GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that both Yahoo! And Microsoft rejected Steam after Valve pitched the first concept to them, saying “That’s a million miles in the future…We can’t help you.”
“You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft… and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam,” said Valve marketing boss Doug Lombardi.
“We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later.
“We went around to everybody and asked ‘Are you guys doing anything like this?’ And everyone was like ‘That’s a million miles in the future…We can’t help you.’”
Valve have done a great job developing the service themselves, without the help of Yahoo! And Microsoft. But we bet both companies wished they’d backed the service, since its got over 14 million accounts registered to date.
