Valve is well known for their successful app platform Steam, which is widely considered one of the better places to sell PC games. Starting early next month that’s going to be true for other apps as well.

The gaming company is planning to expand Steam to include other apps. They haven’t named any new developer partners yet, but the announcement does say that the apps will span from creativity to productivity apps.

“The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games,” said Mark Richardson at Valve. “They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests.”

Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you. But I’m hoping that they won’t require quite as strict DRM as the games currently on Steam. I have to leave the client running in the background at all times or I cannot play the games. What’s more, I have to have a live internet connection each time I boot the Steam client. This might not be an issue for everyone but I don’t always have an internet connection when I’m rebooting my computer.  I wouldn’t want to use such a restricted platform for critical apps.