Valve Unveils Steamworks

[ShadeEX]

Valve Unveils Steamworks
January 29, 2008, 2:43 pm - Eric Twelker

Complete Suite of Publishing Tools Available Free of Charge

January 29, 2008 – Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announce Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools – ranging from copy protection to social networking services to server browsing – is now available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.

Steamworks, the same suite of tools used in best-selling PC titles Half-Life 2 and The Orange Box, is available for all PC games distributed via retail and leading online platforms such as Steam. The services included in Steamworks may be used a la carte or in any combination.

Specifically, Steamworks offers:

• Real-time stats on sales, gameplay, and product activation: Know exactly how well your title is selling before the charts are released. Find out how much of your game is being played. Login into your Steamworks account pages and view up to the hour information regarding worldwide product activations and player data.
• State of the art encryption system: Stop paying to have your game pirated before it’s released. Steamworks takes anti-piracy to a new level with strong encryption that keeps your game locked until the moment it is released.
• Territory/version control: The key-based authentication provided in Steamworks also provides territory/version controls to help curb gray market importing and deliver territory-specific content to any given country or region.
• Auto updating: Ensures all customers are playing the latest and greatest version of your games.
• Voice chat: Available for use both in and out of game.
• Multiplayer matchmaking: Steamworks offers you all the multiplayer backend and matchmaking services that have been created to support Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, the most played action games in the world.
• Social networking services: With support for achievements, leaderboards, and avatars, Steamworks allows you to give your gamers as many rewards as you would like, plus support for tracking the world’s best professional and amateur players of your game.
• Development tools: Steamworks allows you to administer private betas which can be updated multiple times each day. Also includes data collection tools for QA, play testing, and usability studies.

“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 Gabe Newell, president of Valve. “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.”
“As more developers and publishers have embraced Steam as a leading digital distribution channel, we’ve heard a growing number of inquiries regarding the availability of the platform’s services and tools,” said Jason Holtman, director business development at Valve. “Offering Steamworks is part of our ongoing efforts to support the needs of game developers and our publishing partners.”

Steam is a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC games and digital content. With over 13 million active accounts and more than 250 games, plus hundreds of movie files and game demos available, Steam has become a frequent destination for millions of gamers around the world.

Click here for more information regarding Steamworks. To find out about more about Steamworks contact jasonh@valvesoftware.com

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=news&id=1423&l=danish&cc=DK

What do you all think about this, discuss.

[Hudson]

Sounds like a great option for small developers to sell their product and get their name out there :)

[Mountain Man]

It's hard to wrap my head around just how well Steam has taken off. I remember when it was in beta and you could barely download the original Half-Life with it. Now look at it.

[Damien_Azreal]

True.

First time I used STEAM I hated it. It was buggy, didn't download fast or for shit. Lots of problems.
Now it's an amazing program that is almost completely widely accepted by the PC gaming community.

[ryche]

Yeah Valve and their Steam has come far. Good for them. :)

[Simon Charles]

True.

First time I used STEAM I hated it. It was buggy, didn't download fast or for shit. Lots of problems.
Now it's an amazing program that is almost completely widely accepted by the PC gaming community.

They had horrible beginnings, true that. But all complains are gone as far as I'm concerned. It's a great platform now.

[TerminX]

When Steam was first rolled out, the Windows client didn't have the worst of the issues IMO... using it to update dedicated servers on Linux was quite possibly the most annoying experience ever. I can't remember how many times things ended up screwed up due to Steam problems. I think the worst was where Valve's servers would drop connections in the middle of updates (because they didn't have enough bandwidth for it), often leaving most of the servers with truncated Steam binaries, because instead of downloading a new version of the Steam client to a separate filename and then doing something like a simple CRC check before overwriting the original file, it just overwrote the running binary as it went. The installations pretty much self-destructed, and frequently, too, as there were a lot of Steam client updates back then.

Yeah, Steam has come a long way. It isn't nearly as awful now, though the client still does weird stuff for me from time to time... marks all of my games as preloads, randomly only displays half of the game icons, et cetera. Still a lot better than it was.

[Kalki]

I think the worst was where Valve's servers would drop connections in the middle of updates (because they didn't have enough bandwidth for it)
That happens from time to time in certain regions (maybe when a critical server goes down and others can't cut it) so Steam does retain the capacity to piss you off. Just ask Steve.

[Kev_Boy]

It's a shame this isn't for custom developers too, you wouldn't believe how annoying it is to keep servers up-to-date with your content if you decide to release multiple updated versions.

[jimbob]

despite steam being a reliable and good program, i still prefer a physical copy of my games. these online things tend to dissapear after a few years or drop support for older games.

but still, steam is good :)

[brabee]

In my opinion, Valve makes the true "games for windows"...

[Kristian Joensen]

Here is what a guy with actual Steam experience from the development side of thing(was QA guy for Ritual) has to say about this. (http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=16126666#itemanchor_16126666)

[Daveman]

He quotes a guy saying that if Valve doesn't do well they'll have to cut Steam to stay profitable, but I can't see how that would happen. The quote is from before all the third-party developers and publishers started hopping on Steam and from before it was really profitable. The situation isn't really the same anymore.

[Mountain Man]

Here is what a guy with actual Steam experience from the development side of thing(was QA guy for Ritual) has to say about this. (http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=16126666#itemanchor_16126666)
At least that's the perspective from one small developer with an effectively failed product. I wonder if the big boys like id, 2K, Activision, etc. or even the smaller but more successful houses like PopCap Games have the same concerns?

[Sang]

It's great how Valve tries to get more competitors into the gaming development field :) If they wouldn't do stuff like this we'd probably end up with an oligopoly sooner or later!

[8IronBob]

Sounds like a great option for small developers to sell their product and get their name out there :)

True, and after a while, Steam could even go beyond game developers/publishers. I'd imagine even business apps or big utility software companies going to something like this in the near future, too...

[ShadeEX]

Here is what a guy with actual Steam experience from the development side of thing(was QA guy for Ritual) has to say about this. (http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=16126666#itemanchor_16126666)

Yeah that's Michael Russell he left Ritual before the Mumbo Jumbo merger though IIRC.

I've contacted him a few times about Ritual related stuff..

Namely when I made the WoS for Sin Steam stuff..

To bad he got sick so his envolvement in the Sin Episodes: Multiplayer Mod is a bit on the low right now..

[Destructor]

What's this got to do with Steam? :confused:

[Blue Lightning]

All games are moving toward Steam..that's a fact.

The only problem Steam has now that I think they MUST deal with, is to stop putting up 3rd party games on Steam that don't work, or don't work well. Too many games from other developers are sloppily ported to PC or full of bugs, and it seems that Steam just accepts any game without testing it first. Other than that, Steam is the "google" of digital distribution it seems.

[Daveman]

Steam doesn't set standards for you. I wouldn't want that. I imagine that as long as it's not pornographic they'll host it. If they started deciding what they hosted and what they didn't you wouldn't be able to get games by their competitors.

[Agulf]

I find it amusing that they post news about their new tools, named Steamworks, not one day after I talked about how nice it would be for them to add Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura to steam, if they could find a way to gain the rights to do so.

[Karthik]

By the way, have they removed Grand Theft Auto from Steam?

[Phait]

All games are moving toward Steam..that's a fact.

I now see exactly in the clearest, plain view what everyone meant.

[ZuljinRaynor]

All games are moving toward Steam..that's a fact.

No it isn't. "All" never goes to one place.

[Stense]

Except for roads, that all lead to Rome.