http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3178308

Epic Games and Valve Software have announced a mutually beneficial partnership to bring Steamworks to Unreal Engine 3. Valve's full suite of tools will now be offered to Unreal Engine licensees completely free of charge.

Steamworks allows developers to utilize any of the features of Valve's digital distribution platform in their own products, including Steam Cloud save importing, Achievements, user stat tracking, and DRM authentication. It's normally available for free, but its integration into the latest version of the Unreal Engine should encourage even more developers to utilize Steamworks.

"Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we're excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer," explained Epic's Mark Rein, adding, "With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer." 

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Good move from Valve, this should see even more games support Steam and all its functions.

That's very smart, it should help 3rd party's or anyone who uses the unreal engine put their game out on steam faster than ever before.

good call by epic an valve.

Awesome, sounds good to me.

and now stardock will remove unreal off impulse, lol

I wonder if this a move purely for marketshare or if valve is getting a little slice of that Epic licensing fess. Even a little slice would be HUGE.

Steam cloud is awesome.