Steam must play third base, because their corner of the industry is just about the hottest lately. Today, Valve has announced that the upcoming World power will expand beyond games, releasing "Software" titles on the platform as well. Oh snap.
The mysterious "Software" will begin to trickle onto Steam beginning September 5 and will include noted Steamworks features such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to the Steam cloud.
The base set of Software will range from creativity to productivity applications, with future titles to release via Greenlight, Steam's community powered spam filter, assuring only quality makes it to the store, and subsequently to your library during one of the service's generous sales.
This is a bold move, but the right one for the bull market minded Valve. I can see drawing and editing programs being a huge success, especially if they are priced right. The market for word processing and data entry is probably a bit (a huge bit) less, but who knows, maybe pricing and features will bring some new customers to the service. With the high-profile troubles of torrent sites in both the near and distant past and future, an aggresively priced, quality crafted application could be the most painless get for bro who was just invited to Demonoid two days before ship sank. Talk about timing, right?
No word on whether or not the Software will support chat and achievements, but I'm you'll know when you get that messge "Your friend is playing Photoshop".