Will Steam Publish XNA Games?
Update: The short answer is, Yes … the longer answer is here: Steam and XNA Redux
After all this tablet hype started, I began to get excited about the possibilities of new markets emerging for touch enabled windows games. As Steam is currently one of the most robust and popular game distribution networks on windows, I was curious to know whether a game written with XNA could be published via Steam.
I visited their Steamworks developer site and the offering is very attractive: Anti-Piracy/DRM, Cloud Storage, Matchmaking, DLC. coupled with the fact that many gamers I know (a statistically insignificant metric, I know) trust and use Steam, and it warranted a further look. So I emailed them and asked simply (edited for further brevity):
From: Joel Martinez
To: steamworks@valvesoftware.comHello, I was wondering if the Steamworks API is usable from a game written in C# … [I] would like to know if Steam would support games written using the XNA Framework.
Took them a few weeks to get back to me, but they answered succinctly:
From: Steam
To: Joel MartinezHello Joel,
We do not directly support games written using the XNA framework. Steamworks is written in C++
A shame really.
Björn Said,
February 16, 2010 @ 10:21 pm
That doesn’t mean anything: writing a (simple) C++/CLI wrapper aroung the Steamworks stuff won’t be hard — and I would be available to do it
Nick Said,
February 16, 2010 @ 11:04 pm
This also just means the Steamworks stuff isn’t there. I know for a fact that a few XNA games are already available on Steam such as Blueberry Garden and Lucidity.
Alex Said,
February 16, 2010 @ 11:33 pm
That’s really a shame that Steam doesn’t seem to have a C# API supported already! I like making games in C# and XNA — the only thing that doesn’t seem to be there is online awareness of stuff like leaderboards and achievements – it would be rad to have those available, and Steam has a nice system for doing that sort of thing.
X-Tatic Said,
February 17, 2010 @ 6:42 am
I don’t see the problem. You can still interop with steamworks, XNA still uses D3D..
As for XNA framework based games, there are already some sold via steam, I just don’t think they have the steamworks integration.
Erik Schulz Said,
February 17, 2010 @ 1:41 pm
C++/cli interop isn’t hard. It is however time consuming boilerplate code that isn’t interesting to write. I imagine as the demand for language bindings grows they may release something. If they make their header files publicly available someone will make an interop project.