Blender now Available on Steam

On steam now:

I was just about to post this. It seems it just appeared out of nowhere.

Also it is just for Windows for now.

Yeah, Windows only at the moment, but Martijn Berger said Mac and Linux versions are coming. It’s good to finally see Blender in there.

Its about time! How long has it been since Valve contacted the BF? Over a year at least. This will be a game changer. I definitely recommend changing the images on the storefront though. Its all about film, where as the biggest consumer on steam will be on the game end of things.

I don’t see the point of this really…

All I see happening is lots of negativity being generated on steam by people downloading it and then posting a bad review because they can’t find the magic Pixar animation button.

Same thing happened when the CryEngine on Steam, and recently - a game called Elite Dangerous.

Completely different issues.

The CryEngine is very difficult to work with, licensing is not friendly and documentation is sparse. So jumping into the CryEngine with no real experience or knowledge of what you are getting into will not be a happy experience.

With Elite Dangerous, its basically an early access game thats severely under developed that was released as a completed product. It deserves every negative review for that stupid move.

Blender is FREE + there is way too much documentation, tutorials and help from the community for it to be a problem. So the users are only spending their time, not money nor do they have to struggle blindly. The complaints, if they did come, would occur from either fans of other software or those coming over who get to experience Blender’s unconventional design first hand. Not a biggie.

I’ve heard talk about putting Blender on Steam, but I never thought this would actually happen.

Is there any advantage to people actually using the Steam download link, as I would think it wouldn’t give you as much flexibility as to what you can do with the file than if you just obtained it from the Blender website?

Also, I can find agreement on the images since it is a game site, it could use things that showcase newer features like the FPS Camera mode, custom normal data, and data transfer (which includes transfer from high-poly to low-poly).

Cool, make now to donate and boost for development or something like this.

Same, there was an implied resistance on following up with it.

Is there any advantage to people actually using the Steam download link, as I would think it wouldn’t give you as much flexibility as to what you can do with the file than if you just obtained it from the Blender website?

Auto-updates. Steam should be able to save settings. It goes where you go (floating license). Community surrounding it. Lots of pros, very little cons.

Blender recommendation windows 7 sp1 ?.
Best results in linux, also improving agree with many of your comments. Blender has “The magic button” that lets you render “from movie” have to work for it. I also think that the main improvements blender “now” Opensubdiv, opengl 2.1. Improvements would generate a takeoff of it. Also I see some results with “bmw Updated” With my gtx 970 best result was “360x203- 1: 22.81” and that it cuda 5, I’m interested in some improvement to “blender cuda 7”. I’m sure you could lower that number by at least 10%.
Though I imagine the improvements that need blender as “opensubdiv and opengl 2.1”. It would be the basis for a new beginning as amd cycles. Blender sure you have a long way to go, but will be incredible surprises awaiting us by the developers. Although I like some things were simpler, no not knowing some things but dreaming costs nothing.

I think it’ll probably do alright on there. The clunky UI/keymap problems will piss off some like it always does, but I think its featureset tends to impress a lot of people too – especially for the price.

Just being on Steam with positive reviews at all is cool to me though. I still remember being mocked for admitting that I used it not that long ago. These days you can stumble on guys like Matt Kohr/Ctrl+Paint praising it. It’s amazing how far it has come.

False. It was mostly a personnel/ownership thing. Valve suggested it, but didn’t want to do it themselves. There was an abstract interest on the Blender developer side, but no one person with enough interest or (more importantly) time to follow through with being the maintainer for that platform. The fact that it’s on Steam now is a direct result of Martijn’s initiative/availability/interest/what-have-you.

And on that note: Thank you, Martijn!

Well, at least now Blender will update automatically :slight_smile:

I don’t why the negativity in upper posts, I think this will benefit Blender a lot. I just hope there are donate button on the store page. For many countries, this will make donating to Blender a lot easier.

PS: I don’t know where to report this, but my steam version of Blender kept printing this line.


Do anyone have same issue? It’s so annoying because I often printing something on python script and it’s vanishing very quickly because of that message. :no:

this is great, it can give blender tons of visibility.

Well over 100 comments and the vast majority is positive. shrug

We tried to find volunteers to help putting it in Steam. The last volunteer gave the job back to me. It’s really a long tedious process this Steam developer program… so I took a deep breath and dived in. Hours of paperwork, NDAs, image uploading and filling in forms were spent on it. And when it came to building and adding Blender itself we were so lucky to have Martijn taking care of that.

In that sense it’s an official BF activity. There was never any resistance against being added to Steam - aside of the fact that it’s just a lot of work without urgency or priority, so we were looking for volunteers to handle it (just like we still use a lot of volunteers for many Blender jobs).

-Ton-

I am sure the work will be repaid Ton, I think steam is a GREAT platform to increase blender visibility. Blender is at the moment in the top ten of the new releases on steam, and the rank shows up on the steam home page of each one of the millions and millions of steam users each time they log in.

In my opinion this was the right thing to do! Thanks for that and keep up the great work! :slight_smile:

ELI5
I have o idea about the game creator universe… what is Steam and why are tools like Blender there? Is the Blender build any different hosted there (apart from OS issue)?

Also I thought that there was some problem encouraging game creators to use Blender due to Open licensing stuff?

It’s not necessarily about just game creators but rather content creators and those interested in the technology. Steam is both a social platform and a distribution platform, last I checked it was at 65 million active users and rising. The benefits of using steam for software purposes include the fact that it acts as a floating license, which is probably not as big a deal with blender users…but when you have $1500+ software, its usually a great deal (since floating licenses normally cost a lot more).

There’s a bit of a content creator revolution going on right now with multiple markets opening up in which asset creators can trade and sell their goods in a digital market place. In one year alone, Valve paid out around $10 Million to some 600+ content creators. In fact their future growth strategy with the next Source Engine, like Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, is based around content creation and sales.

Thus tools like Blender, Modo, Maya…ect are critically important in the process of creating and selling such content. It’s also why Blender really needs to focus on this particular area for a bit because as a result the revenue comes right back to the development one way or another.