As always, many a new product, title, concept, and methods were discussed at this year’s GDC. While some announcements were highlighted stronger than others, there are always a bit of tidbits which may or may not have been announced at the convention, and how much media coverage said announcement receives.
One such bit o’ info was spotted by a few eagle eyed editors over at BigDownload.com. Apparently, Valve Steamwork’s popular game service game development tools PDF brochure reveals that Steamworks will now support in-game microtransactions.
This unannounced addition has been subtly slipped into the fine print, seemingly while we were all ogling over the Mac client support and Epic Games’ adding Steamworks support to Unreal Engine 3 based titles. In addition to the microtransaction support, Valve also managed to slip in an 100 fold increase in cloud storage limits, up to 100MB per game, as opposed to the previous 1MB.
From Steampowered’s overview of changes site:
Want to offer your customers a scabbard for their sword? New tires? The latest in night vision goggles? Now you can through microtransaction support in Steamworks. Your item server can now be easily integrated with Steamworks so that Steam users can buy and instantly use the items they want – all without leaving the game. Steam handles all of the billing through the user’s Steam account.
And while microtransactions are most seemingly a welcome addition to many developers, it’s also an interesting situation for Steam to be in. Could these microtransactions (and associated support) be paving the way for free-to-play games on Stream? And if so…does this then in turn open the door for free-to-play titles being based on Source and Unreal game engines? If so….. wow!
Tags: epic games, microtransactions, steamworks, unreal engine 3, valve
