The following is the full announcement:
Valve wrote: January 29, 2008 – Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as) Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announce Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools – ranging from copy protection to social networking services to server browsing – is now available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.
Steamworks, the same suite of tools used in best-selling PC titles Half-Life 2 and The Orange Box, is available for all PC games distributed via retail and leading online platforms such as Steam. The services included in Steamworks may be used a la carte or in any combination.
nice news *goes to read longer article* sounds like fun
yeah want to see what its all about to :p
hope they realy mean it with free of charge :p
and no registrations :o:p
I'm interested to see just how portable these tools are. Based on my understanding, I'm guessing a lot of these tools tie in with Steam and Steam will therefore be required for the server browsing, encryption and stats capabilities.
I maybe wrong and this maybe a totally open toolkit, but my initial assumption (without actually doing any investigation) would be this isn't the case.
The more articles I've read (which are all more or less confusing and don't really explain what's going on), seem to point more towards it being 'free' to developers after they've purchased it, so that would mean no monthly charges. So a one time buy.
At least that's what I'm kinda picking up from the language that is used and the fact that in order to get more information you have to e-mail someone that is in charge of business relations.
So, my first guess is it's probably something a studio can buy once and not have to worry about it again, and it probably costs enough to where "if you have to ask you can't afford it"
But maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's just my guess.
Yeah i hope you're wrong too and if you are it might be just what modders looking for.
If I'm wrong, and I hope I am, then Valve has pretty much supplied the community with everything but the actual mod. Sounds like it's going to make PC gaming a hell of a lot stronger regardless.
We'll have to wait and see :)
from the site: "Whether you're publishing your games on Steam or not, Steamworks lets you take advantage of Steam features in retail products."
so it's the tracking software valve uses for steam but you don't need to sell a product on steam to use it, it integrates steam anyway via the 'net.
then again.... what does it do that isn't already done? you have a website, you can track downloads, refers, etc. sounds more like Steam for dev's then anything new.
seems to me this is useful but also a two way street if valve can track all the other stuff (non steam) that the devs are tracking on their own product its gotta be providing a lot of very valuable market research (i really didnt explain that v well but if u get me then i made some sense)
We'll try bring you some more details on this as soon as we find them.
They better just do the same thing as Source SDK...if your gonna sell it you buy it but if its for a mod you could use it for free.Imagine if all mods were to be distributed through steam and all had their own time trackers,stats,achievements, all kinds of stuff.That would be pretty awesome for us the players and them the developers.
*drools*
Fairly amazing, I hope this leads to a more better and reliable steam service. I'll be looking into this.
Valve didn't create Counter-strike.
The developers now work in valve and valve publishes their games...So at least Counter Strike Source was created by them and 1.6 is published by them.
COUNTER STRIKEE SOURCE was developed by turtle rock studios not valve
They made some maps and bot AI.
VALVe Bought the rights.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this yet. Let's see how this pans out when things get a bit clearer.
Unfortunately, SteamWorks is not gonna be available for mods...oh well, would've been too nice :/
Maybe down the road mods will have something like this, or something similar.
At least give us the achievements and auto-updating, c'mon. :)