Valve's Steam goes beyond games

[nsane.forums]

Starting in September, the Steam online distribution platform is adding creativity and productivity apps for both PC and Mac.

Video game publisher/developer Valve created the Steam distribution platform to offer easy downloads and installation for Windows and Mac games. The Steam app and online store work for both Valve's own games, including Half-Life and Portal, and games from other publishers, including both hits such as Skyrim and indie games like Torchlight. Now, the company plans to add nongaming apps, starting in September.

In a brief online statement, the company says: "The Software titles coming to Steam range from creativity to productivity. Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you."

The Steam software store opens September 5 (although there's no confirmed list of apps or publishers yet), with additional software added continuously after that, similar to how Steam works for games. Besides ease of installation, the major advantage of the Steam platform to date has been the ability to easily re-download and reinstall apps on different computers, without having to juggle or reset serial numbers, and presumably Steam's software store would operate the same way.

View: Original Article

[DKT27]

Steam to challenge Windows Store by offering non-gaming software

Valve has announced that, starting on September 5th, it will begin selling non-gaming software products on the Steam service, although specific software titles have not been announced.

Valve's Steam service started out as a way for people to download the full version of Half-Life 2 in 2004. It has since expanded to include over 1,000 PC and Mac games from pretty much every major game publisher, as well as many indie games. Valve has said that there are over 40 million registered users on Steam. Recently, Valve confirmed it was working on porting Steam to Linux.

Today, Valve announced that it will be expanding beyond games for the Steam service. The company announced that, beginning on September 5th, it will start selling non-gaming software products on Steam. Specific products were not announced but Valve did state:

The Software titles coming to Steam range from creativity to productivity. Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you.

Valve also said non-gaming software titles can also be submitted for consideration for Valve's upcoming Steam Greenlight program, which lets developers use social networking to convince Valve to publish their software on Steam.

It will be interesting to see which companies are among the first to launch their software products on Steam, which already has a massive user base for its game titles.

Notably, this software store will soon compete directly against Microsoft when it launches Windows 8. Considering Valve is heavily entrenched in the software distribution for gaming, this could pose a serious challenge to Microsoft.

:view: View: Original Article