Late last night Valve made the Mac version of its Steam digital distribution service available, ending the relatively short beta period, and went on to confirm a Linux version of the service.

It looks well, even if the games list is a little underpopulated at the moment

For the moment, the games available to Mac users are fairly limited, with Portal being the first of the games built on Valve’s own Source engine to be made available, though we’re told we should expect others to follow relatively shortly. In the meantime, there have been a number of additions to the Steam Store that should see Mac users relatively well looked after, including the Telltale Games Steam Play Pack, built around the recent episodic remakes of both Sam & Max (freelance police) and Monkey Island.

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With the trend started by the Amazon MacMillan spat, towards ebooks costing as much (if not a little more) than their physical counterparts, is being more firmly cemented over time, it’s interesting to see statistics from iTunes pricing model.

Looks like these bad boys will be sticking around for a while yet

According to MediaMemo, it seems that Apple gave music publishers the ability to raise the price of their music on its iTunes service early last year, which resulted in some record labels bumping the prices of some songs upwards, while others took the opportunity to drop the prices of certain tracks. The overall result has been an interesting one.

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It’s emerged that Microsoft has patented a system by which peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, or downloading via bittorrent, would see the integration of digital rights management (DRM).

Word comes via TomsHardware of the patent filed by Microsoft, which would help the company roll out software through digital distribution without putting too much weight on its own servers. It’s an interesting distribution model, and one that usually allows users to have their content on release day without fear of stock shortages. Of course, the general issue with heavy-duty digital distribution is the stress on servers, which generally results in slowed downloads on busy days; this is neatly turned to an advantage using P2P networking.

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Thanks to a massive price drop as part of its Christmas sale, Steam has managed, bizarrely, to end up “Sold Out” of 2K Games’ portal-throwing first person shooter, Prey.

Strange stuff...

One of the biggest reasons to opt with digital distribution for games is convenience, not only on the part of the end user, but for the distributor itself. Steam’s model, one would have thought, prevents it from ever having to post a sold out sign, since games should be practically infinitely reproducible. Apparently that’s not the case for 2K Games’ Prey, though so far the reason seems to be a little vague.

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Well regarded author Stephen Covey has moved to give Amazon exclusive rights to publish the electronic versions of his work from his usual publishers over to Amazon, whose Kindle has been vastly successful as a vehicle for the format.

In its report, the New York Times names Covey as one of the most successful writers of the last twenty years, so it seems fair to say that Covey isn’t angling to easy publicity by being the first author signed exclusively to Amazon, but it’s still going to be a bit of a nasty surprise to book publishers who, until quite recently, haven’t really had too much to fear from the ebook market.

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Microsoft has finally released its Windows 7 download tool for those who’ve decided that they’d like to get their copies of Microsoft’s latest operating system via digital distribution, rather than physically.

According to TechNet Microsoft has finally solved the issue that caused the application to be pulled in the first place. The complaint that had been raised was that the original Windows 7 download tool was seen as a bit bloated and cumbersome; on closer inspection, it turned out that there was a significant amount of code appropriated from an open source project…

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Sony has offered a preview of its upcoming update to the PlayStation 3, which brings the device up to version 3.15. The new firmware update adds support for Sony’s “Minis” as well as save-file sharing across different consoles.

Sony’s Minis are essentially a way for the company to sell minigames – the kind of content usually made as a free unlockable game or perhaps offered as part of a collection more normally – directly through its PlayStation Store. Until now, these had been available for the PlayStation Portable, but now Sony has announced that PlayStation 3 users will be able to download and play Minis from the more stationary console when the new update hits.

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Apple has confirmed that it has acquired streaming music service LaLa.com shortly after the company admitted that it was unlikely to reach profitability in the near future, despite having some big players backing it up.

The word that Apple has managed to pick up LaLa (and apparently has managed to do so for a shockingly low sum, if rumours are to be believed) has come as something of a shock, given that the company had essentially been on something of a winning streak. LaLa had, in a month, become the service powering some fairly massive different entries to the web-based music department.

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For all of those angry to have missed the days when Valve dropped Team Fortress 2 to €2.50, your chance to get in on the new sale on Steam is starting today, with Steam announcing some fairly impressive price cuts.

New sale has offers you just can't manage without digital distribution

Timed to coincide with Black Friday, more than once referred to as “the most dangerous shopping day of the year” in the US, the latest Steam sale sees many of the most popular games of the last year discounted fairly heavily. The vastly successful, and many will argue solid contender for game of the year, Batman: Arkham Asylum has been dropped by 50%, and there are plenty of other similar deals to be had.

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With many claiming that Blu-Ray will be the last form of physical media we see film distributed on, the news that Transformers 2 is to launch on a piece of flash memory is both welcome and a little scary.

The device/storage/film (it’s hard to know how to word things sometimes when they’re still at the edge of release) is set to launch in association with Kingston, which will be providing the media itself. While we’ve seen Disney launch movies on SD cards in Japan for distribution with disc-based copies, Transformers is to launch both as part of a package deal with a disc and for sale on its own.

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In what looks very much as though it could be part of MySpace’s effort to gear itself in a more media-centric direction, MySpace and Facebook have entered talks to allow the dissemination of content across both.

TheRegister is carrying word of the meeting between the two, pointing out that it’s as close as we’ll ever see to a “formal admission of defeat for the Murdoch-owned site.” Of course, an admission of defeat in the world of social networking is one thing, but given MySpace’s rumoured involvement with MSN Music and the idea that the two could be building a music service between themselves, it’s far more interesting indeed.

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Microsoft’s MSN is talking to MySpace about some kind of teamup on digital music, given MySpace Music’s focus, it could well be a hard sell.

With Facebook and Google having recently teamed up with LaLa.com to offer their own digitally distributed music services for less than Apple’s iTunes and web-based but free (respectively), word that MSN and MySpace’s are in the early stages of discussions of a joint music venture is simultaneously interesting and unsurprising.

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