Ultra-niche but rather erudite site Steam Review, which deals with Valve's PC game hosting/download platform, and there's a new editorial on 'The Steam Platform' by reader Andy Simpson that's well worth checking out.

It's basically suggesting that games should be able to license parts of the Steam whole, claiming a certain inflexibility right now: "Developers have very few options for using Steam right now. In practice, the only options are one-time billing/download manager/limited auth functionality, a full Source + Steam license or nothing at all." Instead, Simpson suggests many of the more complex parts of Steam such as the Steam filesystem and content streaming should be made available separately by Valve.

His conclusion? "Basically, my message to Valve is this: Make it flexible. Make it open and inclusive. Think about all the people, both developers and end users, who could be using your technology for their benefit and yours who aren’t because of arbitrary limitations and restrictions. The removal of these limitations and the cutting of ties of the Steam services to the Steam client would have the end result of driving people to the client, not driving them away." Personally, I wonder if this doesn't sound like something the OS provider should be making available - thoughts?