14 DAY TRIAL // Infinity Ward, as the developer, and Activision, as the publisher, have announced that the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 is set to use the Steamworks suite from Valve to handle a variety of elements of the game experience, from patching and updating the title to offering achievements on the PC, providing anti-cheating measures and keeping player profiles active across multiple computers. Steamworks was unveiled by Valve almost one year ago and the biggest video game to use it until now has been Empire: Total War from The Creative Assembly.
It's interesting to see that Activision, which probably made the decision, has chosen Steamworks over Games for Windows Live, which offers many of the same functionalities. It is also interesting to note that IWNet, the in-house Infinity Ward solution, will handle all multiplayer elements related to Modern Warfare 2, although Steamworks can also support those aspects.
Robert Bowling, who is the community manager for Infinity Ward, has said that, “Steamworks will make it possible for us to have a closer connection to our fans, and enable us to support our community much more than ever before. Steam is the hands down leader in offering a community focused experience on PC and the inclusion of Steamworks has allowed us to deliver the most feature-rich PC version to ever come from Infinity Ward, which at the end of the day will mean the most to our fans.”
Steamworks can also be used as an anti-piracy measure, as game activations can be handled through it. Another side benefit is that patches are delivered at the same time, automatically, to all copies of Modern Warfare 2 on the PC, eliminating the space between the official release of the patch and its Steam delivery, which appeared sometimes. Infinity Ward could also choose to deliver DLC and even game expansions via Steamworks.