Steam Launches “Item Stores”

Virtual goods purchased from an Item Store can’t be sold or traded for at least a week, presumably in an effort to limit any potential impact on the overall market.

The scheme has debuted with Facepunch’s open-world survival game Rust. Eventually the paid mod store was pulled down, and considered to be a failure.

A Reddit thread also pointed out that the Steam Workshop can be integrated with the new developer-managed stores so that players can sell their own creations.

Item stores will allow developers to sell in-game items such as weapons and clothing for a set fee.

If you check out the Rust Item Store, the only one that exists at present, you’ll see that the listing for individual items points players to the community marketplace, where prices may be higher or lower depending on supply and demand. Rust has been chosen to introduce Item Stores on Steam. Valve‘s Doug Lombardi explained its exactly like existing microtransactions, “except that this new system uses Steam for a bunch of things that developers have traditionally had to build themselves”.

Valve has just launched “item stores” on Steam that will allow developers to sell digital items for their games through the Steam platform. Steam’s terms for revenue sharing between users and game creators have not been disclosed, as the service is now in a testing phase. Steam takes care of the checkout process, splitting payments to Workshop authors as appropriate, and adding the items to users’ inventories. “Your game then just needs to be able to call the Workshop to download item content in the right circumstances for your game”.