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Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront developed by Valve Corporation. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games, and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat measures, social networking, and game streaming services. Steam client's functions include game update automation, cloud storage for game progress, and community features such as direct messaging, in-game overlay functions and a virtual collectable marketplace.

Steamworks, a freely available application programming interface (API) released in 2008, is used by developers to integrate Steam's functions, including digital rights management (DRM), into their game products. Many game publishers began distributing their titles on Steam that year. Initially developed for Microsoft Windows operating systems, Steam was released for macOS in 2010 and Linux in 2012. Mobile apps to access online Steam features were first released for iOS and Android in 2012. The platform's storefront also offers other digital content and Valve gaming hardware, including productivity software, game soundtracks, videos and virtual reality headset Valve Index.

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Prior to the implementation of Steam, Valve had a publishing contract with Sierra Studios; the 2001 version gave Valve rights to digital distribution of its games.[14] Valve took Sierra and their owners, Vivendi Games, to court in 2002 over a claimed breach of this contract. Sierra counter-sued, asserting that Valve had been working to undermine the contract by offering a digital storefront for their games, directly competing with Sierra. The case was initially ruled in Valve's favor, allowing them to leave the contract and to seek other publishing partners for retail copies of its games while continuing their work on Steam.[14] One company Valve approached at this time was Microsoft, but Microsoft executive Ed Fries said that they turned down the offer because Valve intended to continue selling their games on Steam.[15]

In November 2007, Steam achievements were added, similar to Xbox 360 Achievements.[58] In September 2008, Valve added support for Steam Cloud, a service that can automatically store saved game and related custom files on Valve's servers; users can access this data from any machine running the Steam client.[59] Users can disable this feature on a per-game and per-account basis.[60] Cloud saving was expanded in January 2022 for Dynamic Cloud Sync, allowing games developed with this feature to store saved states to Steam Cloud while a game is running rather than waiting until the user quit; this was added ahead of the portable Steam Deck unit so that users can save from the Deck and then put the unit into a suspended state.[61] In May 2012, the service added the ability for users to manage their game libraries from remote clients, including computers and mobile devices.[62] Product keys sold through third-party retailers can also be redeemed on Steam.[63] For games that incorporate Steamworks, users can buy redemption codes from other vendors and redeem these in the Steam client to add the title to their libraries. Steam also offers a framework for selling and distributing downloadable content (DLC) for games.[64][65]

The Steam client includes a digital storefront called the Steam Store through which users can purchase games. Once the game is bought, a software license is permanently attached to the user's Steam account, allowing them to download the software on any compatible device. Game licenses can be given to other accounts under certain conditions. Content is delivered from an international network of servers using a proprietary file transfer protocol.[73] As of 2015, Steam sells its products in US and Canadian dollars, euros, pounds sterling, Brazilian reais, Russian rubles, Indonesian rupiah and Indian rupees[74] depending on the user's location.[75] In December 2010, the client began supporting the WebMoney payment system.[76] From April 2016 until December 2017, Steam accepted payments in Bitcoin before dropping support for it due to high fluctuation in value and costly service fees.[77][78] The Steam storefront validates the user's region; the purchase of games may be restricted to specific regions because of release dates, game classification, or agreements with publishers. Since 2010, the Steam Translation Server project allows Steam users to assist with the translation of the Steam client, storefront, and a selected library of Steam games for twenty-eight languages.[79] In October 2018, official support for Vietnamese and Latin American Spanish was added, in addition to Steam's then 26 languages.[80] Steam also allows users to purchase downloadable content for games, and for some specific games such as Team Fortress 2, the ability to purchase in-game inventory items. In February 2015, Steam began to open similar options for in-game item purchases for third-party games.[81]

Users of Steam's storefront can also purchase games and other software as gifts for another Steam user. Prior to May 2017, users could purchase these gifts to be held in their profile's inventory until they opted to gift them. However, this feature enabled a gray market around some games, where a user in a country where the price of a game was substantially lower than elsewhere could stockpile giftable copies to sell to others in regions with much higher prices.[83] In August 2016, Valve changed its gifting policy to require that games with VAC and Game Ban-enabled games be gifted immediately to another Steam user, which also served to combat players that worked around VAC and Game Bans;[84] in May 2017, Valve expanded this policy to all games.[85] The changes also placed limitations on gifts between users of different countries if there is a large difference in pricing.[86] Due to runaway inflation in Argentina and Turkey, Valve eliminated the use of local currency pricing for users in those storefronts in November 2023, instead moving them to a special regional pricing model based on U.S. dollars as a means to provide fair payments to publisher and developers, though these local users saw effective price hikes as high as 2900%.[87]

The Steam store also enables users to redeem store product keys to add software from their library. The keys are sold by third-party providers such as Humble Bundle, distributed as part of a physical release, or given to a user as part of promotions, often used to deliver Kickstarter and other crowd funding rewards. A grey market exists around Steam keys, where less reputable buyers purchase a large number of Steam keys for a game when it is offered for a low cost, and then resell these keys to users or other third-party sites at a higher price.[88][89] This caused some of these third-party sites, such as G2A, to be embroiled in this grey market.[90] It is possible for publishers to have Valve track down where specific keys have been used and cancel them, removing the product from the user's libraries.[91] Other legitimate storefronts, like Humble Bundle, have set a minimum price that must be spent to obtain Steam keys as to discourage mass purchases.[92] In June 2021, Valve began limiting how frequently Steam users could change their default region to prevent them from purchasing games from outside their home region for cheaper.[93]

In 2013, Steam began to accept player reviews of games. Other users can subsequently rate these reviews as helpful, humorous, or otherwise unhelpful, which are then used to highlight the most useful reviews on the game's Steam store page. Steam also aggregates these reviews and enables users to sort products based on this feedback while browsing the store.[94] In May 2016, Steam further broke out these aggregations between all reviews overall and those made more recently in the last 30 days, a change Valve acknowledges to how game updates, particularly those in Early Access, can alter the impression of a game to users.[95] To prevent observed abuse of the review system by developers or other third-party agents, Valve modified the review system in September 2016 to discount review scores for a game from users that activated the product through a product key rather than directly purchased by the Steam Store, though their reviews remain visible.[96] Alongside this, Valve announced that it would end business relations with any developer or publisher that they found to be abusing the review system.[97] Separately, Valve has taken actions to minimize the effects of review bombs on Steam. In particular, Valve announced in March 2019 that they mark reviews they believe are "off-topic" as a result of a review bomb, and eliminate their contribution to summary review scores; the first such games they took action on with this were the Borderlands games after it was announced Borderlands 3 would be a timed-exclusive to the Epic Games Store.[98][99]

Valve has also added the ability for publishers to rent and sell digital movies via the service, with initially most being video game documentaries.[110] Following Warner Bros. Entertainment offering the Mad Max films alongside the September 2015 release of the game based on the series,[111] Lionsgate entered into agreement with Valve to rent over one hundred feature films from its catalog through Steam starting in April 2016, with more films following later.[112] In March 2017, Crunchyroll started offering various anime for purchase or rent through Steam.[113] However, by February 2019, Valve shuttered video from its storefront save for videos directly related to gaming content.[114] While available, users could also purchase Steam Machine related hardware.[115]

A Steam Points system and storefront was added in June 2020, which mirrored similar temporary points systems that had been used in prior sales on the storefront. Users earn points through purchases on Steam or by receiving community recognition for helpful reviews or discussion comments. These points can be redeemed in the separate storefront for cosmetics that apply to the user's profile and chat interface.[124][125] e24fc04721