Valve announces Steamworks
Posted by Christopher Cossey on February 1, 2008
The development powerhouse Valve, responsible for the Source engine, the Steam content delivery service and online gaming community, and more recently The Orange Box, has announced Steamworks, a “complete suite of publishing and development tools” soon to be available to publishers and developers alike, free of charge.
You see, this is what I love about Valve. They just give shit away. If it’s not for free, it’s insanely cheep. If there’s any new content for a game that you bought from them, it’s almost always free (on the PC end at least). Now they’re just giving away their whole suite of dev tools. If this were any other company, they’d probably charge like three for four grand for a package this elaborate.
Just a few examples of what Steamworks is gonna have to offer:
-An analytics client which tracks sales and how often your game is played.
-An encryption system to help prevent your project from piracy
-Regional/Version control
-An auto updater for easy patch and post content distribution
-Social networking tools, ACHIEVEMENT SUPPORT!!
-and more!
This is big news for independent game developers. Not only will it make development easier, but more accessible to those who have the creative drive and talent, but lack the funds required to act on it. It’s stuff like this that makes Gabe Newell one of my favorite people in the video game industry. Knowing Gabe, he’s probably gonna use this as a recruiting tool as well.
February 20, 2008 at 1:35 pm
[...] and I talk my way in to being able to record a talk that they were holding on Steamworks, the upcoming development suite Valve is making available for free to aspiring developers the world over. I will post the session [...]