Valve has announced that the new community features on Steam are officially live.

We say "officially", because the beta has been live since August and as Doug Lombardi, Valve's director of marketing, told SPOnG in a recent interview, "I think about half the people on Steam are participating in the community beta, so at this point it's beta kind of in name only."

The features enable gamers to create a Steam ID featuring a personal profile, avatar and favourites, a friend list showing who's online and up to what, the creation of groups, and statistics ("so that people can realise, 'Oh, this guy's a badass, I'll invite him onto my team', or 'This guy's kind of a turkey, let's kick him off the team.'" - Doug's words).

Also integrated are instant messaging, text and voice chat features and an event scheduler to coordinate multiplayer matches.

There's a lot going on with networked software platforms in gaming at the moment. Just this week we've had Microsoft talking about YouTube for games and Sony telling us that there's no place like Home.

In other Valve news, impatient Team Fortress fans will be able to get in early for with the [url=http://news.spong.com/article/13722]launch of the TF2 beta next week.
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