Steam has announced that it is rolling out support for persistent, tradable items in its Steamworks API for game developers. This means that devs will have the option to offer items like Team Fortress 2’s hats across their games.
The new API for Steamworks, dubbed “The Steam Inventory Service” is currently in beta testing for developers, and enables them to offer “persistent items that have been purchased or unlocked by individual users” without writing their own systems to support it.
“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,” Valve said.
“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.”
The Steamworks service offers this new benefit in addition to things like achievements, cloud saves, authentication services, error reporting, leaderboards, matchmaking, Steam Workshop, and a host of other improvements. Couple all of this with Steam’s built-in DRM system that’s been proven to work better than anything else out there, to date, without hurting customers, and you have a recipe for a decent service.