Happy Birthday Steam! You’re 20 today
A lookback at what Steam looked like 20 years ago!
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Steam has been around for almost as long as I have, and it’s still going strong. If anything, Steam has only become more and more popular through the years. Steam stands for something great for many of us, it unites gamers all over the world on one big platform with the success that many have failed to achieve at this level. Happy Birthday, Steam, here’s to 20 more years.
What did Steam look like 20 years ago? We’re all very familiar with the sleek and sexy UI design that has been granted to us over the last 6 or so months. But where did it all start? Let’s take a look, shall we?
What did Steam look like 20 years ago?
Steam 20 years ago was a very different place. Steam was released on the 12th of September 2003, marking the beginning of something that would change PC gaming forever, and nobody even knew it.
But Steam itself wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, obviously. Steam mainly existed to sell Valve games, which there were only a few of at the time. These included Half-Life, Deathmatch Classic, and Team Fortress Classic.
This image might shock you, as there’s a stark color difference between Steam’s launch and what we have now. Steam wasn’t always blue. It’s for this reason that the “20 years of service” badge that Valve released recently is in the original colors of Steam upon release.
As Steam grew more popular, so did the games on it, This then interested 3rd parties who made a deal with Valve to put their games on the Steam platform to help them sell. and the modern Steam formula was born.
If you’re interested, the first-ever non-Steam game on Steam was Rag Doll Kung Fu by Mark Healey, released in October of 2005.
How is Steam doing now?
Steam is the most popular PC gaming platform in the world, and it’s likely that it will be for some time. There were some recent highs in terms of concurrent users thanks to some big announcements such as CS2.
Steam DB has data that spans pretty much the entire life of Steam, beginning in December 2003 and ending in August 2023. These concurrent numbers range from 84,000 to 33,598,000 – so only a small difference.
Concurrent users, if you were unaware are the number of users that use the service at once. So the peak concurrent would be the most users at once.
As you can see, Steam is doing very well, probably way better than anyone imagined it would 20 years ago. Happy Birthday, Steam, here’s to another 20 years!
What do you think? Were you around 20 years ago, or are you more accustomed to the way it is now? Let us know in the comments below.
