Valve is telling us about how they are releasing a massive set of development tools and documentation completely free. Steamworks is the core APIs used within the Half Life and The Orange box to allow for systems such as auto updating, copy protection, voice chat, stats tracking, and intergration with the Steam Community.

The release of the backend to Steam should allow more indy developers to work on getting their games onto the Steam service, and good luck to them, I can't wait to see more content on one of the best distribution systems ever made.

Via STEAM