Meh.

I think valve is going to make a lot more money.

I guess it's normal that they want to become more of an "app store" rather than just a game store, but it seems like this will dilute the purpose. I don't really imagine them getting too heavily into productivity software though. I hope not anyway.

As long as I can find games and it doesn't end up like a ridiculous clusterfuck that is XBL these days, then I don't mind.

"bin\sequel3.exe"

Oh Valve, you tease...

Sounds great to me. I love using Steam--hopefully Valve will handle this well.

I think there's even less of a chance Valve will finish development on a new Half-Life game.

I also think it's weird, considering how they seem to be turning away from WIndows, Apple's platforms have the same issues turning Valve away, and Linux distros have their own package managers built in.

Great. How about adding movies and tv shows too?

I'd love that.

@Galiant said:

Great. How about adding movies and tv shows too? I'd love that.

That'd be great buying a 1080p movie for like 75% off.

@Lunar_Aura said:

Meh.

Yep. I use Steam for games, nothing else.

I just hope they keep the non-game software well separated from the game deals on the front page so I don't have to sift through more stuff to get to what I care about.

Neat. 
 
@Skytylz said:

@Galiant said:

Great. How about adding movies and tv shows too? I'd love that.

That'd be great buying a 1080p movie for like 75% off.

Not a major interest for me (productivity software seems to range from the too expensive stuff like Adobe products that I can't have to the good enough, free for use, often open source products that don't require a store). I have no real interest in Valve and MS fighting over an app store with Windows 8, especially if the fallout happens to affect PC gaming, but I'm glad the PC platform is open so neither of them is right now able to kill the other. I own my CPU so I say which software can run on it.

Maybe this colours the anti-Windows 8 comments from Valve recently. Valve, like everyone not called Carmack, have benefited greatly from the Direct X push from MS to create reliable hardware feature tiers and move the real-time 3D rendering industry forward in the last decade. But the push for a Windows app store and Secure Boot option on some hardware isn't a great one (Secure Boot mandatory and possibly with no way of disabling on some WinRT tablets? That would prevent me buying a tablet crippled like that, but as my thoughts on Windows tablets are mainly that x86 provides access to a massive legacy of products, many ideally suited to the power levels of a tablet SoC then the ARM spin isn't really my primary choice anyway).

Up until know I was quite weary of the whole "steambox" theory concerning Valve's ambitions. But now I can't help but see some sense in the idea that Valve might at least produce its own linux distribution. We can be confident that Valve is dedicated to growing Steam as a software ecosystem as much as possible, but it's likewise absolutely certain that Microsoft isn't going to allow a competing appstore on windows 8+, and Apple's similarly locking down OSX.

I think they'll try to grow as much as they can on windows and mac, but in the meanwhile I suspect they will be pushing to make Linux as viable and attractive a platform as possible for them and other developers. Unless Microsoft opens up their ecosystem post windows 8, Valve's endgame has got to be a move to a different platform altogether, and by all appearances that platform seems to be linux.

@Galiant said:

Great. How about adding movies and tv shows too? I'd love that.

AND MUSIC!!

Man, I can't wait to buy Microsoft Word 2010 on Steam, then hopefully Word 97 on GOG when I'm feeling nostalgic.

One more step towards world domination.

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

They'll probably have to round it off a bit. I just don't see "99.749749749749749749749749749749749749749749749749749% off!" happening anytime soon.

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

I wonder how they'll present this stuff in the store. Anyway it's interesting and if it means more revenue to do more cool stuff then I'm all for it.

@theManUnknown said:

Up until know I was quite weary of the whole "steambox" theory concerning Valve's ambitions. But now I can't help but see some sense in the idea that Valve might at least produce its own linux distribution. We can be confident that Valve is dedicated to growing Steam as a software ecosystem as much as possible, but it's likewise absolutely certain that Microsoft isn't going to allow a competing appstore on windows 8+, and Apple's similarly locking down OSX.

I think they'll try to grow as much as they can on windows and mac, but in the meanwhile I suspect they will be pushing to make Linux as viable and attractive a platform as possible for them and other developers. Unless Microsoft opens up their ecosystem post windows 8, Valve's endgame has got to be a move to a different platform altogether, and by all appearances that platform seems to be linux.

Post-Windows 8?

Windows 7 and before and the desktop on Windows 8 is open (as in consumer owns hardware, unrestricted, not as in libre or gratis). MS seem to be making moves into the walled garden stuff with the not-called-Metro-any-more API and app store for those products but Windows 8 will still run Steam, this isn't an Apple ecosystem. MS have seen a great profit in selling billions of copies of their OS and letting the software developers work out their own way of distributing onto the platform. The Windows app store may be misguided in the walled garden it creates but it is an option, not a restriction on developers selling their product and using the open to code nature of the OS to build their own stores and their own APIs. Windows users own their computers, just as Android users can own their phones. Google Play (previously Market) does not restrict Amazon or anyone else from making their own store, it gains money by being the default option but not be enforcing itself as the only option. MS are looking at all that dirty Apple iOS store money and wanting a piece, they know people buying a tablet will expect it (and apps coded to be power efficient in their interaction, maybe with users who don't have a clear grasp of a quit metaphor due to iOS), and they may be fucking it up by chasing that. But they're not crazy, Windows 8 will still be open for business and customers will still own their devices. Windows 9 is where we have to make sure MS doesn't try taking another step towards iOS (by removing the option consumers can use to disable Secure Boot or locking it down further to prevent other OS installs on devices).

"bin\sequel3.exe"

Oh Valve, you tease...

As long as this isn't the first step in them creating a "Media Hub" (similar to the Xbox Dashboard) and limiting their focus on games to only the big retail games, then I'm fine with it.

Anybody want to make any predictions for how long it is until they begin selling music at half the price of Itunes?

@glyn said:

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

yespleasethankyou!

@EvilNiGHTS said:

then hopefully Word 97 on GOG when I'm feeling nostalgic.

O_O

That... That would be amazing to see... :D

:P

As for the situation at hand- it shows just how directly Windows 8 will be competing with Steam rather than just being a platform for it once it comes out.

It sounds like they are doing exactly what Microsoft is doing, but with less vitriol from it's user base.

Oh, the internet.

Oh God they're taking over!

They already sell non-videogame software. It's called Dear Esther.

#crackinwise

Wasn't expecting it or looking forward to it but I think it's a very good idea on their part. Also, the following was brilliant:

@EvilNiGHTS said:

Man, I can't wait to buy Microsoft Word 2010 on Steam, then hopefully Word 97 on GOG when I'm feeling nostalgic.

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

You joke, but the only real reason Adobe's suite is so expensive is that it's massively pirated and makes its money back on the people who have to buy it.

If Steam can offer a piracy-proof system it could make sense to release their programs for £60 a pop. But hey- crazy optimism, right?

I want this future :(

@GS_Dan said:

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

You joke, but the only real reason Adobe's suite is so expensive is that it's massively pirated and makes its money back on the people who have to buy it.

If Steam can offer a piracy-proof system it could make sense to release their programs for £60 a pop. But hey- crazy optimism, right?

I want this future :(

The problem is that we, regular people, are not even their target audience. Those companies make the most money from other companies that need their software, because they are required by law to have legitimately purchased software for whatever they're doing. Well, everyone is, but it is less likely that anyone will go after us instead of let's say a relatively big company. That being said, I do hope that Adobe as well as other leading developers such as Autodesk start selling their software on Steam. Hopefully this will result in a price drop, but on the other hand it would feel strange seeing something on Steam that costs 4 thousand dollars. Or even more.

Another step on the road to steam OS. I am ready for it.

@valrog said:

@GS_Dan said:

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

You joke, but the only real reason Adobe's suite is so expensive is that it's massively pirated and makes its money back on the people who have to buy it.

If Steam can offer a piracy-proof system it could make sense to release their programs for £60 a pop. But hey- crazy optimism, right?

I want this future :(

The problem is that we, regular people, are not even their target audience. Those companies make the most money from other companies that need their software, because they are required by law to have legitimately purchased software for whatever they're doing. Well, everyone is, but it is less likely that anyone will go after us instead of let's say a relatively big company. That being said, I do hope that Adobe as well as other leading developers such as Autodesk start selling their software on Steam. Hopefully this will result in a price drop, but on the other hand it would feel strange seeing something on Steam that costs 4 thousand dollars. Or even more.

Well, first thing that costs that much and has nothing to do with trains ;)

@ModernAlkemie said:

I just hope they keep the non-game software well separated from the game deals on the front page so I don't have to sift through more stuff to get to what I care about.

Yep. That's about it. I think that they can pull this off, but I've been let down by the business practices of many a company in my lifetime. Guess time will tell.

@GS_Dan said:

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

You joke, but the only real reason Adobe's suite is so expensive is that it's massively pirated and makes its money back on the people who have to buy it.

If Steam can offer a piracy-proof system it could make sense to release their programs for £60 a pop. But hey- crazy optimism, right?

I want this future :(

The problem is that we, regular people, are not even their target audience. Those companies make the most money from other companies that need their software, because they are required by law to have legitimately purchased software for whatever they're doing. Well, everyone is, but it is less likely that anyone will go after us instead of let's say a relatively big company. That being said, I do hope that Adobe as well as other leading developers such as Autodesk start selling their software on Steam. Hopefully this will result in a price drop, but on the other hand it would feel strange seeing something on Steam that costs 4 thousand dollars. Or even more.

I would buy photoshop through STEAM.

@GS_Dan said:

@rebgav said:

Does this mean we can buy Adobe CS6 for $2.50 in the next Steam sale?

You joke, but the only real reason Adobe's suite is so expensive is that it's massively pirated and makes its money back on the people who have to buy it.

If Steam can offer a piracy-proof system it could make sense to release their programs for £60 a pop. But hey- crazy optimism, right?

I want this future :(

Someone is buying into corporate propaganda!

@theManUnknown said:

Up until know I was quite weary of the whole "steambox" theory concerning Valve's ambitions. But now I can't help but see some sense in the idea that Valve might at least produce its own linux distribution. We can be confident that Valve is dedicated to growing Steam as a software ecosystem as much as possible, but it's likewise absolutely certain that Microsoft isn't going to allow a competing appstore on windows 8+, and Apple's similarly locking down OSX.

I think they'll try to grow as much as they can on windows and mac, but in the meanwhile I suspect they will be pushing to make Linux as viable and attractive a platform as possible for them and other developers. Unless Microsoft opens up their ecosystem post windows 8, Valve's endgame has got to be a move to a different platform altogether, and by all appearances that platform seems to be linux.

I'm not sure about a Steambox, but I will have zero issues with Valve creating their own Linux distro on which to play games and do everything else. Hell, if that happens I will gladly not use Windows again unless I absolutely have to.

This isn't saying that I don't like Windows; however, I really liked my time with Ubuntu and I'm pretty sad that I have nothing to use it on. Steam on that, or something similar to that, with the ability to play most or all of my games with no issues? Yes, please.

@Lunar_Aura said:

Meh.

This.

I hope they use this as more of a distribution channel than a DRM scheme. I don't want to boot up Steam to use a word processor.

If they incorporate movies and music that would be all the better; the only real competitor in the market right now is iTunes and their software is like something out of the last millennium.

@Shivoa said:

Post-Windows 8?

Windows 7 and before and the desktop on Windows 8 is open (as in consumer owns hardware, unrestricted, not as in libre or gratis). MS seem to be making moves into the walled garden stuff with the not-called-Metro-any-more API and app store for those products but Windows 8 will still run Steam, this isn't an Apple ecosystem. MS have seen a great profit in selling billions of copies of their OS and letting the software developers work out their own way of distributing onto the platform. The Windows app store may be misguided in the walled garden it creates but it is an option, not a restriction on developers selling their product and using the open to code nature of the OS to build their own stores and their own APIs. Windows users own their computers, just as Android users can own their phones. Google Play (previously Market) does not restrict Amazon or anyone else from making their own store, it gains money by being the default option but not be enforcing itself as the only option. MS are looking at all that dirty Apple iOS store money and wanting a piece, they know people buying a tablet will expect it (and apps coded to be power efficient in their interaction, maybe with users who don't have a clear grasp of a quit metaphor due to iOS), and they may be fucking it up by chasing that. But they're not crazy, Windows 8 will still be open for business and customers will still own their devices. Windows 9 is where we have to make sure MS doesn't try taking another step towards iOS (by removing the option consumers can use to disable Secure Boot or locking it down further to prevent other OS installs on devices).

The basic idea is that windows seems to be moving away from being the open platform it once was. We can be quite confident that Steam will be quite unable to flourish to any substantial extent within the Metro (or whatever the heck it will come be to called instead) ecosystem. And it is true that Steam will be able to continue to prosper as much it can within the desktop environment. But from what I can tell, Microsoft is currently wholly-intent on moving away from the desktop and on to Metro. The two environments exist side by side in windows 8, but that is not the ultimate intent of Microsoft. The very fact that they have been preventing every seeming possible avenue to avoid metro indicates that they are hell-bent on their users actually participating in that environment whether they like it or not. Metro is Microsoft's future, and unless Windows 8 is a enormous disaster (which is a substantial enough if—) the walls of the garden it presents are only going to encompass more and more of the OS as a whole as time goes on.

Even if the semi-walled garden approach of windows 8 were to persist and Microsoft not to handicap the desktop as time went on, that status quo would still be toxic to Steam. Unchanged, that paradigm still resembles the situation on OSX, wherein any hopeful developers take quite the financial risk if they don't put their apps on the Mac App Store. The simple fact of the matter is that if Microsoft leverages their position as the OS developer to give their ecosystem features and an experience that Valve cannot match, then that platform is hostile, even toxic, to Valve and Steam.

Ultimately, so long as Valve lacks any reason to think Windows will not only become more hostile to Steam as time goes on, they have every reason to seek out an alternative platform.

Even if that means building their own.

@believer258 said:

I'm not sure about a Steambox, but I will have zero issues with Valve creating their own Linux distro on which to play games and do everything else. Hell, if that happens I will gladly not use Windows again unless I absolutely have to.

This isn't saying that I don't like Windows; however, I really liked my time with Ubuntu and I'm pretty sad that I have nothing to use it on. Steam on that, or something similar to that, with the ability to play most or all of my games with no issues? Yes, please.

I think the only thing preventing any sort of substantial consumer Linux adoption at this point is the lack of compelling software. It used to be that Linux was a buggy, convoluted, and generally compromised experience, but most of the distributions of note have dealt with that by this point. Now it just has chicken & egg problem of software that it's always had, and that every emerging ecosystem faces (just look at the Windows Phone ecosystem for a keen parallel—Microsoft's only way to try and deal with that problem is to basically throw money at it).

The simple fact of the matter is that people use computers to run applications, and if they can't run their applications on a given OS, one can be confident they'll never adopt it. But the fewer people support a platform, the less inclined developers are to invest the time and resources to have their applications support that platform.

Like I said, chicken & egg.

The only solution I can see is to make the process of supporting Linux as friction-less as possible, and that is the sort of solution, service, or software I expect Valve will seek to provide Windows developers. The only way they can end up succeeding on Linux is if they can make the process of porting as smooth and easy and quick as possible: that might mean Valve will come to throw it's weight around WINE, or it might mean taking the abstraction layer they're already developing for L4D2 to work on Linux and expanding that into a more general solution. Either way, I expect something of that sort to start coming out of Valve in the next year or two.

@Skytylz said:

@Galiant said:

Great. How about adding movies and tv shows too? I'd love that.

That'd be great buying a 1080p movie for like 75% off.

I know, right? Sales!

@ajamafalous said:

Indie Game: The Movie is already on Steam.

Yeah, but imagine...the best online movie and tv show library known to man, with sales!

@valrog said:

AND MUSIC!!

You know what, I already have a music streaming service with a great selection of music, but hey - why the hell not?!

Steam - the future of all media? Instead of streaming videos, you'd be...steaming videos!

...I'm sorry.

Or downloading them and playing locally? Whatever.

One can dream.

I think I got this figured out. They're probably looking to incorporate spreadsheet software into the Steam overlay.

Just imagine it, you're playing TF2 at work when your boss comes over. Just in the nick of time, you hit Shift+Tab:

"Just checking over this week's figures, sir!"

It's genius really. Valve are making it incredibly easy for their competitors' employees to refrain from doing any work whatsoever, and the icing on the cake is when they start using company funds to pay for TF2 hats and dancing robot animations in Portal 2. You know those science fiction movies where the corporations run the world? This is how it starts.

Man...I was just bragging about Steam over XB dashboard and such also....

Guess we will see, nobody knows anything yet.

I love the idea of seamless updates for my software but again this seems like a problem Windows really should have solved natively in the OS. Also, cloud saves for my apps, yes fucking please.

How often does you software really update though that you'd need a system of automatically applied updates like Steam has to support it? Most programs I use already alert you of updates when you start the program up and from there its just a process of clicking "Yes" and "Next" 4 or 5 times until its been updated. And it being sold through the Steam storefront probably means that you'll be tied into running Steam in order to use the program, I wouldn't want to need to run Steam just to open up MSOffice.

I don't entirely get the point of this from the point of view of being a consumer, but I entirely see why they're doing it from a business perspective.

@CircleNine: Because it would be cheaper. Hopefully. Also, with the new Hubs, I imagine you could have a nice and easy access to Plug-ins and other goodies created by users that you would otherwise never hear about.

Oh, Steam, you and your fanatical fans keeps amusing me, whenever someone brings any kind of DRM to the PC, they are in for a world of hurt. But when it is Steam, it's all cool and nice - and even a good thing in some peoples minds...

I think I'll go with a "no thanks" on this one, I don't want to have an active Internet connection and Steam open to be able to use (for example) Word or other Microsoft Office programs...

I would like to see more effort put into modding software like the SDK. At the moment the process of converting valve's models to files that can be read in industry standard software like Maya is done via 3rd party software that is, in some cases, several years out of date and falling apart. It's all very well putting emphasis on community made content but the hoops one has to jump through to actually start creating stuff is ridiculous.