Valve Details Community-Focused Steam Update

Valve, creators of digital distribution platform Steam, have announced a number of the community features slated to be added to the service as part of an update coming in July, including personal profiles and groups. The summer update, which Valve promises will be free of charge, will allow the platform's community of some 13 million people to set up personal Steam pages and profiles. The update will also allow the creation of customized 'groups', scheduling of times to play with community friends, reviewing of other Steam members you've played with, and both text-based and voice chat. Valve also promises that all of the new community features can be used across all games currently available from the service, both new games, and the classic titles that have been coming to the service in recent months. Said Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell, "Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve. Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam." This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004. In its three year history, Steam has defined the next generation online gaming platform delivering hundreds of games to millions of users with services such as Guest Passes, Automatic Updates, Free Weekends, and allowing gamers to access their games from any PC.