http://store.steampowered.com/news/15728/

Taken from Steam news:

With today's Steamworks SDK update, we've released The Steam Inventory Service beta, a new feature available to developers with games or software on Steam. The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user's inventory.

With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items.

This new service adds to the list of APIs available for free to Steamworks developers, including achievements, cloud saves, authentication services, error reporting, leaderboards, matchmaking, Steam Workshop, peer-to-peer networking, in-game overlay, downloadable content, and much more.

Not really sure games with item drops would be a good or bad thing.

Thoughts?

10 years ago*

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Is this a good idea?

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Yes.
No.
Don't care.

Very good. Very good indeed. Always nice for developers to have a plethora of tools at their disposal to engage their customers. It will most likely be abused by some turds, but it will do more good than bad. In my opinion.

10 years ago
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Sweet. Now I'm curious to see how many developers will take advantage of it. Valve's gonna make bank off it too.

10 years ago
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Money makes the world go round and round. I cannot hate someone for wanting more of it. They provide a decent service and a fun one at that. So I will gladly pay them in pennies.

10 years ago
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All I see are the glaring grammatical errors...

But yeah, seems interesting. Let's see how some devs implement it.

10 years ago
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I think I killed them with fire :P

10 years ago
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hmmmm.. another nice way to Valve get money with their freaking TAX.

But anyway that seems ok, unless they don't abuse in some cases.

10 years ago
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It's been available before, but you just had implement your own server. Now that server isn't always needed.

Now promotional items ('own another game(s)') & time drops (like CS:GO) can be done without server.

10 years ago
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Haha, no. The market is already bad enough.

10 years ago
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Closed 10 years ago by Fyantastic.