Valve originally needed Steam to create system requirements for Half-Life 2
Microsoft couldn't provide statistics on players' computers, so Valve had to take matters into its own hands.
Now Steam is the largest distributor of games, but initially it was intended only as a service for collecting statistics on players’ computer configurations. Valve used this data to create the system requirements for Half-Life 2.
Valve chief programmer Jay Stelly spoke about this in a documentary for the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. According to him, the developers encountered difficulties in drawing up the minimum system requirements for the game. The fact is that in the early 2000s, the choice of video cards was much wider than now, and they differed not only in the conventional amount of video memory, but also in fundamentally different rendering technologies.
Valve turned to Microsoft for help, the developers wanted to know…
