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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Valve didn't invent the idea, piracy did. You could download full games years before any legal distribution channel allowed you to do so.
You could download games from multiple publishers years before Valve did it, too. Doesn't mean Valve didn't come up with the first, largest digital distribution platform for games that was then the template for every first party (and most of the digital media distribution in other media industries).
Best I can do for you is let you have that and agree that piracy invented it and Valve monetized it, which is actually worse?
Certainly means that large companies didn't invent digital distribution as some form to eliminate physical distribution as an anti-consumer move. Consumers (via piracy) invented it for convenience.
Well, I think there's a nuance between the notion of people hosting files and sharing them for piracy purposes, which is technically no different than hosting and distributing any other file, and a platform for digital distribution of media.
You could argue that peer-to-peer services with built-in search, like Kazaa or eMule came a lot closer and that's defensible, but the birth of modern platforms is less on the tech to host and share the files and more on the ability to do DRM and sell access tokens digitally. Modern digital distribution is less an iteration on piracy software and more a response to it to provide something that could compete on convenience while being monetized, having DRM and, yeah, cutting a lot of people out of the money loop.
And on all those counts... yeah, it was Steam. Valve did it first and did it effectively while music labels and movie studios were still hoping lawyers would fix things for them.