An architect of GameStop’s long-forgotten Steam competitor explains why he thinks Valve came out on top: ‘What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community’

Larry Kuperman made his mark on the industry as part of the team at Nightdive, the games preservation and remaster specialists, but before that, he was on the front line of the digital distribution wars from the early 2000s to 2013. He helped build up the online storefront, Impulse, which was later acquired (and ultimately shuttered) by GameStop.

Valve’s unlikely victory against titans like EA and Microsoft has always fascinated me, and I asked Kuperman for his take on Steam’s ultimate victory when we spoke at this year’s Game Developers Conference.

“The idea was coming up to all of us,” said Kuperman. “Let’s also remember that Steam really began as a visual way of finding your Counter-Strike server.” Steam had a number of early rivals in digital distribution⁠—Kuperman shouted out Paradox’s GamersGate (don’t say it)—but he thinks Steam was quicker on the draw to sell other companies’ games on its own platform.

“The idea of selling games, and then selling third party games, didn’t seem intuitive at the time,” Kuperman said. “You’re a game company, why are you selling other people’s games? That was a hard thing to understand. But Gabe really had a great vision, coming out of Microsoft.”

Another advantage, according to Kuperman, was Steam’s “stickiness” and embrace of social elements. He noted that Steam and Impulse both let you redownload your games without restrictions, something that wasn’t always guranteed⁠—I still have a GamesPlanet receipt from 2008 that would only let me redownload Fallout 1 and 2 through the service six times a piece.

But Steam also had friends lists, messaging, playtime stats, and those little popup notifications about what your buddies were playing. “What Steam did better than anybody else was to create a community,” Kuperman argued. “They established a stickiness to it, that people came back because it was Steam.”

There’s one more decision by Valve that Kuperman cited as key to Steam’s victory: Its relatively low barrier to entry. There were so many great games in the 2000s, it’s easy to forget all the small to mid-sized studios that shuttered during that era, particularly PC specialists who couldn’t make the jump to consoles. Shareware is dead, digital distribution is yet to be born, now is the time of monsters.

“If you did not get a retail buyer to pick up your game,” recalled Kuperman, “If your game wasn’t at Walmart, GameStop, three or four retailers⁠, you were done. You didn’t make a game. Games that were kind of unusual and quirky, that broke them.

“Steam’s philosophy of, anybody can put their game on it—for a price, but it’s not a significant price—that really changed the gaming world. … I think that probably the biggest thing that you can say about Steam is that, for a number of indies, it kept their company alive when they would have otherwise gone under.”

But Kuperman attributes the survival of his own indie studio to a different storefront that emerged in the same ferment. “If it wasn’t for GOG, there would have been no Nightdive,” said Kuperman. “GOG was the one that put System Shock 2 up and really started our company, and that goes to our friend Oleg [Klapovskiy].

“These are relationships that we’ve had for years, but I don’t think people realize just how important they were. I think Good Old Games is something that when you look at the history of games during this time, that they deserve their moment in the sun and the spotlight on them.”

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