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"We are talking about Valve becoming the platform holder and guardian of the PC as a gaming system over the next two years," says Stephen Gaffney, Business Development Manager of Splash Damage. The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars developer is responding to Valve's announcement of Steamworks, a suite of publishing apps that will enable developers and publishers to use Steam's many tools for free.

Valve is giving away the tools that make up 80-90% of Steam. With 15 million customers, their digital delivery platform has already taken on a life of its own: through it you can buy all of Valve's releases and over 250 third-party games, while it also takes care of multiplayer matchmaking, voice chat, stats collection, anti-piracy measures and sales tracking. Now they're going to give everyone in the industry the opportunity to use that functionality, solving at a stroke many issues that burn up development time, incur costs and hit sales. Steamworks could place PC gaming back at the forefront of the videogame world and make it a more viable platform than ever for developers to focus on.

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