Some people may wonder, why did they change that cool name? Some may say wasnt GameConnect cool the way it was? Well... Maybe it was indeed, however, there are multiple reasons for us to change our name and trust me, we have thought about it many times and ofcourse the GameConnect name will never really be gone. Thats how it all started....

The start of GameConnect

Started back in 2004, as the Gaming arm of TechConnect Magazine, GameConnect grew out to be one of the biggest clans/communities in Europe while establishing a strong base in the United States aswell. Our magazine was all about the latest gaming news, while our gameservers were there for everyone to play together and make "Friends" online.

After a couple of years, sponsoring all kinds of Steam projects like Sourcemod, Steambans and Sharedstats we found that we grew so strong and instead of just being a clan we had to continue like a community and support people/projects and ideas.

The new GameConnect was born and Faith, Solidsnake, Rick, sslice, Dave, Flyinmongoose, poxer and many others joined the team to focus on building a stronger community to support everything related to Steam or the Source engine by Valve aswell as keeping our gameservers up and running with the latest enhancements and cool plugins.

We just had it in our hearts and we all knew we wanted to grow stronger and become a big player in the gaming industry, but as always especially with Half-Life 2 (Source) modifications and games.

A new way

Then 2007 came and a strong relationship with Valve aswell as a lot of other Steam publishers made us think twice about our name and especially the growth of the Steam platform itself made us realise that we still had that steamfriends.com doing nothing. So we decided to do something with it. Our main focus would be to keep sponsoring Source mods and projects but also focus completely on the Steam platform concerning games, reviews, previews and more. SteamFriends.com was born!

As you can see now, our new site has just been launched and we are still working on a lot of things, adding previews, reviews, developers columns and a lot more. We have so many ideas, so many people involved, and so many wonderfull enthousiasm that I can only say one thing to everyone involved with GameConnect and ofcourse now SteamFriends.com: "Thank you all for the great time we had so far and I am sure together we can make this project kick ass!"

We hope to see everyone on any of our gameservers or on our brand new IRC channel on irc.gameswitch.net #steamfriends for a talk, a chat about Steam, Source or whatever you feel like talking about. Make sure you register, visit our forums and prepare for a big year with lots of great things to happen!

Kind regards,
Viper aka Michiel
Managing Director SteamFriends, a division of TechConnect

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As part of Management I've been asked to add something to this wonderful news.
Although most has been said already I still have some things to add. In the past week me (Faith), Olly, Flyingmongoose, Viper,  Sslice and a few others have pulled a job most didn't inmagine would be possible in that timeframe. Which was creating this website from scratch to what it has become. But as one can see we did it! And we are damn proud of it!
I like to thank the people mentioned earlier who helped out a lot with a special thanks to Olly for his help.
For the coming years one can only say: "The Sky is The Limit! Let's see how far it goes!"

Kind regards,
Faith aka Robbert
Manager SteamFriends