Few gamers have not heard of Steam. The first appearance of the site falls already in 2002. On it large publishers could safely distribute games.
A dozen years later, Steam Greenlight appeared, which made it possible to get to the site not only for large studios, but also for ordinary indie developers. Users themselves chose which games they want to see on the site. But due to the emergence of a mass of second-rate games, such a system had to be closed. Direct has replaced Greenlight. According to the developers, such a system should make the publishing process orderly, transparent and accessible to new developers from around the world.
For nearly two decades, Steam has ceased to be just a digital distribution platform. It has an internal economy, achievements, collectible cards, inventory. All this is necessary to increase player engagement. Naturally, it was necessary to enable developers to somehow integrate these components of Steam into their games. For this, Steamworks was created.
Steam’s history as a multiplayer platform began with CS 1.6. Multiplayer has always been one of the key aspects of the game. The site gives players the opportunity to communicate with each other via a peer-to-peer network (P2P), or use dedicated game servers. For the first case, naturally, matchmaking is necessary – the process of uniting players into a game session. The recruitment of players takes place in the lobby, where players can discuss various aspects of the game, choose characters and a map. Steamworks provides a comprehensive API for working with matchmaking.
