[Bf-committers] Steam-powered Blender

Hi everyone, I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers. So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2. Long story: Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern). Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click. This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one. What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop. If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you! Best, Jan-Peter