I’ve reported on Valve and its Steam platform in the past in ways that were somewhat orthogonal to TeleRead’s primary focus on e-books—mainly focusing on its attitude that customer service fights piracy, and its sensible stance on DRM.
That makes it a little amusing to me that now I can finally report on a genuinely-e-book-related matter concerning Steam. Our sister blog GamerTell reports that Valve is now selling digital editions of Prima strategy guides to various games for download via the Steam content management platform. (Actually, I noticed myself the guides were available a couple of days earlier, but didn’t think about the significance until I saw GamerTell’s report.)
There are only a handful of titles so far, and none of them for games which I own, so I can’t report from experience. They are listed at $19.99 with a 50% discount to $9.99 on Steam’s website; it is unclear whether this is a “permanent” discount, based on what the guides would cost in print, or an introductory sale discount from Steam’s usual price.
The guides include videos, and can be accessed from within the game or without. One downside is that Steam does need to be able to connect to the Internet to access them—treating them more like games than actual e-books. (Loot Ninja notes they do not work on the Mac, either.)
I still have the Prima guides to Starcraft and Brood War that I got when I ordered a “battlechest” of the games, and found them to be thorough and well-researched for the most part. However, search engines, free guide websites such as GameFAQs, and even fan-built wikis for the most complex games have largely rendered paying for strategy guides somewhat unnecessary. But it is possible that the inclusion of video demonstrations might well add enough value to make the purchase worthwhile.
