For those of you who don't know about, or have never used, Steam, it is a system developed by Valve corporation. It allows digital games distribution, digital rights management, and facilitates multiplayer gaming and inter-player communications. One of the main uses of Steam is to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. Steam also has community features, automated game updates, and in-game voice and chat functionality. It is a very popular system amongst many of our writers and members here at UFO Gamers. 

At last year's E3, Valve made the shock announcement of plans to bring Steamworks development suite to the PS3 console in order to allow for auto-updates, downloadable content, community features and cross-platform play. Work is still ongoing to get it fully functioning.

However in a recent interview conducted by Develop, Chet Faliszek stated attempts to have Steam on Xbox 360 are in place but the final decision lies in the hands of Microsoft. Faliszek's actual quote was "maybe, we'll see. That's something Microsoft will have to decide. There's some things going on with Portal 2 right now, but we'll see". One of the apparent reasons for the stall in Steam's availability on the console is due to Microsoft having to relax its Xbox Live regulations, which don't allow outsiders to introduce the likes of quick patches and mods to the service. Faliszek went on to say, "the games industry needs to figure out how to make the internet better instead of figuring out how to keep customers off the internet". Despite this, the company is still offering help and support to its Xbox 360-bound customers with the recent announcement that the first batch of Portal 2 DLC would be free to download across all platforms.

So what do you think? would you like to see Steam on home consoles or not? The act of downloading games onto consoles was a topic of discussion in one of our recent UFO Gamers podcasts and is also a thread on our forum here. Why not give us your opinion. Do you prefer to digitally download your games or are you, like myself, one who likes to have the pyhsical copy and prefer to maintain the status quo within the gaming industry. How do you think this would effect the industry or even game shops?

[Source: Develop]