Valve has announced that Steam will soon be expanding beyond the realms of mere gaming-based software, into the strange and mysterious area of things like Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. Don’t take those examples as literal, because Valve hasn’t really said what brands of software the new wing of Steam will sell, but Valve’s Mark Richardson has indicated that they’ll fall under the headings of ‘creativity’ and ‘productivity’.
“The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games” says Richardson. “They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests.”
Given the choice I think I’d rather be playing games on Steam than messing around with a word processor or graphic design software, but hey, that’s just me.
5 September is the date when Steam will be stocking non-gaming software, so that’s the day we’ll find out exactly which software titles they are. Naturally, more titles will be added after launch too.
