Steam was rejected by Microsoft, Yahoo

Steam is pretty much ubiquitous for gamers everywhere nowadays and we accept it as a fundamental part of our daily TF2 deathmatches. There was a time though when the digital distribution platform was only a concept though and in that time Valve offered to partner up with Microsoft or Yahoo.

But both of them said no.

Speaking in an interview with GI.biz, Valve's Doug Lombardi said that they originally tried to get Microsoft and Yahoo on board to help build Steam, but were eventually forced into designing the platform themselves from scratch.

"You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam," said Lombardi in the interview with James Lee.

"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.'"

I bet those companies are kicking themselves now - the last headcount revealed that Steam hosts over 300 games for a community in excess of 14 million. While the system is rarely flawless, it is at least functional and continues to represent the forefront of PC games distribution. Let us hear your LOLs in the forums.