Valve are sneaky buggers. They tempted us out with the lure of meeting lovely independent developers before blindsiding everyone with Greenlight last week, and now there’s something hokey going on with the Steam App for Android. If you do a search, and filter by genre, there are some very odd categories coming up, Verge noticed. And they might mean a few different things. Some very exciting, some depressingly mundane.
The categories in question are things like Accounting, Animation & Modelling, Audio Production, Design & Illustration, Education, Photo Editing, Software Training, Utilities, Video Production, Web Publishing. Actually that’s all of them, and they’re all empty. Which means that there is two prevalent theories going around.
The first is that this is Valve’s first step into becoming a utility software company (unlikely), or at the very least starting to sell and distribute utility software (less unlikely).
The fact that it’s showing up on Android, though, makes it seem, to the very optimistic eye, that they might be seeing Google’s platform as their next foray, and they’ll start selling apps through the Android Steam app (possible).
Conversely, there’s the idea that this is just how Valve use Steam internally, to distribute bits of software within the company, almost like other people, normal people who don’t have their own distribution platform, use software like Dropbox or Google Drive (quite likely). If that’s the case this is just a glitch, and soon enough these categories will slip from the genre listing and you’ll scratch your head and wonder if you actually dreamt it all.
Except here this bit of speculatory news will be, proving that yes, it really happened. And won’t you be relieved.