Steam Community

Aside from hosting the best first-person shooter ever, the Steam service is growing in popularity at an incredible rate.  Aside from Valve's own titles like Half Life 2 and Counter Strike Source, games from 2K, Activision, Capcom and other major publishers are also available - You can even pre-load 2K's Bioshock ready for its release on the 24th August!

Aside from its content delivery service it also has a very respectable multi-player server browser, allowing you to quickly join Counter Strike and Day of Defeat servers for some much needed online carnage.  There's also a "friends" service, rather like every other messenger service like MSN and Yahoo.  Trouble is, these things never really met up in the middle as a single cohesive service....

Until now of course.  Valve have released the next step to total Steam domination as a beta called "Steam Community".  It is exactly what it sounds like, bringing together the server browser, the content delivery and the friends service - sound familiar?

Yes, I know what you're thinking - it sounds just like Xbox Live Gold.  You'd be right in thinking that but there are some subtle differences.  There are no "achievements" right now, but it does track your playing time and gives you a rank accordingly.  There is also no cost either - the Steam Community is free - buy a game and play it online with no extra charge.

There's something else too.  You can have your own profile page where you put in your description, pick an avatar and choose a favourite Steam game to display on your profile.  It'll also show your steam rank and the games you've been playing.  You can also have "groups" too.  Got a Counterstrike clan?  Cool, give it its own page, add the members to it, create "events" to get everyone on your server on the right date and time or even just open up a chat window and chat to your clan members!

Anyone using Steam right now can get in on the beta.  All you have to do is go into the Steam settings dialogue and look for a button called "my participation".  Click on that and pick "Steam community" and away you go.  Create your profile, get invited into or create your own group and get gaming.

Yes it puts a big spanner in Microsofts machine, but if it encourages people to buy on Steam rather than download from bit-torrent it can only be a good thing for PC gaming.