14 DAY TRIAL // Doug Lombari, vice president of marketing at Valve, talked about the plans for the popular games download service at the Game Developers Conference. And some of his remarks are rather surprising.
Last year has been a good year for Steam. One doesn't need to look at the numbers of games downloaded to know that. For starters, the Valve service is becoming the digital download choice for more and more AAA titles, like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and BioShock. Also Valve released, late in the year, a free development kit called Steamworks that allows all game developers to create distribution channels for their games. Lombardi has disclosed the fact that sales through Steam have increased over 150% over 2006 and that the trend is in continuous growth, fueled mainly by the fact that more and more publishers come to Steam with a game release and then offer more and more of their products through it.
And now, according to Lombari, Valve is looking at a high impact change for Steam. Up until now the platform has been used to distribute games, downloadable content for games and sometimes mods or other enhancements. But it seems that Valve is seriously thinking about making music tracks and video streams available on Steam, in a move which might prove a real threat for paid music download services, like iTunes from Apple.
Talks about the move are still going on at Valve and there is nothing definitive yet, but the initiative from Valve certainly makes a lot of business sense. The number of Steam accounts has gone over the 15 million mark recently. That's a huge base of potential customers and that represents a big chance for Valve to get more revenue from digital distribution.
Valve's marketing vice president also talked about Left4Dead as the company's Orange Box for 2008, saying that early fall, probably September, is the targeted release date for PC and Xbox 360. With Steam distribution and Valve's reputation for polished products, the game seems set to be another success.