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Steam Expands Beyond Games

News Editor: Craig Farren Date: 09-08-2012 [ Print | 4 comment(s) ] Discuss in Forums

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises and leading technologies, 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.

A recent announcement from Valve may come as a surprise to some. Valve are going to be releasing the first set of software titles on Steam, their popular gaming platform.

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.

What are some of the applications we would expect to see on Steam? There has been no official word on just what will be coming or what is included in the launch set of software so we will just have to wait until September 5.

Source: store.steampowered.com/news

Tagged as: Valve, Steam

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Steam Expands Beyond Games

kreegor

Posts: 396
Joined: 2011-01-21

#26085 Posted on: 09.08.2012 10:07:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by esoteric

am i right in thinking they will stock software such as photoshop and dare i say it even windows?

Only if Adobe and Microsoft agree to it which I doubt they will. I'm not sure what they will provide but I can well image that something like Open Office could be hosted there with cloud saves for documents etc so they are available anywhere.

I can see it working for open source software or free software, especially on Windows. It seems strange that this would be on Linux seeing as though Ubuntu (for example) has a built in software centre where you can download just about anything (including Linux games).

The valve link says that programs can be submitted and voted on using the Greenlight feature so who knows what could become available.

Steam Expands Beyond Games

kreegor

Posts: 396
Joined: 2011-01-21

#26094 Posted on: 09.08.2012 23:58:21

I don't think it will be primarily open source software but I have no idea what will be part of the starter package. The thing that confuses me is that there are heaps of free programs that do the job of paid applications. e.g. Paint.NET or GIMP as alternatives to Photoshop, Open Office or Libre Office as alternatives to Microsoft Office etc

Maybe they will have some business software? Who knows?