Steam has a massive worldwide audience for its PC game downloads, numbering in the tens of millions. But is Steam, and its owners Valve, making a move to expand beyond games? This week it was revealed that Indie Game: The Movie, an acclaimed documentary on indie game development, is now available for pre-order on Steam. It is the first feature film that has been made available for sale on the Steam service.
The movie itself, which won a Sundance Film Festival award this year (for Best Editing in World Documentary Cinema ) follows the small development teams behind three well know indie games, Super Meat Boy, Braid and FEZ, as they work on their creations and show them to gamers. The Steam version will be released on June 12 and will be presented in full 1080p video. The normal price will be $9.99 but pre-orders get a 10 percent discount.
This is not the first time that Valve has released non-game content on Steam. The service has also released Portal 2: The Final Hours, an interactive article on the making of Valve"s 2011 released puzzle shooter. PC Gamer also released a number of interactive "issues", in the fall of 2011 and early 2012, although that effort seems to have been cancelled, at least for now.
The big question: Is the release of Indie Game: The Movie just a way for Valve to help out some film makers that have created something that might interest Steam owners, or is this a test run to see if offering feature films on Steam would have an audience?
Source: Steam | Image via BlinkWorks Media