Steam Starts Publishing Movies

[WYP]

Steam was once a place which was exclusive to games, but now it has move to cover software and a few documentaries. Today Steam has now started offering their first Feature length movie.

Read more on Steam Publishing Movies here.

 

[rzthrun]

Savvy move by Valve

This is a savvy move by Valve in my opinion.

Steam (behind the Appstore, Google Play, and Amazon) is arguably one of the largest game delivery platforms out there. Bringing other content product types into their offerings pushes them towards being a company like iTunes, and away from one like GameFly or NetFlix. There is room in the marketplace for more of these multi-product-type marketplaces.

But Valve's experience with multiplayer gives them a unique position to leverage more from temporal media (TV/Film) then perhaps these other competitors.

This is a topic I could rattle on aboot alll daay. I know the DP of Motivational Growth, will have to wish him congrats. And it's about time I try to get my games on Steam. Motivational Growth is an apt description for the future of this move by Valve.

 

[Dark NighT]

This would be nice if the store page wasnt such a big mess, why o why cant we remove the queue and curators thing in favor of having a smaller store or list the movies in those spots.

 

[rzthrun]

in favor of having a smaller store or list the movies in those spots.

Until now, to my knowledge, the only motion-picture content on Steam was tertiary/supplementary products, like "Making of..." videos and such, not stand alone primary works likes "Motivational Growth".

Such supplementary products could coexist with the gaming content, for one reason because there are not that many of them. Frequently, this is desirable : "The making of Fallout" video is semantically linked with "Fallout" the game, although they're categorically different products. The presumed purchasers are already involved in the brand/ip: hence why the release of "Motivational Growth" is news worthy - cuz it's a primary text in video.

I'd say there isn't enough video content on steam to really form a sub-store or category at this time. If they continue single piece-meal releases like we've just seen, users looking for video content could become really confused by the mismash.

Currently, it is possible to see only video content on steam by using the "Movie" metadata tag to sort. But if they're really going to pursue video content, they'll need a decent sized video content library released simultaneously with an update to the UI like you've described.