Steamworks

[Ronin Storm]

Courtesy of Eurogamer:

Valve has announced that Steamworks, a suite of publishing and development tools, is now available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide

[...]

The Steamworks tools were used in titles such as Half-Life 2 and The Orange Box and offers real-time stats on sales, gameplay and product activation. as well as territory control, an encryption system, auto updating, voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking and social networking services.

Aside from an obvious marketing ploy to get more people to use Steam, this seems like a pretty neat idea. No idea whether the implementation is up to much, of course.

 

[Wol]

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...... er......

thats better

Sounds quite interesting, spesh with quite a range of features too.

Im not particularly sure why so many people object to steam and suchlike. Id prefer to load up a program like it, and have it sort out the friends list / messaging / preloading games / updating games without me having to download a patch and apply it myself.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Id prefer to load up a program like it, and have it sort out the friends list / messaging / preloading games / updating games without me having to download a patch and apply it myself.

I couldn't agree more. The real trick is getting a system that does that well. I guess Valve are saying, with releasing this, that they feel this works well enough. When releasing it for free I wonder whether it's only just good enough or whether the marketing is worth the "free" price tag? That's just speculation, of course.

 

[thatbloke]

I couldn't agree more. The real trick is getting a system that does that well. I guess Valve are saying, with releasing this, that they feel this works well enough. When releasing it for free I wonder whether it's only just good enough or whether the marketing is worth the "free" price tag? That's just speculation, of course.

The more people that are using steam and the games released on it = more money for valve. By releasing this they are opening it up to anyone who wants to develop a game for it. More games = more people using it = more money.