- Steam.com sold for nearly $400,000 in January 2021.
- The buyer wasn't Valve, even though the name matches its game store.
- The domain dates back to 1994, nine years before Steam launched.
- The domain wasn't for sale for years, then went back on the market.
- It was the priciest of 20 domains GoDaddy sold that month.
Steam.com sold for nearly $400,000 in January 2021, GoDaddy said in a list of 20 domain sales it disclosed that June. It was the priciest name on the list. Domain Name Wire and James Names both reported the buyer wasn't Valve. Valve's store uses steampowered.com.
James Names reported that public registration records pointed to a buyer in China, with few other clues about who that was. Domain Name Wire said the page just showed a placeholder marked as reserved for a future project.
The domain itself goes back further. Registry records show steam.com was first registered in 1994, nine years before Valve launched Steam in 2003. Archived pages from 1998 show it belonged to a San Francisco consulting firm called Steam Tunnel Operations. Its home page showed a photo of a worker climbing out of a manhole.
One of the people who ran that business, Cliff Skolnick, also helped start the Apache web server project in 1995. He's still listed today as a member of the Apache Software Foundation, though no longer an active one.
By 2008 the site had become a plain holding page. It said steam.com was the former home of Steam Tunnel Operations and that the domain was not for sale. A capture from 2016 still carried the same message.
About six months after the January 2021 sale, steam.com was for sale again. In July 2021 the site showed a picture of a steam locomotive, a dictionary definition of the word steam, and a diagram of water turning to steam. The contact line on the page pointed to sales@saw.com.
In a forum discussing the sale, one commenter said they often typed steam.com by mistake, meaning to reach Valve's store at steampowered.com. Several others assumed the buyer must be Valve, but other commenters said it wasn't.
