Steam launches its own software Store
 

http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/sp...ge_english.png

With Steam dominating online game sales, they've now introduced their own software store.

http://store.steampowered.com/software

Starting with just seven titles and a 10% discount on them for the next week, until Oct 9th, the store wiill be selling applications for both Windows and Mac (though the first titles are Windows-only).

It's cool but how many people are gonna buy any of those titles? They're all very specialist.

It's probably a relatively small part of the steam community, but enough that it'll be useful / generate sales.

Be interested to see what else appears over time!

It's probably by design to get new game devs up and running so they can put more shit on the Greenlight store!

Yep, seems totally game dev focused to me. Makes sense, although I wonder if they will expand to more general software?

I was thinking the same thing

I think quite a few people will buy them I reckon. Christmas is just around the corner.

It does hook in quite nicely to the other Valve rumoured valve project we discussed a little while ago.

http://www.trickery.net/vb/showthread.php?t=59624

Certainly all the pieces are falling into place to support such a move. :D

I'm not sure thisadds any more weight to that, does it?

Yeah , not quite sure what selling third party software adds to a possible piece of hardware?

Seems to me you can't create a hardware appliance and have it succeed without an app store these days?

Aye depending on what you want to do. But given steam is kind of the ultimate app store already , them doing non games is simply good business sense.

If it is a step or leads to a bit of kit, awesome but for me one doesn't lead to the other!

One thing a co-worker pointed out to me today is that there are steam achievements for these apps.

http://steamcommunity.com/stats/214850/achievements