No, that’s Valve for you always trying to improve its bottom line at the customers’ expense. This SDK release is just another money grab at developers and a way to screw consumers by forcing more games to require Steam. When the consumer “buys” a game which requires Steam to run it, he’s not really buying anything at all. Steam is nothing but a tenuous subscription service. It’s no different from Gametap except customers pay upfront for it instead of by the month (and Gametap also has some free full games while Steam doesn’t).

Read the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Valve guarantees nothing, and customers can only run their games which require Steam so long as Valve says so. Valve also has a “zero tolerance” account termination policy, and it can and does terminate users’ Steam accounts with no compensation or refunds whatsoever regardless of the hundreds of dollars the users spent “purchasing” Steam games.

“Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools – ranging from copy protection to social networking services to server browsing – is now available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.”

The SDK itself is free. Implementing it in games isn’t as it requires Valve’s backend servers and services which are NOT free.

“Real-time stats on sales, gameplay, and product activation: Know exactly how well your title is selling before the charts are released. Find out how much of your game is being played. Login into your Steamworks account pages and view up to the hour information regarding worldwide product activations and player data.”

With Steamworks publishers and developers can spy on their customers like never before. Huray!

“State of the art encryption system: Stop paying to have your game pirated before it’s released. Steamworks takes anti-piracy to a new level with strong encryption that keeps your game locked until the moment it is released.”

With Steam the customer cannot buy a game at retail and be assured that he can begin playing it immediately when he gets home. The game won’t work until Steam says it will work because the customer first has to connect to the Internet, create a Steam account and login, and then wait for the game to decrypt itself even before the actual installation can begin. Then the customer may have to further wait to download and apply updates to the game once it has been decrpyted and installed because the game won’t launch until all available updates are applied. And, if those updates are large and/or the customer’s Internet bandwidth is limited or Steam is too busy, that wait can be many, many hours. And, if the customer bought the game before the official release date because the store sold it early, that wait will be even longer.

“Territory/version control: The key-based authentication provided in Steamworks also provides territory/version controls to help curb gray market importing and deliver territory-specific content to any given country or region.”

With Steam, developers can now determine whether to allow customers to play their games outside of the country or region where they bought them. Think your customer paid too little for his game because he bought it in some country or region where it was cheaper than his home? No problem! You can just do what Valve did with the Orange Box and just disable his game.

“Auto updating: Insures all customers are playing the latest and greatest version of your games.”

Yes, these forced automatic updates ensure that the customers can only play the version of the game that the developer wants them to play regardless of whether they want to play that version or not. Don’t want ads in your Counterstrike? Tough shit because that update like all game updates is forced upon you with Steam.

“With over 13 million active accounts and more than 250 games, plus hundreds of movie files and game demos available, Steam has become a frequent destination for millions of gamers around the world.”

That should read “Steam has become a frequent destination for millions of suckers around the world.”