Valve's digital gaming platform Steam is expanding into the strategy guides. The new Steam Game Guides feature will allow players to create walkthroughs and share them with the gaming community.
The feature sounds fairly robust. Players can upload images or use any screenshots in their Steam cloud. It's also possible to embed YouTube clips. Steam Game Guides also allows multiple users to edit the same document, creating the possibility for massive collaborations.
PC and Mac gamers are already on Steam anyway so these guides would certainly get a lot of use. I'd imagine a lot of players already swap strategies on Steam Community's discussion threads, so the Game Guides is simply a way to organize that activity. If players could pull them up in the Steam overlay without alt-tabbing out of their game, that could be pretty amazing.
The potential popularity of this feature might make GameFAQs, the go-to site for gaming tips and tricks, a bit nervous. It's another nail in the coffin for publishers of premium guides like Prima and Brady Games. Those two companies actually sell a limited selection of digital guides through Steam; I wonder if they'll be pleased at the prospect of free alternatives springing up on the same platform.
Steam Game Guides can be accessed by gamers already in the Steam Community beta.
