Valve Announces Steamworks: Free Tool Suite Available to All PC Developers

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Valve Software today announced Steamworks, a suite of tools freely available for any developers to use with retail or online PC releases.

The tools include real-time sales, gameplay, and product activation statistics, an encryption system, territory control, auto updating, voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking, social networking services such as leaderboards, and other development tools. The full list of features can be found on Shacknews.

Many of the features are already integrated into the Steam Community platform. The tool set is similar to what Microsoft offers to developers--for a fee--in both Windows Live and Xbox Live.

"Developers and publishers are spending more and more time and money cobbling together all the tools and backend systems needed to build and launch a successful title in today's market," said Valve president Gabe Newell. "Steamworks puts all those tools and systems together in one free package, liberating publishers and developers to concentrate on the game instead of the plumbing."

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    January 29, 2008 10:19 AM

    am i interpreting this wrong or are they trying to do what Live does for xbox?

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      January 29, 2008 10:22 AM

      I think they've been trying to do that for a while. And they're pulling it off, imo (especially compared against Windows Live!).

      I just hope they don't spend so much time on the backend (publishing) stuff that they delay their in-house games more.

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        January 29, 2008 10:24 AM

        Different teams, no doubt. I don't think it's going to matter.

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        January 29, 2008 11:01 AM

        valve is huge. it's very unlikely that the guy who is messing with the source engine is also writing the steam dev kit, and when it comes to actual content (game scripting and all that) it's assured that there are different guys.

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          January 29, 2008 11:12 AM

          yea, valve's taken over several floors of a rather large office building in downtown bellevue... when you tour the place you get a feel for where the different devs are. Ps3 guys are in this corner, 360 guys are over here... steam guys are upstairs... gabe's office filled with giant squishy balls is over this way....

          And they've also picked up turtle rock - so I think it's safe to say that they aren't straining their devs...

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      January 29, 2008 10:23 AM

      They're trying to do for their developing and publishing partners what they do for their games.

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      January 29, 2008 10:23 AM

      Almost sounds like it. Steam already has community features which beat Windows Live at it's own game. I've really grown to like Steam in the past year... I wouldn't mind if it becomes THE place to buy and play my PC games. It's already almost there.

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        January 29, 2008 11:16 AM

        I agree, i support steam 100% and if a game is available for purchase on steam vs retail, i'll go for the steam copy 100% of the time

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      January 29, 2008 11:25 AM

      They already are a platform much like Xbox Live is. This is more along the lines of giving away Xbox Live to everyone - the actual guts of Xbox Live. It sounds weird.

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      January 29, 2008 4:23 PM

      for free

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      January 29, 2008 6:10 PM

      Windows Live with Vista is a joke

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