Valve walks through the dev-focused features headed to Steam in 2019

Valve’s Steam Business Update from this year’s Game Developers Conference has been shared on the Steamworks Development YouTube channel, giving developers a way to hear more detailed information about the updates and improvements announced for the platform last month.

A quick look at the news from the show can be found in that original writeup on the talk, but the video above offers devs a more complete look at what Valve’s Tom Giardino and other members of the team discussed during the show.

“Our goals for this talk are pretty simple," says Giardino. "We want to be transparent and open about our priorities and plans, we want to provide you with a little bit of data about how the platform is doing and where we’re growing, and we also want to get into the nuts and bolts about a few tools and features that we’ve built that we think we think are going to benefit a lot of developers and a lot of customers.”

Early on, Giardino outlines that Valve’s vision for Steam has three distinct parts: to create value for players and developers, to constantly re-invest to grow the addressable market, and to invent new ways for developers to make their customers happy. He says Valve’s big focus right now is on long-term growth and how that will benefit the developers on its platform, and offers up a look at how different features the company has introduced to Steam have affected the platform’s yearly user counts since 2009. 

Other members of the Valve and Steam team team take the stage throughout the talk to offer more information on things like Steam’s upcoming new look, overhauled Event system, other social features due out for the platform this year, new Steamworks network APIs, and how Steam is looking to help devs expand into emerging markets worldwide.

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