Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Intelligence Ji (ID: paperji), Author: Nameless

On September 12, 2003, the first Steam release was officially launched, which is where G Fat Dream began and where the player wallet "nightmare" began.

Steam is a gaming platform produced by Valve, and V Club was founded in 1996 by Fat G and Harrington. In 1998, Valve released Half Life, which established its position as a leader in the game development world (once V Society was also a brother in the game world).

With more and more players, the contradiction of not having their own game platform began to appear. First, the game could not be updated in time, which led to the old version of many users, and the increase of piracy and fraud.

At that time, G fat's first thought was to find a big company OEM, but some big companies such as Microsoft did not care about the platform, G fat did not stop to create Steam.

In March 2002, Steam launched a beta version of the platform, and on the day of the beta release, there was a huge influx of players. The server crashed instantly. One of the highlights of the beta version was the half-life mod version of Day of defeat. It can be seen that when you promote a new thing, you need a product that is strong enough to attract people.

However, Steam was not smooth sailing when it was first released. Like all test products, there were not many games, no social interaction, many BUGs, and a particularly long loading time. In an era when only 20% of users in the United States had Internet at home, many players who bought games often couldn't log in because of the Internet, and Steam's poor interface left a bad impression on players.

Steam's only advantage at the time was probably "frequent updates."

Until September 2003, when Steam was officially released, Steam had "taken shape" and its main function was to provide a login platform for CS1.6, or to play CS1.6, only to become a Steam user.

Therefore, Valve's seed players are mainly half-life, CS players, which is also G fat promotion Steam strategy, but also their confidence in the quality of CS games. As the saying goes, iron also needs its own hard, V Society at that time was high and hard.

This strategy is also replicated in EA and Uplay when promoting their own platforms. Want to play Battlefield and Assassin's Creed? Then come to Origin and Uplay, but obviously these two games are not enough to support the platform for a long time, and eventually return to Steam hand in hand.

Fat G's ambitions are not limited to making Steam a starter for his own games, his goal is to stir up the chaos of game distribution. In the process of traditional physical game production and distribution, R & D, distribution, platform and retail channels participate in it respectively. A game's revenue needs to be divided between a platform and a channel, and less than half of the revenue ends up with the publisher.

At that time, in the game of eating cake, the distribution and development cost 50 million to 100 million US dollars to complete the research and development and promotion for more than three years. A game often needs to sell more than twice its total cost and nearly five times its development cost to break even. Publishers don't have a solution to this, and the brutal competition and high barriers to game console hardware and merchandise retailing also keep most of the weaker competitors out.

Fatty G didn't believe this. Since physical games had such a large cost, wouldn't switching to digital games save a lot of costs? In 2005, Steam launched its first non-Valve game called Rag DollKong Fu.

The Steam game empire has expanded since that year, and as long as you want, as long as I can, then you come to Steam to sell games. Steam has also officially transformed itself from a "private workshop" to an "online game store."

It is not too much to say that Steam opened the era of independent games, and G fat gave these producers a platform to sell games, which was hard to imagine at the time.

If Steam is how to change players, that's probably it.

Before Steam:

Know a game → Read the game review → Download the game from the network disk or XDM → Install manually, you may encounter a bunch of incompatibility and runtime problems → Find Chinese patches → Patch → Solve the game error → Install the missing library manually → Enter the game

After Steam:

Know a game → Read game reviews → Steam search → Automatic download and installation → Automatically fill in the missing runtime → Enter the game

When the basic functions of Steam platform can be improved, V Society did not stop here, but carried out more in-depth research and development to improve the user experience, used to Steam may feel that classification, evaluation, community these functions are common, but when you switch to other platforms, you will find how these small functions affect the user experience.

In 2007, Steam introduced a search feature, player rating features, and filtering mechanisms such as "Best Seller" and "Latest Listing" to greatly enhance the usefulness of the store interface.

Simple but sophisticated review system, direct communication with game developers about game content, after player reviews, will show the time spent on the game by the player of this review, which will make the review more reliable.

In addition to communication between players, Steam is also the first platform in the world where game developers will go to the store interface to see player opinions.

In 2008, Steam's store interface added category browsing and focused the store's home page on the latest games, allowing players to know when their favorite games were released anytime, anywhere.

Every game community had a lot of player discussions. After players bought a game, they could visit a game-specific workshop. There were a lot of game-specific content in the workshop, such as all kinds of fan art, all kinds of mods, etc. The installation was also a one-click installation. There was no need for other tools.

On the other hand, other platforms are currently doing a lot of evaluation, not to mention these icing on the cake features.

Not to mention Fat G and his killer move-discount! The first discounted game is now difficult to study, but the discount range is real and increasing, domestic players feel the deepest discount atmosphere may be after 2015.

Because Steam opened up domestic payment channels that year, so that players in the national area can also happily chop hands, and the national area is classified as a low-priced area, but also discount, players seem to realize overnight that "so little money can buy genuine games."

Low prices, coupled with the lack of previous consumption opportunities, players in the mainland in 2015 have come hard for "retaliatory consumption." Soon, the number of users in the national region became the second largest in the world, second only to the US region, and in 2019, PUBG surpassed the US region and became the region with the largest number of Steam users in the world.

At this point, Chinese players mentioned that Steam naturally emerged a kind fat guy,"G fat conspiracy" has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.

Steam's discount promotion is deeply loved by players because of its huge quantity and real price reduction. Compared with some activities such as "full reduction" and "full gift" on other game platforms, Steam just says "I say a number, shoot me!" "

Steam has grown to its current height by steadily optimizing the user experience step by step, although not every update is earth-shaking, but always in small places to continuously improve the user experience.

There was no king born, and there was no loser to counterattack. Steady fighting was the key.

Now this can empty the player wallet "electronic succubus" also passed his 20th birthday, G fat does not accompany you to old age!

"What a pleasure to count all the way! The past 20 years have been wonderful. All we want to say to you is thank you, thank you, thank you again! Let's fight another 20 years! "

Do you remember how you met Steam?

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