Valve gives away game development tools for free

Posted at: 5:48am 30th January 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

SteamWorks to give any game developers access to Valve's social networking, voice chat and ant-piracy encryption tools

While it got off to a shaky start on the launch date of Half-Life 2, Valve's Steam service has proved to be a phenomenal success, knocking game piracy on the head and dispensing with archaic annoyances such as DVD-ROMs. Valve has now become the envy of the games industry, continuing to make money without spending anything on packaging and distribution costs. Now, however, the popular games developer has decided to offer up some of its development tools free for any games developers in the form of SteamWorks.

The godfather of Valve, Gabe Newell, said that the move was a response to developers 'spending more and more time and money cobbling together all the tools and backend systems needed to build and launch a successful title in today's market.' Newell reckons that 'Steamworks puts all those tools and systems together in one free package, liberating publishers and developers to concentrate on the game instead of the plumbing.'

It's a good move for the games industry, and one that could result in quicker game development, as well as more revenue from Valve's anti-piracy encryption technology. Among the features included in SteamWorks is real-time statistics on sales, gameplay and product activation, which Doug Lombardi from Valve thinks could be very useful for game developers and publishers. In an interview on Next Generation Lombardi boasted that you could 'Forget NPD, forget ELPSA. You'll know down to the finest details how many games have been sold every hour of the day, every day of the week. And that information is in real-time.'

SteamWorks will also include Valve's auto-updating and voice chat systems. As well as this, it contains Valve's multiplayer matchmaking system, as used in Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, as well as social networking services, supporting records of achievements, leaderboards and avatars.

There's also what Valve calls a 'Territory/Version control,' to stop people importing versions of games that aren't intended for their region, as well as an encryption lock to stop games being activated until they're released. Apparently, you don't even need to put your game on Steam at the end of it, and the service is intended for both retail games and direct downloads, even for alternative download sites to Steam.

See the official website for more information.