14 DAY TRIAL // Valve and PopCap Games, the leading developer and publisher of casual games, have recently announced a mutual agreement to distribute the latter's games via Steam. Seventeen titles are available for now, covering the whole spectrum of puzzle, word and arcade games, but their number will steadily increase in time, and PopCap collection packages are also planned for the future. Keeping the PopCap tradition, all games are available for a trial period, with the option of buying the full version afterwards.
"The addition of PopCap Games' expansive library of leading casual games is an important step for the growth of Steam and direct distribution channels," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve Software. "The benefits of Steam will now be provided to a much wider group of games and game customers. PopCap games by themselves are larger by an order of magnitude than the next-gen consoles online gaming services."
Some of PopCap's titles, such as Bejeweled and Zuma, have been rightfully called "benchmarks of the casual games industry", generating over 175 million downloads and three billion player minutes per month, and with Steam, the already impressive numbers can only go up.
"We know that our games appeal to all gamers, and not just some narrow 'puzzle game' niche," said Bryan Fiete, PopCap's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. "This is a great opportunity to put our content in front of a large and passionate audience. We're thrilled to be the first casual game publisher to distribute our games via this new channel; we're all Steam users here in the studio, and it's going to be very cool to see our own titles up alongside such awesome content as Half-Life 2."