Valve Software, the company behind award-winning, critically-acclaimed video game titles such as the Half-Life series, Left 4 Dead series and Team Fortress 2 is making a major change in its digital distribution system, Steam. Starting September 5, they will start selling non-gaming software on the platform.
Steam has been a video game distribution system since its release in 2003. Gradually it has grown to be really popular, with over 54 million active users and over 1500 video game titles from various developer and publishers. In June 2012, Valve released its very first non-game title on Steam - Indie Game: The Movie - a documentary following the story and struggles of the independent developers of some popular games.
In a press release, Valve has announced that their users said they are interested in having more of their software on Steam. There is a "launch set" of software titles coming on September 5, 2012. It is currently unclear what these programs will be.
Valve says that the software titles range from "creativity to productivity" and many of them will take advantage of Steamworks features such as easy installation, automatic updates and the ability to save your work to the Steam Cloud.
Personally, I think Steam should always have been a platform to buy and manage games. But Valve is probably choosing to do this for their own reasons. Let's wait for a month and see how things turn out and how these programs work.
