Valve Releases Steamworks For Free.
Each of the times industry luminary Ken Levine has been a guest on the GamersWithJobs podcast he has praised the business and technical acumen of the folks running Valve. He has mentioned that they have oodles of statistics on how games are selling, how many are being played, and we all know that the stats of end-user machines running Steam are big deals all by themselves. Valve has managed to turn a game downloading and authenticating service into one of the last great hopes in the fight against piracy, pulling in big titles like BioShock, the entire ID Software back catalog, and most recently its first MMO in the form of EVE Online for digital distribution. Their Steam Community has been lauded by GWJ as being the best online gaming service of its kind that can even help you know what non-Steam games your pals are playing if they set it up just right.
So it comes as something of a surprise when this industry titan of digital distribution gives away the keys to the server matching, digital distribution, sales-number-crunching, anti-piracy, auto-patching kingdom by releasing their Steamworks development toolset to all developers and publishers free of charge and with no royalty strings attached. If early interpretation of the press release is correct, it looks like this could be the start of an explosion of third party content available through Steam with full Steam Community integration at no extra cost to PC developers and publishers.
Who wins? Every PC gamer potentially wins. Valve wins by having more people running Steam to market to, and potentially signing up hosting deals with publishers that want to have their data managed by Valve directly. Publishers win by getting a ready-made, proven, extremely solid antipiracy and distribution system. Independent developers win by possibly being able to self-publish.
Who loses? Matchmaking services like Gamespy, XFire, and the very late to the party Games for Windows Live initiative stand to lose a lot.
Source: EvilAvatar linking to RockPaperShotgun.
Recent Comments