The STEAM Community

June 20, 2007 -- This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing an advanced set of community features to more than 13 million gamers around the world.

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.

Free of charge, the new community features will be accessible via the Steam desktop client and via the web.

"Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam."

This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004. In its three year history, Steam has defined the next generation online gaming platform delivering hundreds of games to millions of users with services such as Guest Passes, Automatic Updates, Free Weekends, and allowing gamers to access their games from any PC.

And from Gabe Newell's speech at Showdown LAN, the keypoints:

• Steam
  • More games from independents and publishers
    • Simultaneous releases with retail
    • Also out-of-print libraries
    • capcom titles started this week
  • Starting to get drivers onto Steam (ATI)
  • Steam Community this summer (prior to Orange Box)
    • Free addition to Steam driven by gamer feedback
• Steam Identity
  • Create Profile and Home page
    • Preferences
    • Affiliation
    • Statistics
  • Control Panel
    • Public versus private
    • Schedule
    • Real-time status
  • Revamped all the communications function to make it easier to play with your friends
    • Find a friend
    • See who's online or playing
    • Invite Friends to chat or play
    • Join a friend's game
• Steam Community - Communications
  • Instant Messaging, integrated voice (finally), and chat rooms
  • Works with non-Steam games
• Steam Community - Affiliation
  • Join or create new groups
  • Scheduling/Organizing tournaments and matches
• Half-life 2 : Episode Two
  • 5 Games, One Box
  • Available on October 9
  • More TF2 Movies
  • Steam will have variety of offers

And finally, some fuzzy pics of the beta! Yay!