Today Valve released the details of their Steam/PSN integration that had many scratching their heads.
From the press release:
April 13, 2011 – Valve, creator of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today disclosed details regarding the Steam experience designed for the PlayStation®3, which is set to debut next week with the release of Portal 2.
The first title to support Steam on a console, Portal 2 offers cross-platform matchmaking, gameplay, friends, chat, and achievements, all powered by Steam. Steam on the PS3 also saves co-op game progress and single player saved games to the Steam Cloud, enabling players to pick up where they left off on any PlayStation®3.
The Steam overlay for PS3 provides access to both PSN and Steam friends, displaying their in-game or online status and providing a quick pathway to text chats, player profiles, friend requests, and game invites. Steam Achievements are earned in lockstep with PSN Trophies and are also accessible within the Steam overlay.
Steam on the PS3 provides access to all of these features once the player has linked their PlayStation® Network account with a Steam account, which is done right within the game. A Steam user can login to an existing account, and anyone new to Steam can create an account with the click of a button.
In the spirit of Steam Play, linked players of the PS3 version of Portal 2 can also access and play their copy of Portal 2 on any PC or Mac by redeeming an in-box access code on their computer. The Steam client verifies the linked customer and then lists Portal 2 among their library of Steam games for PC and Mac.
If this works, expect to see more cross-platform titles to use Steam on the PS3.
This is the harbinger of a strange world. As a kid growing up, I never imagined being able to play with people on different systems. You were either a Nintendo kid or a Genesis kid or what-have-you. That was it. Even the current generation of gaming platforms are divisive. The closest thing to PC gaming is Xbox 360, and yet here we now have cross-platform gaming on Playstation 3 and PC. Of course, this isn’t the first time that’s ever happened (see Final Fantasy XI), but it’s going to be seen as the first mainstream success of cross-platform PC/Console co-op.
I’m more interested to start seeing the control scheme debate. And hey—first it’s co-op, but one day soon it will be PC vs. Console on a good FPS. Then we’ll see.
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