Apparently, there’s a section of Steam in which you can purchase and watch video content. Before today, despite having used Valve’s platform for much of the past ten years, I was entirely unaware of its existence. Now though, I somehow have to cope with the fact that it’s not going to be around for very much longer.
In a blog post released earlier today, Valve says that “for the past few years, we have worked on expanding Steam beyond games and software by building a video platform that supports paid and free video content.” Sadly, it would seem that no-one’s really watching, as the company says that it’s become clear that “we should focus our efforts on offering content that is […] directly related to gaming.”
With that in mind, Valve says that “we have retired the Video section of the Steam Store menu.” The ongoing aim is that game-related videos will be discoverable through the rest of the store, but “over the coming weeks a number of non-gaming videos will be retired and will no longer be available for purchase.”
That’ll include a number of comedy specials, as well as Hollywood films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Kill Bill. There’s also a number of anime series that will likely be axed. If you already own any of those, however, you’ll still be able to watch them as normal.
Related: Check out this week’s Steam Charts
There are a number of making-of documentaries around a wide selection of games, and presumably those will stick around after the video tag is retired, although it’s not clear exactly where they’ll go. At time of writing, the tag is still available, even though Valve’s blog post seemed to suggest that it has already been retired, which could mean this will be a somewhat gradual rollback.