Valve have opened up the Steam Inventory for Steamworks developers to use, enabling them to use Valve’s tech to create and store items earned or bought within games. It also allows for players to use the Steam Marketplace to sell items to the rest of the community. Cool.

The inventory and marketplace have been around for a while, being the cornerstone of some of their most popular titles – most notably Team Fortress 2 and its huge collection of wearables/hats. Now it can be used for other games outside of Valve titles.

The announcement of the new service read: “With today’s Steamworks SDK update, we’ve released The Steam Inventory Service beta, a new feature available to developers with games or software on Steam. The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user’s inventory. With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items.”