PopCap Games To Be Made Available Over Steam

Valve and casual game publisher and developer PopCap Games (Bookworm, Zuma) have jointly announced a new agreement to debut a significant portion of PopCap Games' catalog of casual PC titles via Valve's Steam digital download service. In a statement released today announcing the agreement, the companies commented that PopCap's titles have resulted in “over 175 million downloads and three billion player minutes per month.” Beginning August 30, seventeen of those games will be made available on Steam. In addition, much like those offered for download over PopCap's website, each game will be available for a free trial period as well as for purchase over Steam. The companies also plan to offer PopCap collection packages as well, though no further details regarding these Steam-specific compilations has been revealed at this time. "The addition of PopCap Games' expansive library of leading casual games is an important step for the growth of Steam and direct distribution channels," noted Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "The benefits of Steam will now be provided to a much wider group of games and game customers. PopCap games by themselves are larger by an order of magnitude than the next-gen consoles online gaming services." Bryan Fiete, PopCap's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer added: "This is a great opportunity to put our content in front of a large and passionate audience. We're thrilled to be the first casual game publisher to distribute our games via this new channel; we're all Steam users here in the studio, and it's going to be very cool to see our own titles up alongside such awesome content as Half-Life 2."