BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside, which enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. It essentially has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers bring existing mobile games to Discord and Steam.
To be more specific, the company said developers using BlueStacks Inside will get access to the usual Steam features like the collection functionality, curators, promotions, payment via Steam Wallet, and community hub. The game will run on its own native window, with no BlueStacks branding.
According to BlueStacks, the initial list of developers launching games with BlueStacks Inside include Fabled Game Studio, Funplus, and KOG. But how is the company making money out of this? The team says it'll take a percentage of revenue from in-app purchases while also charging an "integration fee."
The good news for developers is that they don't have to go out of their way to develop for two different platforms - they simply have to create an Android version of your game and BlueStacks Inside will turn it into something that can run on PC.
For PC gamers, meanwhile, this means there could be an influx of new games that might not otherwise have been available. However, this could also bring an influx of the free-to-play games filled with in-game purchases that are so common on mobile devices.
The company remains optimistic, though. "What we see is that the BlueStacks and Steam audiences overlap almost completely. So the partnership gives gamers access to the entire Android gaming library right on their PCs," says Rosen Sharma, BlueStacks CEO, in a statement.
"We eliminate the need for separate development teams just to bring mobile games to a PC audience. When published with BlueStacks, a player downloading the game through Steam gets the full game experience. It isn't BlueStacks. It isn't Steam. It's a PC game."
BlueStacks investors include Ignition Partners, Radar Partners, Andreessen-Horowitz, Samsung, Redpoint, Qualcomm, Intel, Presidio Ventures (a Sumitomo Corporation Company), Citrix, AMD, and Helion Ventures.
BlueStacks launched in May 2011, and the first version of BlueStacks was released in March 2012. BlueStacks crossed 370 million users in January of 2019.
