Is Valve’s dominant digital platform the future? Or does it herald the end of PC gaming as we know it? Steam. Publishers and rival digital distributors want to be it. Gamers and developers want to be with it. And animals lacking opposable thumbs want to learn how to use computers just to use it… or so Valve would have you believe. But all isn’t as rosy in the land of PC gaming as all that, and as Valve’s digital gaming platform has picked up more and more, well, steam, it’s garnered its fair share of backlash as well. With Valve’s recent tiffs with EA over their upstart Origin distribution platform, never before has the community been so polarized by Steam. Will Steam continue to dominate the PC gaming landscape? And if so, what does this mean for gamers? First off, let’s dispel the myth that Origin is a rival to Steam. Perhaps it will be in time, but as it stands now, EA’s digital marketplace is just that – a digital store front for EA published titles. For the moment EA is content in simply bypassing Steam, in order to sell their products directly without losing revenue to a rival distributor. So, no, Origin is NOT in direct competition with Steam, but neither are any of the other PC digital distributors. And I don’t mean ‘no competition’ in the ‘we’re kicking your ass in marketshare’ kind of way. No, I mean they’re literally not selling competing products—they simply lack the depth and breadth of what Steam has to offer. Whereas Origin, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GoG, GamersGate and others are all perfectly valid online stores and distributors, they aren’t what Steam is: a unified, managed gaming platform for the PC.