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hhjinks

Steam.com was for the longest time unrelated to Valve, which is why you'll find Steam under steampowered.com instead.

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Valve owns s.team now, as well. That’ll bring you to the store page

It also acts as a url shortener for their hardware support pages.

s.team/deck, and s.team/machine take you to the appropriate support pages.

I will never remember that, but I could instantly remember steam.com

It's still unrelated AFAIK. From what I remember, the owner refused to sell the domain, and then eventually asked Valve for a huge fee that they refused to pay. So now the domain is just unused.

That's what happens when you name your project after someone else's domain. A usual part of starting a project now is picking an unused domain name.

Using a dictionary word for your project will never be easy, but what often happens now is to just not get the .com domain (Likely taken), or prefix with "get" and then later hope that you can time it right so that you can afford the clean .com domain...but not be famous enough that the buyer would want to get some crazy amount for it.

I really wish using random dictionary words wouldn't be so popular.

Parking domains and not using them is poor taste. Finders keepers is okay compared to pay to win but if someone has a better use for the domain, maybe release it for a reasonable price?

I really wish reselling would not be allowed at all by ICANN and could result in the domain being reclaimed from either the seller or buyer if discovered.

What incentivises the domain holder to do that? Under the UDRP, parking is only not allowed if it's obviously done to screw with someone's trademark, has no other purpose, and their trademark came first.

I’m thinking idealistically, not practically

I have a theory that's what happened to my company's rebrand, they now use a 4 lettered .com domain name. Not even a word, just an abbreviation.

Or if you’re worth a trillion dollars you just literally buy the domain chat.com for over $15 million

Steam used to be steamgames.com, too.

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