14 DAY TRIAL // Today is September 12, 2013, a date that marks the 10-year anniversary of Steam, Valve's hugely successful digital distribution service, which was rolled out to the public on September 12 in 2003.
Valve has been around for some time, with the independent development studio creating some hugely successful franchises like Half-Life and adapting user-made mods like Counter-Strike.
The studio really hit it big with the release of Steam, an online service that acted, more or less, as an anti-piracy system designed to protect PC games from being copied illegally.
After many issues concerning its low number of servers and the really tough release of Half-Life 2 in 2004, Steam slowly began to improve its performance and Valve has turned it into one of the most successful digital distribution services in the world, serving users across the PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.
This popularity is set to continue to increase in the future, as Valve is planning on launching a dedicated mini-PC based on Linux, in the form of the so-called SteamBox.
A celebration of this anniversary might kick off later today, at 10am PT.