A Steam-powered Locomotive

If you ever bring up Steam, the online game company, to me in conversation be ready to get an earful of praise about it. Well, technically Steam is not so much a game company as an online game store. The actual game company is called Valve (do you see a pattern here in the names?) Valve began many years ago when it released an innovative game called Half-life. This is one of those games that revolutionized and changed the entire gaming industry. The graphics were better than any other game out at the time, and showed what was truly possible for a game. Ten years after that Valve released , and again they revolutionized the gaming industry. You know all these new games with ultra realistic graphics and open worlds? Well half-life 2 was the first game to introduce those. That game as the transition between the blocky, polygony style graphics of the early 2000’s and 1990’s to the sleek and more real graphics we see today. What does this have to do with my game though, you may be asking. Well like Half-life and Half-life 2 revolutionized the game industry when Valve created Steam, the first online game market. they revolutionized the game market. In fact they were one of the first online marketplaces for video games. I’m sure you may have heard of others, such as the Xbox online marketplace, or Sony’s PlayStation marketplace (the one that was hacked a few years ago). While all these marketplaces pretty much started out selling games for their intended platform, Xbox for Xbox games, Playstation for Playstation games, Steam has branched out the most. Steam has the widest variety of games, huge sales and affordable prices, and even Steam Greenlight. Steam Greenlight is a newer program where anyone can make a game and submit it to Steam. Once it is reviewed it is presented to the user on Steam to be voted on. If a game gets enough votes it’ll be added to Steam where anyone can buy and play the game. The nicest part is even though Steam sells the game and provides the platform, they still give the game creator a large percentage of the profits. So you can probably see where I am going with this: ultimately I want to release a game on Steam. This is a wonderful system with a great chance for making some decent money from making my own game.