Filip Novotny Valve, the company known for the series Half-Life or Left 4 Dead, intends to expand its Steam store to non-game applications as well. This could be the first serious competition for the Mac App Store.
The American company Valve, which originally became famous for highly successful series such as Half-Life, Portal, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress, is no longer just a game developer. He is the owner and operator of the most popular game store. Its initial offer was intended only for the Windows operating system, at the beginning of 2010 it was expanded to include Mac OS X. In the near future, Linux fans should also be able to wait. For all mentioned platforms, games can also be purchased from devices with iOS, Android or for the PlayStation 3 console.
It was thanks to a bug in mobile Steam that users discovered in July of this year that Valve was probably going to expand its store to non-game applications as well. Among the common categories in which games are classified, items such as Edit Photos, Accounting, Education, Design and illustration.
Although these categories disappeared again after a short time, the news about the planned expansion has already made the rounds of all technology servers. At the beginning of August, Valve itself confirmed the assumptions with the following statement:
Steam is expanding beyond games
The inaugural lineup of software titles will arrive on September 5th
August 8, 2012 - Valve, creator of highly successful game series (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal a Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the first line of software titles headed to Steam, kicking off a major expansion of the platform best known as the leading destination for PC and Mac gaming.
The software titles heading to Steam fall into a variety of categories, from creative tools to productivity. Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installs, automatic updates, or the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space, so your files can travel with you.
After the service launches on September 5th, more software titles will be gradually added and developers will be allowed to submit software titles via Steam Greenlight.
"The 40 million gamers who visit Steam are interested in more than just games," says Valve's Mark Richardson. "Users have been telling us they'd like to see more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to customer requests."
For more information visit www.steampowered.com.
Although there are already several alternatives to the official Mac App Store (Bodega, Direct2Drive), none of them have succeeded in any significant way with the public. However, Steam deserves special attention as it has managed to become a platform with 70-80% of all digital game distribution in just a few years. This makes it probably the biggest contender for the built-in Mac store. Developers could resort to it if they don't want to rewrite their application according to Apple's new standards, such as mandatory sandboxing. Valve can offer them a simple submission of their work through Steam Greenlight, which many independent creators have already tried with their indie games. They can take advantage of automatic updates, which are also started before the application itself, so they are really mandatory. It also offers, among other things, a large community on discussion forums.
On the other hand, Steam will also have some disadvantages compared to the Mac App Store. First, iCloud support will be missing, which will certainly not please those who use multiple Apple devices. Only developers who offer their sandboxed application on the official store can count on its support. Although it is possible to use Steam Cloud services instead, it is still not as far as the solution from Apple. For the same reason, developers will have to do without push notifications. Both flaws will result in Steam-hosted apps not being able to fully connect to iOS devices, as they likely won't be able to access files in the Steam Cloud and won't be able to send push notifications to them.
Despite some shortcomings, it is possible that Steam will grow into the first real competition for the Mac App Store. The level of popularity of the new platform will be somewhat of a sign of whether Apple has taken a bit of a bite out of its Mac business. A lot of developers are delaying the release in the official store for various reasons, and Steam could be a viable alternative for them. Let us be surprised on September 5.
That's nice, but what Steam on Mac really needs is (probably) a code rewrite, because it's horribly slow (on a MacBook mid2010 2.4GHz)
Apple buys Valve.
I think it wouldn't be so easy, Gabe (Valve director) is about the 100th richest person and even if they had enough money for Valve (they probably should) I think Valve would reject it. I'd rather buy a Samsung :D
What about iCloud? I thought that there was an API for it and no, that it was conditional on the sale of the application on the App Store... ??
I wouldn't be so worried about it, if it starts to bother Apple, they will simply cancel them and they won't be supported for any of their platforms