one of those things to kick yourself over and over?

Steam sure would have helped MS to world domination.

Thank God they did it themselves.

Hard to say "yes" to people whom were once employees themselves to Microsoft :P

I'm surprised they asked tbh, 'cos we all know MS demand practically 101% of the profits from any Xbox Live game. If Steam was MS built, Valve would already be out of business!

Thank god Microsoft is run buy idiots who cant see 5 years ahead. Or PC gaming would be doomed already!

But then there is VISTA :( Damn you Microsoft for trying to kill your own platform!

The stupid... it burns...

No, not MS, you people.

Oh dear god, thank god they declined it. MS is good with live and the 360, and I sort of like Vista now except for the odd freezing bouts I STILL GET. But for something like Steam? Eh. Games for Windows Live is like smelly pile of poo, and i'm sure Steam would of been the same way.

As for Yahoo, Yahoo is pretty much down the drain these days... they would of probably built steam into there junky messenger making it a nightmare.

Either way, Steam is Steam. It's great. Except for the banning, I love it.

With Microsoft screaming from the rooftops about the fact that discs will be a thing of the past in the next few years, you would think they would have deemed it worthy of investment and development. It would have been HD-DVD investment better spent...

@satek:Sometimes the people trying to lead the pack or fortell the future are often most blind to what they want being right in front of them.

But really the main reason this did not happen was because it was not born within Microsoft's offices. It's not the first time the big boys have refused to do something for someone outside of their circle, only to have that someone go and do it themselves to great effect.

@SanjiX:Sometimes I remain amazed that Live even happened with the old boy mindset at place within Microsoft.

Meh, internet in my country is shit... We'll probably only be able to use something like Steam in 5 years.

**** How to live in Rejection, Episode One ***

Apple to the Music Industry "He.. maybe can be a good idea to build a portable that connect to a online shop!".

Music Industry to Apple: "OMGZWTF!? STFU n00B, you are a computer music, let the music industry do the business the way has been the last 65 million years, ROLFLOL!"

And that how the iPod was invented.

Steam may be obsoleted itself in a few years, or at least not as dominant. Other companies are starting their own services with better deals. There could be a price war in digital downloads.

Well we can thank MS not taking the offer, otherwise we wold have to pay just to access to the Steam shop and wold get blue screens back like in the Win98 days.

thank god

@KroKan: VISTA will be responsable for the end of times

I actually can't stand Steam, for some reason it just messes with my computer and generally feels loaded down with useless things.

It's the same deal with iTunes.

I really love what Valve has done with Steam, it's just the go to interface for PC Gaming.

With that in mind I think it's time Valve gave up its further development to some other company.

Valve is always busy working on some game or the other and this leads to Steam being neglected. At the moment I can think of several little tweaks that Valve could make to Steam to make it infinitely better. Especially in light of the opening up of the platform to other companies via Steamworks, it really requires that extra bit of spit and polish.

@Sinfjotle:

Example.

Yeah thankfully Steam was self-developed by Valve. I can't imagine Microsoft or Yahoo doing something of that scale and not have a few hiccups at the beginning of the launch. Steam is a good service, sure maybe they're a little bit pricey for some of the older games, but then again you don't have to go searching for them so that's worth a few extra dollars in my opinion.

Amen!

I don't know... I don't see Yahoo as having that kind of force anymore... now steam and Google... think of the bandwidth, think of the connectivity, think of the capital to just about anything. I think Gabe is just begging for someone to buy Valve these days :)

I liked V1 of Steam because it was very simple and did the job it needed to do. I HATED V2 of Steam because it ran worse, had an unnecessary and ugly GUI, and was much buggier.

V3, the current version, is much improved however. Haven't hit any bugs yet and they added tons of features. And the GUI reminds me of the bastard child of 1 and 2.

I'm just happy MS didn't make Steam or else we'd be paying for it @_@ Free is always better

I'm not sure about you guys, but Steam has become the center of my PC gaming life. I seriously don't know what I'd do without it.
Probably not play Half-Life and Half-Life 2 based games, but thats not the point.
It's completely replaced Xfire for me, it's working towards replacing MSN and co., and it's replaced (with the aid of shopping websites) the traditional brick and mortar store for me.

@Dullshimmer: Uh, steam had more than "little hiccups" at launch.

On one hand I'm glad Valve did Steam themselves, but on the other hand if Microsoft had accepted we wouldn't have this crappy Games for Windows Live malarkey right now.

Well.. Microsoft can do it now.
Theres already a base: XBox Live for Windows. Can build on that roots a service for "Digital download" games. Can even liar to the public, and say that "Games for Windows" stupid initiative was designed for this.

Anyway I am still reluctant to have a single portal for games.

What If you forget the password? you are stuck in "no-games-man-lands". Totally like a nightmare.

Good job Microsoft. You're "Games for Windows" initiative is falling way behind Steam and you had the opportunity to work with the guys responsible for Stream and build Steam, but you passed it up.

Years into the future for you, maybe, and that's why people think PC gaming is dead. When the foremost PC platform rulers get overshadowed by the game development studio, something's wrong.

@Grive:

I dunno what you're talking about. I bought the HL2 pack the day it was released and downloaded all the games no problem.

I'm assuming MS wanted to do this themselves without Valve. But Steam still isn't THAT big or great as some people here make it out to be.

MS will probably just buy them anyways once it reaches a larger portion of the market.

Im just thankful that Valve relied on itself, thats probably the reason it has become successful and not a disaster.

+1 for Steam, PC gamings future.

Steam is a poor copy of XBL.

What makes it worse, is that GFW is a poor copy of Steam. If Microsoft made GFW as good as XBL, it would easily challenge, and better Steam.

The biggest problem, PC Gamers have had online for free for too long, so will never pay for a service, and the majority would rather have a substandard service than pay. Microsoft want to make money from it, so will never succeed.

Theres got to be some sort of middleground where you can pay, or get advertising shoved at you.

@Mr_Ed:
And they were all pretty much copies of GameSpy's old browser, which was done far better by All-Seeing Eye (which worked great, pretended to sell you a copy, then expired!)

@fuchikoma: Who started as QSpy, a Quake1 browser made by some dude on the Army.

@Mr_Ed: Steam came before XBL, so if either are a copy XBL would be a copy of Steam. And I much prefer Steam over XBL.

I'm just glad steam is not owned by M$... imagine paying $5 for every update... never getting connected, and CS that never answers your questions.... i'll take the steam of today over anything M$ has to offer (even if valve takes months to release the remaining achievements and class updates of TF2)
OHHH God I really need it to be time to go home an play

For reference. All this "integrated game browser" world started with that text file:

==========================
= 5. The QuakeWorld Team =
==========================

John Carmack
New network code and game modifications, original Master Server Code

Michael Abrash
Video and Sound drivers (WinQuake Port)

Christian Antkow (aka: Disruptor) qwmaster@idsoftware.com
Master Server Development, QWSV and QWCL Documentation, id Master Server
Administrator

Geoff Scully (aka: Tarok) gws@dis.on.ca
Master Server Development, id Master Server Administator

Joe Powell (aka: QSpy) jep@sclsis.navy.mil
QSpy (QWFE) Programmer, Master Server Development

Dave Riller (aka: DRiller/Kevorkian) qwdist@idsoftware.com
QuakeWorld Distribution Co-Ordinator

Rick Brewer (aka: ^Drag0n^) qwskins@idsoftware.com
QuakeWorld Clan Skins Administrator

Dave Kirsch (aka: Zoid) zoid@threewave.com
QuakeWorld QC 1.01 to 1.06 Upgrade, QuakeWorld CTF Mods,
Moral Support

Ron Crisco (aka: RonSolo) ronsolo@stomped.com
Scoring Systems Development, id QuakeWorld Webmaster and all around nice guy

@Tei: you'll never experience that problem with steam... it saves your access in the PC so it logs in automatically... that is the beauty of if... no clutter, no hassle
and those who tink live is the same as steam... they have it very wrong... steam works all the time even under heavy load (as yesterday's release)

But just think! If Microsoft had built Steam it would mean never buying another game - imagine, all the back doors, cracks and patches that people would create for your bittorrented games to run on M$team. I kid I kid, Microsoft would just release the backdoors on a USB stick for you!

@NeoAkira: You got lucky, I guess. There was a huge uprising back when HL2 was released. Servers went down, people couldn't activate because the validation system was overloaded, etc etc etc. There were also some stability issues, but these weren't too widespread

I vividly remember the RRoD-like internet backlash.

Was it horrible and the end of the world? nah, it wasn't. Would Microsoft have done it better? I don't know, maybe, but chances are no.

But saying it had no hiccups is quite inaccurate.

Saying that MS blew this call isn't quite the same kind of blunder as the president of Western Union Telegraph telling Alexander Graham Bell that the telephone was a stupid idea.

Unlike the singular paradigm shift of the telephone, Steam emerged at a time when plenty of other specialized online services were launching and were seen as the wave of commercial future success. It was a crowded field back in 2002, and myriads of startups like Steam were just seen as the long tail of the dot-com bust. Similarly, their monetization model was probably pretty weak back then and coming at a time when the "PC gaming is dead" claim was gathering, haha, steam.

Besides, MS was already up to other similar and profitable ventures... like Live.

STEAM is great now. I swear by STEAM and think it's the future of PC gaming and that all PC games will eventually be distributed through STEAM. However, it was total crap when it was first introduced. The PC gaming community was afraid of installing that software for a very long time. Valve worked long and hard to get STEAM where it is today.

I like Steam, but I wasn't around for the early years clusterduck. At the very least, I can say that it has been a very rewarding experience since TF2 was released.

@Tepoz:
It no longer leaks memory so badly that Windows can't display more than one font, so now it's not the WORST program out there.

It does hose you down with a flood of ads on sign-in, and unless you enable offline mode, it requires a net connection to play a single player game. (Hey, check out Portal, it's awesome! Uh... sorry... Gotta update. Come back in 10 min...) You can buy a game on a disc in a store, install it, then have to wait an hour to update it even if you're never going to take it online. It's also still a third wheel if you just want to run a game, and not open your IM/contact list, game browser, etc... Also you quit a game and it still sits there being useless, so you quit Steam separately.

It's also putting all of PC gaming's eggs in one basket. What if Steam vanished tomorrow? How much would you lose? You may be able to play for now if you're already set to offline mode, but the next time you want to install?

It works alright for now, but it's a dangerous game relying on it as much as we're starting to...

@NeoAkira:

Well you were lucky then because a whole lot of us had major problems on HL 2's release.

I <3 Valve & Steam. I'm glad that they decided to just build it themselves.

Man, as it is, it just seems like it was made by Microsoft. Because when it works, it works fine, but when it doesn't work... well, it doesn't work, I guess that's all there is to say. But usually it works, and to that extent it is better than pretty much any other digital distribution system on PC. It is the very definition of adequate. Making me be online to play single player games is dumb, and making me download things I bought in a store borders on offensive, but (except when it dies altogether) those things always work without more hassle than the basic hassle of what they are.

The ads, also, are obnoxious, every time I sign out of a steam-based game. But Billboards are obnoxious too, and there's no chance of that changing.

So Steam could be improved quite a lot. It would have been pathetic if it was developed by Yahoo (Steam! Only $9.95! Wait, you want to play games? For that you need Steam Deluxe! Only $29.95! Server error.) If it had been made by microsoft? I imagine it would start life as a piss-poor excuse for software, and gradually get patched and updated into something functional and inelegant, just like it is now, and just most other Microsoft PC products. (except for IE. It started terrible and just got worse.)

Fuck Yahoo.

I wonder if Steam would be GFWL if Microsoft built it.

Lame-ass.

HA! MS missed out BIG TIME. Games For Windows Live would have succeeded for this.

Then again, in MS's hands it probably would have screwed up and been really limiting.

I'm much happier that Valve did it themselves instead of letting MS or Yahoo taint it.

Steam is good but it has annoyed me a few times(but hey so has live and PSN). It has gave me popup advertisements at some inopportune times I know this can be addressed but I don't think I should ever have popups on software that I use for software I bought(ads fine popups not so much). Additionally there really isn't a way to install to multiple partitions. I had bought a game I believe dark messiah on disk and installed it to a partition I had space on and then the setup for integrating into steam came up and it started to move the files to steam(not really valves fault(I don't think) the game should have been a better install)but I had to make space then I had to wait like 3 hrs of download files needed for steam to play a game I bought on disk I was not happy.

But the new features they have added that are similar to Live are great having an easy friends list that works across games. And their version of achievements is not bad either.

Microsoft, you guys really missed the boat. Good for Valve, then.

What can I say?
Sometimes "NO" is the best answer to hear.

In this case, BESTEST OF THE BEST.

I'm so glad both rejected the proposal...

If MS backed Steam from the start, I'm sure Steam would have even more users based on the fact that MS will someway include it in Windows XP and Vista right on an update or during the installation.

@Tei: The thing that strikes me from your paleolithic iD game browser of yore is the innocence. The developers' naked, permanent email addresses, in cleartext.
Sigh. In the golden age before spammer's address-seeking web spiders and concerns of being swamped by millions of web n00bs stalking them with idiot questions.
Awww. It's so sweet. Thanks! :)