A big change has taken place at Valve’s Steam powered (in other words cloud-based) games store as the incredibly successful experiment expands its catalog to productivity software, at this stage with an artistic bent.

Among the first offerings is YoYo Games‘ game development environment, GameMaker: Studio, which gives an opportunity for users to easily make and export games of their own. They can then be run on various formats (including Steam, HTML5, Facebook, Android, iOS, Windows and OSX). The free version allows game creation, with additional features available by purchasing a package.

GameMaker: Studio STANDARD is offered at $49, while the professional version is available for $99. Additional versions for HTML5, iOS, and ANDROID are available for $99, $199, and $199, respectively. The availability of Steam Software Store and GameMaker: Studio is expected to expand consumers’ access to the best technology and dramatically increase the amount and quality of content that is published to the Valve community and submitted to Steam Workshop and Greenlight – Steam’s user-voting system for new indie game submissions.

GameMaker: Studio provides the features that make Steamworks so easy to use, including ease of installation, automatic updating, and use of the Steam Cloud. In fact, GameMaker was used to create early versions of Derek Yu’s Spelunky and also Koya Rift (our review) among many others.

What is very cool about the Steam version of GameMaker is that it includes Steam Achievements! This is great incentive, particularly because, speaking from experience, you may face many many lonely, existential moments coding your way through a game design, and that extra little push may be just what you need to keep you pushing through. Just remember: eating and bathing at least once a week is good.

For more information about the GameMaker: Studio family of products for Steam please visit the Steam Software Store

Other products now available at Steam’s software store include painting and 3D modelling suites like ArtRage Studio Pro, and 3D-Coat.