Directional Pad

Steam to get community features next month

Having first effectively created the concept of unified online game distribution and then conquered it, Valve is looking to branch out. Next step for Steam? Community. Next month, Valve is planning on rolling out "Steam Community", a major upgrade to the Steam platform which intends to kill Xfire, and maybe take a stab at Teamspeak and Ventrillo. Here's what Valve has to say on the matter:

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Neat, right? There's more, though: over the weekend Gabe Newell stopped by the Showdown LAN to give a sneak-peak of the new system, and Steam Review has pictures.

At the very least, it looks like this has a pretty good chance of taking on Xfire, since Steam has the bonus draw of being able to buy your games with it, manage your games with it, and now handle all your player-to-player community stuff with it. Whether Steam Commuities' ability to import new games and then use Voice Chat with them will be a Teamspeak/Ventrillo killer is yet to be seen, as both services are already pretty heavily entrenched in MMO circles, and until you start seeing Valve publish MMOs through Steam I don't think you'll see their voice chat push Teamspeak/Ventrillo out of the limelight.

Then again, three years ago I had a hard time imagining that Valve would be publishing big-name non-Valve games like Devil May Cry, Lost Planet, Hitman, Civ 4, and so on. So who really knows?

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