Early Look at Steam Overlay on Playstation

Today, Valve and Sony released details on how the union of PS3 and Steam will go down when Portal 2 releases next week. And to go along with that we have a bunch of screens of the overlay in action.

People who buy Portal 2 on PS3 will simply have to hit Select in-game and log in to their Steam account. If you don’t have a Steam account (you crazy person), then it will create one based on your PSN ID.

While signed into your steam account, any PSN Trophies you earn will unlock Steam Achievements too. That’s a one-way system only though; the Steam version will not unlock Trophies on your PSN account.

As for the Steam version of Portal 2, each new PS3 copy sold will come with an activation code, much like EA’s Project $10 dollar and similar used-sale deterrents.

Now for those promised images.

The Pause menu, not the Steam Overlay. It’s got a pretty nice background to it.

Here’s the Steam Overlay. Few spoilers for the achievements here. As you can see it’s the nice and friendly gradients brought in with the 2010 Steam redesign.

Here’s the Friends list (I’m going to assume you’re stupid, gives me something to write in the caption).

And here’s the chat window. You can enlarge the picture to get a short review of how handy it is.

It’s a small step, but with the fairly extensive use of Steamworks in PC games it’s not too big a leap to guess that, in future, more and more PS3 games will incorporate it. Only time will tell if it’s an extra bullet point on the box or a Trojan horse.

Steam Activation Instructions @ Steampowered.com