A few years ago when I purchased Half-life 2 I got home only to find out I first had to install Value’s Steam client and activate the game through it.   Lets just say my first experience with Steam was not a good one.   Not only did I not want to have to install Steam to play the game, but I couldn’t activate my account for over a day, so I couldn’t even play the game I just bought.   I hated, HATED Steam, but over the last few years I’ve grown fond of the service and its become my preferred way to purchase games.

There are other download services out there, IGN’s Direct 2 Drive, Stardock’s Impulse, Gamers Gate, as well as a few other smaller known services, but none that can match the features Steam can offer.  While D2D has a monster game catalog, it lacks in any other featues.  Aside from just purchasing and downloading games from Steam, it also has great community features like a buddy list and groups.  Users can see what games their friends are playing or checkout their or their friends game stats without having to even open the game.   There are so many features that makes Steam great I’ll just stop there before this article starts sounding like an advertisement, if it’s not too late already.

Steam has become to video games what Itunes is to music and movies.  At this point I don’t think any of the services currently out there are any threat to Steam.  However if anyone can give Steam a run for their money it might be Microsoft if they really decide to get serious with their Games for Windows initiative.

It’s no secret that Microsoft’s Xbox Live service dominates the console world for online gaming.  It’s the most polished and complete online gaming service between the 3 big consoles by leaps and bounds.   If Microsoft ever decided to integrate a PC game download service into Live, it would not only rival Steam, but I think it could kill it.   Microsoft’s Live service already has millions of users and it’s pretty safe to say that a good portion of those users probably also game on their PCs.   But as Steam builds up steam (yeah, I know) it might be too late for Microsoft to replace them as the top PC gaming service, but then again Microsoft came into the console race last and are doing quite well, so you never know.