Half-Life 2: Episode Three

Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. Steam also has community features, automated game... updates, in-game voice and chat functionality. As of January 2012, there are 1504 games available through Steam, and 40 million active user accounts. The concurrent users peak was 5 million on January 2, 2012. Although Valve never releases sales figures, Stardock, former owner of competing platform Impulse, estimated in 2009 that Steam had a 70% share of the digital distribution market for video games. Many major publishers have large catalogs available on Steam, including Bethesda Softworks, Activision, Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, 2K Games, and Sega. Steam's primary service is to allow its users to download games and other software that they have in their virtual software library to their local computers. Steam-integrated games are stored as single non-compressed archive files with the extension .gcf .
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