Valve and Epic ink Steamworks deal
Steamworks services to be incorporated into Unreal Engine 3 free of charge
Valve Software and Epic Games have inked an agreement to include Valve's Steamworks suite of tools and services to all licensees of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 middleware, free of charge.
"Epic’s technology is one of the most widely used engines in the industry and has powered many of the best games created in the past 10 years, on multiple platforms," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve.
"It’s an honour to have Steamworks included in the technology offered to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. It’s hard to think of a larger, better targeted group of developers who could derive more benefit from the Steamworks services."
The deal comes in the same week that Valve announced it would be bringing its market-leading digital distribution service Steam to Mac formats.
"Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we’re excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer," added Mark Rein, co-founder and vice president of Epic Games.
"With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer."