Steam a tool without end, almost
Steam is a platform (program) created by a Valve Corporation. It is designed to "distribute games and related media online". It is often used by both large software corporations and small ones alike to make their games available for the gaming community. It can be compared to the Facebook of the gaming community, where you can see what games your friends have been playing and how long, comment on and checkout their profile, join different groups, join community discussions, and more. Below there is a basic tutorial on how to use Steam by a fellow steam user and wildcat.
Steam also allows for new "Indie" developers to publish their games on a new built in tool called Greenlight where fellow users can up vote or down vote those games and potentially make them available through steam if there is enough demand for the games. A major part of Steam is obviously the store, where you can scroll through hundreds of games and software ranging from hundreds to free. The store has constant weekly, and daily sales as well as having holiday sales. Some of the games available on steam are made by the valve corporation but the majority is made by other companies that use steam as an outlet for their games, since steam receives over 3 million users online simultaneously at any given moment of the day. Some times during the day this number may rise to 7 million which is a big demographic for these companies.
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There is also a user friendly library where you can sort all the software and games you have installed through steam and even add non steam games to it. Steam also installs any games you installed through it automatically so when you want to play your games are up to date. The steam friends list is also very developed allowing you to check what games your friends are playing in detail, talk, trade items, chat vocally, and more. While this is limited to basic users once you buy a game on steam it becomes much more, allowing you to add your own friends and so forth. It introduced a market where users can sell in-game items or games themselves for their "Steam Wallet" a place where you can store money to buy other games or in-game items. With this introduced recently many items in-game have been changed to real life currency and many more people have interacted through the market.
Steam is an amazing piece of software that is used by gamers worldwide to sort their games an connect with other gamers with similar interest or to find new games to enjoy.
Articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_%28software%29
