Valve Launches Steam Guides
Valve, the entertainment software company, and the creator of some of the world’s most award-winning games, has officially launched a Guides tab in its community hub, allowing players to get some much needed hints, tips, and tricks from fellow gamers. Known as Steam Guides, the section can be found via the Steam Overlay or from any Community Hub and allows users to create and release their own manuals and references for games and software.
Steam Guides help users create their guides and gives them the ability to make a table of contents to organize their manuals and also add in images, screenshots, videos and tables to supplement them. These guides can range from a character build or a full blown game play walkthrough.
“Gamers have always been a highly social and merit-based community,” says Kyt Dotson, one of SiliconANGLE editor and ‘out’ gamer. “In the early days, Nintendo would publish games that some people couldn’t play without chat knowledge from magazines such as Nintendo Power. Now, the production of walkthroughs, completionist guides (a guide telling a person how to do everything in the game), and even Let’s Plays (videos of a person playing through a game) have become their own community-centric focus.
“With the addition of Steam Guides, Valve is adding to their own social media and community a long-held tradition among gamers to explore, highlight, and enjoy their medium of choice. It’s been a long time in coming and probably already existed in some form on their forums, but an official section of Steam doing this makes a lot more sense.”
The interesting part is that there are already 1215 Steam Guides published as of this writing. This has even led some users complaining because no one is moderating the guides, and people can post whatever stuff they want in the guides section.
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