Valve and Epic games have made an agreement to deliver Valve’s Steamworks suite of services to all licensees of Epic’s industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 for use in their products, free of any additional fees.
This means all licensees of Unreal Engine can now integrate their games seamlessly with Steamworks which provides Stat tracking, achievements, saving games on the cloud, product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology and more
Unreal Engine 3’s licensees include publishing heavyweights such as Activision, Electronic Arts, 2K Games, THQ, Ubisoft, and Square Enix.
Mark Rein, co-founder and vice president of Epic Games, said,
Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we’re excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer, with Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer.
Gabe Newell(also known as the father of PC gaming), co-founder and president of Valve, said,
Epic’s technology is one of the most widely used engines in the industry and has powered many of the best games created in the past 10 years, on multiple platforms, it’s an honor to have Steamworks included in the technology offered to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. It’s hard to think of a larger, better targeted group of developers who could derive more benefit from the Steamworks services.
