Valve is removing non-gaming videos from sale on Steam

Even though there’s a little more viable competition now, Valve is still the pre-eminent player when it comes to PC game distribution. For a little while Valve tried to break out into more, and dabbled with video distribution too. The company distributed free and paid videos through Steam in a bid to take on more established players in that industry like Google and Apple.

If you’ll recall, Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios released a bunch of short films on Steam, as a sort of testbed to see which of them could be expanded into feature-length ideas.

Valve’s now decided to stick to gaming, and will stop distributing videos unrelated to video games. Valve announced the change on its website.

“For the past few years, we have worked on expanding Steam beyond games and software by building a video platform that supports paid and free video content. In reviewing what Steam users actually watch, it became clear we should focus our effort on offering content that is either directly related to gaming or, is accessory content for games or software sold on Steam.

As part of this refocus, we have retired the Video section of the Steam Store menu with an expectation that video content is discovered via the associated game or software store page, or through search, user tags, recommendations, etc. “

Those who have purchased videos on Steam will be able to access them for perpetuity, but new purchases will soon be disabled. I did watch Indie Game: The Movie on steam years ago, but I can’t say I’ve ever considered Steam to be a viable video distribution platform.

Last Updated: February 20, 2019