Integrações
DataScope & Steam

Steam wasn't a store when it launched in 2003. Valve launched the service to offer multiplayer functionality in their game Half Life. Then, in 2004, Valve made Steam a requirement for purchasing the highly anticipated Half Life 2. Third-party titles showed up in 2005, and the growth only accelerated from there. One might say it picked up...momentum. Read MoreToday Steam dominates the PC gaming industry, with 90 million monthly active users and billions in annual revenue. Steam's main feature, the store, offers something for everyone. Customers like the experience of buying a game in one place and having access to it on all of their devices. Game developers, meanwhile, like the visibility offered by the platform. New features added over the years have only made the service more popular. Steam Cloud, for example, makes it easy for gamers to sync game saves and settings between multiple computers. Active communities for games, including forums and multiplayer options, allow gamers to connect with each other. Leaderboards and achievements allow game designers to reward players for going all-in on a game. Steam Workshop allows fans of a game to create, share, and sometimes even sell mods, changing the way games look and play. Mods are as old as gaming itself, but traditionally finding and installing mods was a time consuming hobby. Steam Workshop made it superficial, which led to an explosion of creativity. Steam Sales, which occur seasonally, offer big discounts, prompting a massive spike in purchases on the platform and way too many tweets and Facebook posts in which people state they will never actually play all the games they just bought. Which is all to say that Steam is way more than a store at this point. It's a platform. A hub that gamers use to connect with the games they like, the friends they play those games with, and an entire community of enthusiasts. Steam offers clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, though not all games work on all three platforms. But cross-platform games only need to be purchased once, meaning if you buy a game on your Mac, you can also download the Windows version. This is a notable advantage over stores that are limited to one platform, like the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store. And a feature called Steam Link extends this even further, allowing you to stream from your computer over to your phone, tablet, or TV. At this point, it's hard to imagine PC gaming without Steam, as much as other companies wish that weren't the case. Similar game stores keep popping up, but none have come close to supplanting Steam.