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Productivity and Creativity Software Coming To Steam

Posted by Soulskill on from the infinite-app-stores dept.

lga writes "Valve announced today in a press release that they are expanding Steam beyond games and will start to deliver other software. This means that Steam will compete directly with Microsoft's Windows Store and perhaps explains some of Gabe Newell's disdain for Windows 8. The ability to save documents to Steam Cloud space also brings Valve into competition with the likes of Dropbox and Skydrive. According to the press release, '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.'"

6 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Githaron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just do it after you create and release Half-Life 3.

    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Half-Life 3 has been re-imagined as a suite of image editing software rather than a first-person single player action game, and will ship with this release.

    2. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I see that they're following the example of Master of Orion III, which instead of creating a sequel, they released some tax software with an alien interface.

  2. Single Point of Failure by The+Raven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Valve has, numerous times, banned users from Steam for violating policies (such as cheating). When only games are affected this is draconian, but understandable. However, what about when your kid cheats, and that gets your copy of Office taken away? All the documents you created?

    This is something that will have to be addressed in the TOS before I would be comfortable putting too much in their care.

    I should note the same issue affects Google... this is not unique to Steam.

    --
    "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
  3. Steam Cloud by Lynchenstein · · Score: 5, Funny

    You gotta love that name.

  4. Don't underestimate Microsoft by DrYak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't underestimate the energy that Microsoft will put behind squashing the competition once they roll out their own product.
    They will put every single effort they can trying to kick Steam out of the business.

    Yup, probably that the official MS store will be crap. But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).

    Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]