"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," said Mark Rein, co-founder and vice president of Epic Games. "With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer."

"Epic's technology is one of the most widely used engines in the industry and has powered many of the best games created in the past 10 years, on multiple platforms," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "It's an honor to have Steamworks included in the technology offered to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. It's hard to think of a larger, better targeted group of developers who could derive more benefit from the Steamworks services."

Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and PCs, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers. Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets and gameplay in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular, scalable and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools that offers PC game developers and publishers access to the game features and services available through Steam. These include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology and more. The features and services available in Steamworks are offered free of charge and may be used for both electronic and tangible versions of games.