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Valve announced Steam in 2002. At the time, it looked to be a method of streamlining the patch process common in online computer games. Steam was later revealed as a replacement for much of the dated framework of WON and Half-Life multiplayer and also as a distribution system for entire games.
There is a Linux version of Steam, but is used to manage accounts for dedicated game servers, and client-end games cannot be played through Linux.
In the legal battle between Valve and their publisher Vivendi Universal Games , VUG argued that Steam is an attempt to circumvent their publishing agreement. Valve's Doug Lombardi revealed in October 2004 that Half-Life 2 requires activation via Steam in order to play. When Half-Life 2 hit some store shelves earlier than its intended release date of November 16, Valve reported that Vivendi prevented them from activating the Steam authentication servers until the 16th.
On November 16, Half-Life 2 was released at retail and over Steam. Both forms of installing required a user to log into the Steam network. As many gamers vocally predicted, Steam's authorization servers found themselves suffering from a form of slashdot effect, with every person installing the game attempted to connect to the Steam servers. Unable to cope with the amount of connections, the servers appeared to be offline for a great amount of people. Europe's Steam servers literally did fail, with error messages saying "Your copy is not authorized because you cannot connect to Steam, and you need to connect to Steam to play".
Products currently available through Steam include Half-Life 2, , , Half-Life, a Source engineThe Source engine is a game engine developed by Valve Software for their first-person shooter computer game Half-Life 2 and for licensing to other developers. It provides rendering, sound, user interface, networking, artificial intelligence, and physics. based version of the original Half-Life, SourceThe Source engine is a game engine developed by Valve Software for their first-person shooter computer game Half-Life 2 and for licensing to other developers. It provides rendering, sound, user interface, networking, artificial intelligence, and physics. SDK and several mods. Source-based projects available in the future include , and the Blue ShiftBlue Shift is the second expansion pack for the first-person shooter computer game Half-Life developed by Gearbox Software and released on June 12, 2001. Like Opposing Force Blue Shift returns to the original story but this time with the player in a diffe expansion pack.