Borderlands Will Be Available On Steam
Finally! An answer to the question that has launched a thousand forum threads.
Will Borderlands will be available on Steam?
Yep. Although no official announcement has been made, we've pieced this together from two very reliable inside sources.
Who exactly? Developer Gearbox's Randy Picthford and Mikey Neumann.
Randy gave us the first hint yesterday. On Shacknews , DuvalMagic--an alias used by the Gearbox prez and former magician--posted "Steam version on deck."
Borderlands Guide didn't consider that sufficient to call a Steam version definite since we strongly believe, but couldn't confirm, the poster was Randy. But then we got what we needed from Gearbox creative directory Mikey Neumann's Twitter account. (Thanks to Shirowshadow for breaking this news on the forums.)
It started today when Mikey kicked off a Borderlands contest:
Today is OFFICIAL BORDERLANDS PRE ORDER DAY. Twitter me a screen of you buying the game and I'll play BLs with you and give you loot.
Then questions streamed in about people hoping to buy the game via Steam. Would they be eligible for the contest? Mikey's response:
People wanting to pre-order on Steam... I'll ask again the day it becomes available, saavy?
Reading between the lines, sounds like Gearbox has wrapped up a Steam deal. They just haven't announced it through official channels yet.
Welcome news for the mouse-and-keyboard crew. It might take some sting out of the recent delay of the PC version of Borderlands. The release date was pushed back six days to optimize the game.
The comments from Mikey and Randy answer what was one of the biggest unknowns about the game. With Borderlands' co-op focus and Steam's matchmaking capabilities, a coupling has seemed natural but Gearbox never officially announced anything.
We've reached out to Gearbox to see if they would like to comment, but so far they haven't responded.
UPDATE 9/28/09 11:33 AM EST: Jon Ross at Destructoid has confirmed with Gearbox that Borderlands will be available on Steam. There will also be a couple goodies for the PC version, although they were not named.
Comments
i thought it was said that borderlands would be on steam like a year ago?
woooooooooooooooooooooooooot!!! Steam rocks!
@ Church
Nope, it's never been announced.
According to Co-optimus, Borderlands is officially coming to Steam. Also, there's been some unique PC features that have been announced:
"With however many millions of weapons the game is up to, the one feature that will be a crowd pleaser is the ability to export JPG Cards of your weapons to show off to your friends. The PC version will also have built in benchmarking tools, and finally, a custom interface designed for the mouse and keyboard. Yup, there's no console inventory management here folks!"
What exactly is Steam?
Steam is sort of a platform for PC games. It's a service that allows you to browse and download titles directly to your hard drive. That's about all I know.
The only thing that Ghinao missed is that you can get REALLY good proces on games on the weekends. Like 50% off good.
Sorry, I'm not a PC gamer really, so what does this mean?
"The one feature that will be a crowd pleaser is the ability to export JPG Cards of your weapons to show off to your friends. The PC version will also have built in benchmarking tools, and finally, a custom interface designed for the mouse and keyboard."
well I don't know what "benchmarking tools" are, but I'm assuming the JPG Cards is basically a feature that allows you to export a picture and stats of your weapon to a JPG image that looks like a collectable card. This could actually be a really handy feature for the gunopedia to use. It's a shame the consols can't do that. As to the costom interface, it means that consol gamers won't have to struggle with an unweildy interface designed for the PC and vice versa.
Said goodies mentioned in the article edit, are posted by me, 4'th post down "According to Co-Optimus." Which are taken from an article posted by Co-Optimus this morning.
Really? This Many Non-PC Gamers?
---STEAM---
STEAM is a Game Distribution client, where you can buy games (or register a few select games from retail stores, like orange box) with, and it becomes permenantly bound to your account.
When a game is bound to your account, you can log into the client anywhere, and download the game to play, so no more worrying about keeping track of the CD's!
Not to mention, it can (and does unless you disable) automatically update said games for you.
STEAM also provides a more community based interface. You have a friendslist you can add others to, and are capable of IMing them, even in game fullscren (Shift+Tab brings up a little overlay, allowing you to message friends, or skim through their community browser thingy)
Neat little thing about pre-ordering games with STEAM is that in most cases, it'll actually download the game data before the release date, unlocking it on midnight of release.
---Bonuses---
Benchmarking Tools are something that lets you judge how good your computer is.
A lot of higher-end video games basically run a certain segment of the game, and keeps track of how many FPS (frames per second) you pull off on various points. Nice tool if you want to brag, or are tweaking your system to make it faster.
The Optimization is just general things that you get a lot of complaints from in the computer world, when the menu interface is pretty much the console one copied over (which is crap a lot of the time, because you can do much better. Oblivion for instance.) So they're not going to get hit for "bad porting" of the game.
Unique guns are Unique Guns <3
As for the Card's, I'm hoping they took a note from Spore and went "Hey they're card references for all the ridiculous amounts of creatures were neat, and easy to show them off...maybe we should do that for guns!"
Which gives a very neat way to show them off.
So long to documenting every type of gun, they'll just be giant databases of those jpegs (My advice to anyone making a search engine with them, use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) instead of manually entering each cards data)
Pretty damned neat, and made me ABSURDLY happy.
Glad to know putting off pre-ordering for the possibility of STEAM was worth it. =)
Ditto with Shirowshadow. I am happy it is comming on steam since a majority of my PC collection is on Steam or based threw Steam
It is great to see platforms like steam. it really takes the guesswork of operating systems out of the mix. Some people have stayed on Windows for the gaming, but platforms like steam make the Mac an option for gamers. I wonder if platforms like this will move into the facebook app development space. What do you guys think?