Valve to offer Steamworks for free

Valve Software’s sending out some dev love. Word on the press wire says that the company behind the Source engine and the Steam platform are now offering the tools used to develop the Steam digital distribution service at no additional price. That’s a lot of premium backend tools to create an elaborate online community of PC games being selectively tagged as freeware – if you’re a developer or a publisher, that is.

Valve has announced that it will be offering Steamworks, a set of developmental tools used to create the Steam digital distribution platform, for free to developers and publishers. And it’s a complete suite, too – from social networking services to automatic patching and even multiplayer matchmaking. Other features include:

• Real-time stats on sales, gameplay, and product activation: Know exactly how well your title is selling before the charts are released. Find out how much of your game is being played. Login into your Steamworks account pages and view up to the hour information regarding worldwide product activations and player data.
• State of the art encryption system: Stop paying to have your game pirated before it’s released. Steamworks takes anti-piracy to a new level with strong encryption that keeps your game locked until the moment it is released.
• Territory/version control: The key-based authentication provided in Steamworks also provides territory/version controls to help curb gray market importing and deliver territory-specific content to any given country or region.
• Auto updating: Insures all customers are playing the latest and greatest version of your games.
• Voice chat: Available for use both in and out of game.
• Multiplayer matchmaking: Steamworks offers you all the multiplayer backend and matchmaking services that have been created to support Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, the most played action games in the world.
• Social networking services: With support for achievements, leaderboards, and avatars, Steamworks allows you to give your gamers as many rewards as you would like, plus support for tracking the world’s best professional and amateur players of your game.
• Development tools: Steamworks allows you to administer private betas which can be updated multiple times each day. Also includes data collection tools for QA, play testing, and usability studies.

Valve says that these tools were used on all the PC games offered on Steam, though the use of these tools don’t mean that the game has to be distributed over Steam. So it would seem that games using this technology can also be sold over retail or another digital distribution service.

What would this mean for us gamers? Well if publishers and developers to take up Valve on their offer, that would help decrease chances of piracy, a lot more chances that social networking will be a norm for incoming games, and no more need to go patch hunting. Plus, if they go digital distribution, there’s no more need to deal with scratch-prone discs and retail price tags either.