Valve and Steamworks

Valve is releasing tools for game developers and gamers called Steamworks. The best part is that they are releasing it for free. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a full press release showing the things that will be possible with Steamworks.

"The suite will allow developers to perform many of the tricks that have distinguished Valve, such as monitoring sales stats, hefty anti-piracy measures, automatic updating, voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking, social networking and even the ability to run beta testing. The possibilities this opens up for independent developers, and smaller publishing companies, could be enormous."

Valve is allowing the end user to build out their game and even sell it on Steam with the ability to give updates. It will be interesting to see where game developers will take this and how much free gaming will come from it.