After all this tablet hype started, I began to get excited about the possibilities of new markets emerging for touch enabled windows games. As Steam is currently one of the most robust and popular game distribution networks on windows, I was curious to know whether a game written with XNA could be published via Steam.
I visited their Steamworks developer site and the offering is very attractive: Anti-Piracy/DRM, Cloud Storage, Matchmaking, DLC. coupled with the fact that many gamers I know (a statistically insignificant metric, I know) trust and use Steam, and it warranted a further look. So I emailed them and asked simply (edited for further brevity):
From: Joel Martinez To: steamworks@valvesoftware.comTook them a few weeks to get back to me, but they answered succinctly:
Hello, I was wondering if the Steamworks API is usable from a game written in C# ... [I] would like to know if Steam would support games written using the XNA Framework.
From: Steam To: Joel MartinezA shame really.
Hello Joel, We do not directly support games written using the XNA framework. Steamworks is written in C++