Imagine a world where the Steam client was not developed in-house by Valve, but by either Microsoft or Yahoo. That's a rather interesting, if not scary thought right there. That could have actually been the case had Valve originally gotten their way.
"You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam," [Doug Lombardi] explained.As it stands, there are over 300 titles available on Steam, with over 14 million user accounts. Go ahead, it's ok to point and laugh at Microsoft and Yahoo for passing that opportunity up.
"We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later.
"We went around to everybody and asked 'Are you guys doing anything like this?' And everyone was like 'That's a million miles in the future...We can't help you.'"
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