Valve recently announced that Steam Inventory will be available for Steamworks developers, as well as Curated workshops for non-Valve games. While only currently in beta, it represents some exciting things to come for the Steam platform.
"With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items."Along with this, Curated Workshops are available for non-Valve games, the first two being Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. The Curated Workshops allow custom content to be made and downloaded as add-ons for games. Valve pays creators for their creations through the curation system. Total payments to over 1500 creators topped over 57 million dollars, just for items made for Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive."The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchased or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user's inventory."
"The Workshop has continued to grow and a larger number of contributors are now earning revenue from more pieces of content in a wider variety of games. To help answer questions about where revenue is coming from, we're also launching a set of new tools that enable contributors to view real-time sales data for their items as well as view detailed per-item revenue breakdowns and historical statements."Furthermore, new revenue tools have been added to help Workshop authors track where their revenue is coming from via real-time sales data and per-item revenue breakdowns. The tools will be available from the 'My Workshop files' page in Steam.
Both of these additions to the Steam platform really broaden the market on both inventory items and Workshop creations for developers and creators alike. These improvements were hinted with the inclusion of Steam Greenlight-esque discovery for Steam Workshop curators. The inclusion of non-Valve Curated Workshops is the most exciting to me, as I really dig user created content in general.
Are you excited to see Steam Inventory and Curated Workshops for non-Valve games?
