developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licences", they "can not infringe on existing copyrights.”²²

It was a “we’re on the fence” moment for Valve, but six months later, they chose a side and released a new policy that allowed the use of generative AI in games under the condition that developers declared any use of it during the submission process.

Steam’s content survey was updated to split out games that pre-generate assets, sound, code etc and games that use AI to live-generate content during gameplay. With games using live generative AI, developers have to describe the “guardrails” they’ve included to stop AI generating illegal content. This comes with a backup system where players can report illegal content if it’s accidentally generated during their game.²³ To be honest though, unless you're embroiled in Ofcom's Online Safety Act, I don’t think many people can recite the 17 types of illegal harms.²⁸

As a result, the number of games on Steam disclosing the use of generative AI has grown by over 800% since 2024, with nearly 8,000 titles now using the technology.^24,25 So far this year, nearly one in five new game releases have incorporated generative AI. But are we really surprised by that?

Generating assets like characters and scenes is the number one reason game developers are disclosing gen AI use in their games, but generating music, scripts and code are all cropping up in the disclosures too. Of course, who knows how many games don’t disclose the use of AI because the consequences remain the usual “your game will be rejected or de-listed”.²⁵

Shall we talk about another awkward subject? Remember when I briefly mentioned that Valve enacted an “anything goes” policy in 2018 for releases on Steam? Well, that approach has recently been squashed. 

I’m just going to touch on the recent NSFW takedown for the sake of mentioning that it happened and is still happening. Here are the facts:²⁶

• Valve stated that the takedowns were a result of being notified that certain games might violate the rules of their payment processors, such as Visa and Mastercard. The company feared that losing these payment methods would disrupt sales for all games on the platform.
• Steam updated its rules to prohibit "content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks". The primary targets of this new rule appear to be games with a strong emphasis on nudity and themes of incest, but their rules don’t go beyond saying “certain kinds of adult only content.”²⁹
• Steam isn't the only platform under the microscope for NSFW games, Itch.io has also been subject to the same pressure from card companies.³⁰

So that’s it, we’re right up to the present day where we sit slap bang in the middle of the Generative AI Era with lots of extra hurdles thrown at us every day. There is one thing we can count on though; Steam remains the biggest platform for PC gaming and the biggest opportunity for any game developer with $100 to publish their game - something that I'm hoping you'll realise is quite a unique offering.

References

1. Wikipedia | Steam (Service)
2. Wikipedia | Valve (Corporation)
3. University of Harvard | Assignment: Growing Businesses in the… Steam: Digital Distribution Pioneer
4. PC Gamer | The 19-year evolution of Steam
5. Wayback Machine - Kokatu | Steam is 10 today, remember when it sucked?
6. University of Harvard | Steam – the gaming platform before there were platforms
7. Digitech.ch | 20 years of Steam: from compulsory program to platform of choice
8. PC Gamer | Gabe Newell: Steam Greenlight is "a bad example of the election process"
9. Steam Community Announcements | Closing Greenlight Today, Steam Direct Launches June 13
10. Steam Data analysed in Data Explorer
11. Game Rant | Valve Draws Criticism for Steam Direct Program
12. Eurogamer | Steam Greenlight had to go, but its replacement might just work
13. WN Games Industry Ecosystem | How the pandemic affected game releases on Steam
14. Game World Observer | nfographic: what impact COVID-19 pandemic had on AAA and indie games on Steam
15. Science Direct | Making sense of the pandemic: Multiple functions of commercial video games during one year and a half of COVID-19 crisis
16. University of Harvard | Steam: Upping the game in 2020
17. Gigazine | Steam looks back on 2023, a dramatic year with ``For the first time, more than 500 games generated total revenue of more than 450 million yen'' and ``Number of concurrently connected users exceeded 33 million.''
18. Game Pressure | Steam became a better place for gamers and devs. Valve recaps recent changes and prepares more improvements
19. Upsala Universitet | The saturation of the Steam platform game market and the noticeability of the saturation by Steam users.
20. PC Games N | Indie developers are frustrated with Valve's lack of support
21. GamesIndustry.biz | Indies on Steam are betting on discoverability
22. Eurogamer | Valve says AI-generated content policy goal is "not to discourage the use of it on Steam"
23. Steam Store Announcements | AI Content on Steam
24. AI Base | The AI Game Trend Is Coming, Steam Developers Are Falling into the Quagmire of Prompt Wars!
25. Totally Human | The New Surprising Number of Steam Games That Use Gen AI
26. Steamworks Documentation | Onboarding - Rules and Guidelines
27. Steam Community Discussions | !!! Steam's NEW ban on AI generated content
28. Ofcom | Overview of Illegal Harms
29. Comic Book | Steam Loses Tons of NSFW Games in Surprise Crackdown
30. The Sixth Axis | Itch.io delists all adult NSFW content due to pressure from payment processors and Collective Shout