What Is Steam?

What is Steam? :- Alright, this is going to be more of a beginner’s guide to Steam. This article is for those who are new to PC gaming or don’t really know how to use Steam or maybe considering switching from consoles to PC.

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Cut to the Chase

So what you are looking at now, this is the Steam store. It’s exactly what you would expect it for buying PC video games, there is currently over 37,000 PC games on the store. Which is pretty incredible and it’s much larger than any other platform on the PC space or actually on consoles. As well a lot of you may not know this, but Steam controls roughly 75% of the PC gaming marketplace which is insane.

Recently it hits over 100 million active users each month which is crazy. And some of that is inflated because of the whole coronavirus situation, but it has continued to increase in popularity over time especially as more people can afford gaming computers.

History

So Steam was originally created back in 2003 by some game developers known as Valve or the Valve Corporation. They’re known mainly for games like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Dota and many more. They have a lot of popular games and they originally released the client to streamline updates onto users accounts so it made the process very easy to install updates and it was very innovative at the time. Especially on PC so this is just a variety of different images showing the evolution of the user interface.

Later on steam started allowing other game developers to join in and they started releasing other games on the storefront. So other developers found the service to be incredibly valuable because it kind of limited, the amount of piracy that was going on at the time, especially in the early 2000s.

It also just allowed an easier way for users to find their games on the storefront and it created like a centralized place for users to have a library of games, to play all of their games in one place which is pretty cool to see on PC. And eventually it grew more popular over time. Back in the early 2000s consoles were definitely dominant, but over time as more games started getting released on Steam, the movements kind of shifting and now a lot of users really enjoy using Steam and playing PC games.

Steam Store

Now we will have a quick overview of the Steam store. So at the top of the page you can see featured and recommended. Steam tries to keep track of what games you purchase, what games you play and what games your friends are playing. It tries to recommend you games at the top of the store. Usually they’re games that might be more appealing to you.

Special Offers

On the left side there’s a bunch of various links to different categories. It provides different aspects of Steam. In which, you can see Special Offers, there is consistently sales on the Steam store for a variety of different games. This happens all the time and during the summer and winter months. There’s the summer sale and winter sale and that’s when pretty much the entire store has sales, pretty much 90% of the games are on sale. So those are some really fun events where you can actually save a lot of money by purchasing games on the steam store.

Scrolling down, let’s go to the New and Trending top-selling popular and specials box. This is where you can see what other people are currently purchasing and what other people are playing. So this is kind of a cool area especially if you want to keep up to date with the newest and best games.

You can also click on various things that will go to more. Like in-depth, so here is global top sellers and this actually shows all the games ever release on Steam. It just sorts them by top-selling. So there’s a lot of great games here.

On the right side you can see a bunch of categories or places where you can filter out the store, so if you had a specific genre in mind. If you were into say action games, you can click the action box and the store will be filtered by action games. There’s a bunch of other different things. Here as well there’s also software and various demos you can play for free.

Free to Play

There’s a ton of free to play games. If you don’t even want to spend money on the games, that are worth using. In special offers, where you can see a bunch of games that are currently on sale, you can also click box here and sort by user reviews, by price and release date.

So forth user reviews is especially good, because there’s a review system on Steam and every user can independently review each and every game they play. And then it assigns a review score, it sorts the store by review scores. So obviously some of the best games are at the top and some of the worst games are way way below, you probably don’t even want to play those.

Steam Client | Steam App

Now let’s move on into the Steam client. Everyone who uses steam is going to need to download and install the client. Click Here to go to Steam page. The client looks like pretty much exactly the same as the website in terms of the storefront. But there’s a bunch of added features including the library, this is where all the games you purchase are displayed.

Here, you can download and install each one individually. The Steam download servers are incredibly reliable and extremely fast. So you never really have to worry about losing a game. You can just reinstall it at any point.

Games | Library

So here’s a list of my games that I have installed and love playing. You can find all sorts of great games on the steam store. As you can see here, there’s a bunch of other features including guides, discussion groups and forums.

There’s user reviews, there’s achievements that you can get within each game, and they’re all listed. There’s a bunch of community features, so the library is excellent and this is what you’re mainly going to be using all the time to play your games.

Profile

So now we will go over some of the more social features of Steam, Here, every user has their unique customized profile. As you can see, this is my profile. Here, there’s a unique background, there’s various showcases on the front and on the side, here you can see that there’s actually a friends list.

Chat System

Steam does it’s own chat system. You can actually send messages to friends or you can voice call them. Very similar to likes of Discord or Skype. It’s kind of a cool way to interact with people. Also you can also set up games, so you can play with your friends. You can set up playdates and so forth. So that’s pretty cool and you can see each person’s a unique profile just by clicking on their name.

It’s a nice way to find people to communicate and play with. Those are all the basic features, someone would need to know in order to start using Steam.

Community Marketplace

We will go into a couple other features. There is a community marketplace where people can purchase and sell in-game items from various games. This is very unique I don’t think any other gaming platform has this. You can actually make a little bit of a profit by doing this, depending on the game within.

You also have a user inventory system, where all of your items are stored. You can actually access these items within games or you can sell them on the marketplace. By this, you can try to make a little bit of money. So that’s really unique.

Steam Levels

Apart from that there’s also steam levels. Every profile has a little level in the top right corner to gain levels. Either participate in various Steam events to earn experience or there’s a very unique trading card system. So a lot of the games on Steam as you play, you unlock trading cards and if you collect all the trading cards you can create badges. And these cards can also be purchased on the marketplace.

So there’s a whole lot more of Steam that may not be visible the first time you use it. But I encourage you to check out the additional features and honestly there’s a lot to Steam that is very creative and unique compared to other gaming platforms.

So that’s it for this article, hope you learnt something new out of it. More Steam stuff will be here soon, so stay tuned.

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