February 19th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough 
THQ’s upcoming post-apocalyptic shooter/adventure game/awesomeness simulator (errr…I’m just a little geeked about it) will be using Steamworks when it releases on the PC on March 16th in North America and March 19th elsewhere.
That means that it will make use of Steam Cloud saves and Steam Achievements and the like, but also require the game to run through the Steam client. So regardless of where you buy it, you will need to run it via Steam.
February 16th, 2010 Cliff Riseborough 
The new iteration of AvP released in North America today using Steamworks as its DRM system.
The Beta for the game had consisted of a single multiplayer level, using what Rebellion claimed was an old build of the MP portion using a Peer to Peer matchmaking system.
Well, as of now the promised Dedicated Server support for the full game release is…coming soon?
Posted by a Rebellion employee in the Steam AvP forum :
Rebellion are busy preparing the dedicated server for the Aliens vs. Predator community. We hope to have a beta release with reduced functionality out in the next few days and further updates to improve functionality and fix bugs over the next few weeks.
The files will be available to download from the “Tools” tab in the Steam client and will be a free download.
This thread will be updated as and when there is more information to provide.
So, what happened? It seems odd that a game said to use dedicated servers would launch without that support in place. Was Rebellion waiting on using dedi-servers wile gauging interest in the game? Were they holding off until sales reached a certain level? Or was there simply a snafu somewhere along the way?
We’ll probably never know, but it is an odd sequence of events.
January 29th, 2010 Cliff Riseborough 
Okay, let’s get this out of the way right off the bat…yes, boys and girls, Steamworks is a form of DRM. It’s wrapped around associated applications and is required for them to run. Doesn’t mean it’s evil (and let’s please leave the perception that DRM must automatically equal Satan to the screaming zealots), but it is. And yes, for the sake of total transparency, so is Stardock’s Impulse platform.
Anyway, enough blather on that front!
Regardless of how you personally feel about Steam, everyone would have to admit that it has been a smash success. Digital retail has absolutely exploded on to the PC marketplace, and Steam has dominated that market. To what extent? The figures released by Valve certainly give some idea of that.
Steam saw a 205% increase in accounts in 2009. Yes, you read that number correctly. And this is the fifth consecutive year in which their sales grew by OVER 100% over the previous year. 25 million people currently have active Steam accounts, and 10 million of them have also set up User Profiles.
The ironic part of all of this is that last year’s massive growth explosion was likely fuelled, at least in part, by Modern Warfare 2’s use of Steamworks. Impulse, Direct2Drive and Gamersgate refused to sell it from their services because of that, meaning buyers had to use Steam if they wanted to purchase online. It was supposed to be a stand against the Steamworks requirement (which means the Steam store application installs as well), but it backfired as they simply pushed more sales to their competitor.
And as digital retail continues to become a bigger piece of the PC sales pie, those numbers are likely to increase. Its also interesting to note the similarities between the account-based DRM system that Ubisoft is going to use from this point forward and how Steam’s system functions now. Clearly, others are taking notice of the popularity of the basic Steam model when crafting their own alternatives.
January 25th, 2010 Brad McGraw 
Steam News has announced that Napoleon: Total War and Aliens vs Predator will be using Steamworks in both retail and downlaods.
Two highly anticipated titles from SEGA, Aliens vs. Predator and Napoleon: Total War will ship with Steamworks support at retail and online, including among other features, Achievements, Matchmaking, Leaderboards, Stats, and Cloud.
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