Gaming Subscription Trend Expands As Valve Joins The Party

Valve's Steam digital distribution gaming platform has added support for gaming subscription plans, allowing gamers the ability to manage their subscription-based games through the gaming service. The new feature offers a simple way to sign up for games and manage payments. The first and only game so far to use the new feature is Darkfall Unholy Wars.

More games will follow in the future, but for now, only Darkfall Unholy Wars is compatible — most likely to just test out the new system before rolling it out for more games. The service will allow you to manage subscriptions of all your Steam-based subscription video games through Steam itself, which is certainly nifty, and should give gamers a bit of flexibility and control.

To sign up for a Steam Subscription Plan, you'll have to find a subscription-based game in the Steam store, and from there you just select the plan that you want and purchase the plan (rather than just a one-time fee for most games). It seems it's a lot simpler than buying individual plans for multiple subscription-based games.

You can also cancel subscriptions from your Steam account, and Steam will list all of the subscriptions that you have. From there, you can just select the one you want to cancel and you'll be all set. That same page will also let you renew subscriptions. Currently, Steam doesn't offer the chance to gift a subscription plan, but we're guessing they'll come out with that sometime in the future.