Valve Releases Free Steamworks Platform for Game Developers

Valve announced something the other day that was actually quite interesting. Called Steamworks, the platform is designed to help game developers out and let them focus on what’s important… the game. Steamworks takes out the hassle of all the boring stuff that surrounds game publishing, including copy protection, installation methods, auto-updaters, news alerts and the like, by offering an all-in-one platform that’s entirely customizable. So, if a developer chooses to use it, the end-user won’t even know that it’s built on the Steamworks platform.

This is a fantastic idea and one that’s going to be appreciated by many. I don’t necessarily agree with all of how Steam handles things, but a -free- platform like this is going to save developers many hours of anguish, and instead put that time to good use… by creating a great game. It’s a smart move for Valve as well, since many of these developers will be encouraged to sell their game through Steam. It seems like a win/win.

Developers are going to be able to skin this stuff so that it’s basically invisible to the user. If they used Steamworks on their disc and didn’t use Steam to distribute you’d install, then have a box come up and say “hey, you have to create this account and unlock the game” and they’d launch and go into the game. The only time you’d see Steam was in creating an account, everything else can be reskinned, auto-updating will be transparent to the user already.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun