Steam's future

In a post on the official Steam forums, Valve's Erik Johnson said that the free beta phase for the Half-Life developer's online distribution service is coming to an end. The next major version of Steam will move Half-Life multiplayer gaming into the service, and Steam will then require that users have a valid Half-Life CD key.

Valve has plans to release three more Half-Life 2 movies via Steam after this upcoming update, and the service will see a number of enhancements, including full support for interface skins, more efficient use of disk space and bandwidth, and a conversion wizard to integrate content already present on the hard drive. For more information on Steam, visit Steampowered.com.