Steam Inventory Service Now Available Developers

Steam Inventory Service Now Available Developers

| Source: Valve Author: Mark Campbell

Steam Inventory Service Now Available Developers

With todays Steam SDK update, the Steam Inventory Service Beta update. Now developers have access to a lot more features like creating persistent items for trading and selling through Steam. This update/service will also provide developers with APIs for developers to easily include; achievements, cloud saves, authentication services, error reporting, leaderboards, matchmaking, Steam Workshop, peer-to-peer networking, in-game overlay and downloadable content.

"The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user's inventory."

"With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items."

With this update developers will be able to much more easily implement features which was previously only available to Valve's own titles and other larger developers. This is a big move for Steam as when an Item is sold on Steam, they and the games developer take a cut, which could in time become a huge source of revenue for Valve.

This is also an opportunity for gamers to use their hard earned in-game rewards in a larger selection of games on Steam to become a source of cash for their Steam Wallets, allowing them to purchase yet more games or items. The thought of an internal Steam economy where players could trade items to earn some extra cash in their Steam wallets.

As I have said before Steam in recent times have started to add a lot more functionality, both for players and for developers. The continued development of Steam is certainly giving it a larger lead over it's competitors like Origin or Uplay. Let's hope Valve can also improve their customer support.

You can join the discussion on the Steam Inventory Update on the OC3D Forums.

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