Expands Beyond Games
 

Launch Set of "Software" Titles Coming Sept 5

Aug 8, 2012 -- Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the first set of Software titles are heading to Steam, marking a major expansion to the platform most commonly known as a leading destination for PC and Mac games.

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.

More Software titles will be added in an ongoing fashion following the September 5th launch, and developers will be welcome to submit Software titles via Steam Greenlight.

"The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games," said Mark Richardson at Valve. "They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests."

For more information, please visit Welcome to Steam.

Hope they have achievements :p

Congratulations you have achieved "Batch processing 1000 Pictures"

My wallet turned white-as-a-ghost at the thought of a steam x-mas sale with more than just games.

So the first piece of software has been added, GameMaker: Studio

And it actually does have achievements :biglol:

Bwahahaha...You called it

I don't think this is a good move for Steam personally.

May I ask, why?

Sorontar

A great idea. Its such a a pervasive distribution platform, stable and easy to use, i hope more applications make it there. I dl'd Gamemaker studio and had a play around. To me its such a natural follow on to the Workshop.

I was leary of Steam for years, after 3 years of using it, I find it a pleasant and reliable service. If I can use it for buying more software, that would be great. I use Amazon a lot for buying software online, and it just does not have the community Steam has. The only problem I see are the several choices for cloud platforms. Right now, I store things in Skydrive, Amazon Could, Google Drive, and Dropbox. If Steam is going to be a major cloud service, too, then I will need a program that syncs all of them somehow.