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.
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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.
“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.”
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