Steam to experiment with video and music?
Category: PC, Posted: 02/27/2008 at 10:13AM CST by Billy Wang, Previews Editor
Steam is a force to be reckoned with; I use it practically every day and I join the 15 million other folks around the world who use the service too. With plenty of games available at my fingertips, Steam is a forerunner in the upcoming/current age of digital distribution.
Over on Tom's Games, Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing for Valve, answered a question regarding what's next for Steam this year. Lombardi said, "...And we're also looking at other types of content like video and music. We're definitely having those conversations and meetings, and we're reaching out to folks with other types of digital entertainment.
I think before the end of the year, you'll probably see some pilot programs with other digital entertainment on Steam."
Considering Steam has dominated PC gaming over the past few years, it was natural to see the service begin to expand into other entertainment businesses. Valve launched a social network for Steam users, Steam Community, last year, which seemed to be the start of the future for Steam.
Within the same interview, Lombardi also discussed how the Orange Box for PC outsold the console versions combined. He estimated that the Orange Box has sold about 1.5 million copies on consoles but PC sales for that platform were stronger.
- Too Human 09/02/2008
- Helix 09/02/2008
- N+ 08/29/2008
- Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice 08/29/2008
- Bionic Commando: Rearmed 08/23/2008
- Madden NFL 09 08/22/2008
- View More
- Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe ... 07/31/2008
- Hands-On: N+ 07/29/2008
- E3 2008: Resident Evil 5 hands... 07/25/2008
- E3 2008: Too Human hands-on 07/23/2008
- E3 2008: The Agency developer ... 07/22/2008
- E3 2008: Left 4 Dead direct fe... 07/21/2008
- View More
Kyle Stallock
Updated June 4th, 2008
Indie Games Journalism
Brendon Lindsey
Updated August 5th, 2008
Blu-Ray Review: The Sum
Frank Ling
Updated: Aug. 1th, 2008 Are you a game snob?
Eddie Inzauto
Updated Wed, September 3
Too Human scribblings
GamerNode needs your help. Register
now and join thousands of gamers in a
crusade to spread the word of
GamerNode!
Join the Node Army!
- World's Longest Thread 09/08/2008
- You laugh, you lose. 09/08/2008
- What are you listening to? 09/08/2008
- F*** Pine Trees 09/07/2008
- What's your favorite grand theft... 09/07/2008
- Google Chrome - Beta Releasing T... 09/07/2008
- online gaming difficulty rating.... 09/07/2008
- Offical Hot Women Picture thread... 09/07/2008
- Hey There, It's Psi Phi Ty 09/06/2008
- I think my girlfriend is cheatin... 09/06/2008
- View More
Sounds good to me.
I would like it if they added a feature that allowed music to be played in all steam games with one app, for example the community tab.
You could always run iTunes or whatever in the backgrond while gaming. But yeah, having it integrated would be nice, it would centrainly streamline things.
I'm all for it
I do it with itunes, but it's annoying cuz you need to minimize the game to pause or mess with it.
Get a keyboard with good media controls (like a Logitech G15) and then use foobar2000. You can map the media keys on the keyboard to the program and then make them global keys, so no matter what program you are running, you will be able to control your music.
They could make it so you can designate what player Steam can control, and just add play/pause, stop, fast forward, rewind, skip ahead and skip back to the Shift+Tab menu. If they end up doing that, they could also have their future games have a similar system to 360 games, where it'll automatically mute the music in the game when you're playing other stuff.