Steampowered.com (Triman Nguyen)

Steampowered.com

Steam is Valve’s website for distributing games which they and others make.
Steam also serves a dual-purpose as a social platform for gamers to
organize and play games with each other. Steam’s popularity has launched
Valve from a small company into mainstream gamer life.


One of the best things about Steam is their use of Premiums. Every day
there is a deal where a random game would be 75% off. In addition, there
are also Midweek, Weekend, and holiday deals and Free to Play weekends.
This encourages people to continually check the website, even if they
aren’t planning on buying or playing on that particular day since no one
wants to miss out on 50-75% off a game. Moreover, since the discounts are
so outrageous, when someone finds a deal oftentimes they will notify their
friends and try to get them to buy it also.


Steam does a phenomenal job at encouraging user participation. The sales
mentioned above helps encourage users to actively recruit more players into
Steam. Steam offers this special deal called a “4-pack” where you get 4
copies of a game for the price of 3 (more or less). Users have an incentive
to try and either gets more friends to play with them, thus getting a
cheaper game overall, or trade copies of the game with one another (Valve
still sells more games either way). In addition, the Free to Play weekends
that Steam has every now and then enable players to try the full game for
free. Undoubtedly, some end up buying a game that they would never have
otherwise. Steam also has tools to help the player play games. There is a
friends list that allows you to invite people to play with you and see what
others are currently playing.


Steam handles User-Created-Materials in an interesting way also. There is
an achievement system which lets you tell others what amazing achievements
you obtained in certain games. For the modders (people who like to edit
games), there is the steam workshop that allows people to submit and/or use
and rate other people’s work. Steam is moving towards enabling people to
charge money for their creations, providing further incentives to
user-created-materials while letting Valve get a cut of the profit).


Lastly, Steam also updates daily what games are released and featured on
their page. New games are constantly added and people can vote on what
games they would want to see added ASAP. In case users need support, there
is a support button at the top which will guide users through the support
process with clear steps and explanations about what users have to do for
each step. Thus, with their amazing ability to enable users to create their
own mods for games, constant updates of new releases and frequent sales of
games, Valve’s steampowered.com website has become the undisputed #1
platform for PC gamers.