Steam, Valve's digital distribution service, rescued PC gaming from its "dark ages," Wasteland 2 developer Brian Fargo told Eurogamer.

Developer InXile Entertainment funded its role-playing game with nearly $3 million on Kickstarter in 2012. Wasteland 2 arrived on Steam Early Access last December.

According to Fargo, that developers can bring the unfinished game directly to interested players is a credit to Valve, a company that "has all this power but they don't wield it. They let us all work in an open system."

PC developers now have more options than they did before Steam launched in 2002, and more freedom than they do on consoles, Fargo said.

"They've been great," he said, referring to Valve. "You think about where we all were, kind of in the dark ages, when there was nothing. There was just Flash. There was no digital distribution. They've opened up a way to get directly to the audience in a way that isn't politicized, or forces us to do exclusives or all the other things the console guys do."

For more on Wasteland 2, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows PC, you can watch our interview with Fargo from Gamescom 2013 below.