Steam community launch soon

Valve is preparing to launch its completely free Steam community features this summer, the developer said today.

The new suite of options will allow users to create their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with and how well everyone did, chat with groups, chat via voice and more.

It will be available for all Steam games - past, present and future - and accessible via the Steam desktop client or the Internet.

"Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve.

"Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam."

Valve's Steam client launched in March 2004 and has guided the developer's own games to market, gathering a lot of its momentum with the launch of Half-Life 2.

These days the content delivery network is home to a range of third-party publishers, including Activision and Eidos, who use it in addition to boxed releases as a means of reaching gamers who've become increasingly bound to the Internet. Like us.