Empire: Total War is ready for pre-purchase on Steam right now. For those of you who chose to pre-purchase you will receive a copy of Rome: Total War Gold for absolutely nothing.

It costs $54.99 here in the UK which is a bargain considering you get Rome thrown in too. Well maybe not a bargain, but it isn’t a bad offer.

The Steam and retail versions of Empire will also come fully loaded with Steamworks which will provide owners of the game with updates, downloadable content and achievements. Steamworks will also act as the multiplayer backend of the game, more details will emerge on this soon.

For those of you who are now worrying about offline gaming, don’t worry, you only need to connect to the internet once via Steam to play single-player.

It is released February 3rd in North America and February 6th in Europe and other territories.

In some news that I have been sitting on for a few days I am pleased to inform everyone that World of Goo will be getting a release on Steam come Monday the 13th October for $20. Want to know what the best thing is? World of Goo will be using Steamworks which means we will be having a great eight achievements to work our way towards.

Mr. I Decide What Games We Get On Steam Justin Holtman said that World of Goo was one of the most asked for games to come onto Steam.

“More people have told us to get World of Goo on Steam than any other title coming this year. It has captured the imagination of the press and other members of the industry during its incredible pre-launch campaign, and we’re delighted to debut the PC version with Steamworks Achievements.”

He is damn right that World of Goo has captured the imagination of almost everyone. Check out the praise the game has received from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, The Poisoned Sponge and even from yours truly.

There is another bit of great news for those who pre-ordered World of Goo, you won’t be missing out on the Steamworks perks. You will be able to use your Magic Key from your pre-order email to activate the game on Steam. Brilliance!

If you don’t wish to get it from 2D Boy themselves you can get it from a variety of other places including amazon.com and Direct2Drive. Goo will also be purchasable from Indie friendly Greenhouse and from 2D Boy’s North American retail publisher Beanstalk Games.

Seriously there is now no reason why you shouldn’t be buying your daily allowance of Goo.

The next iteration of the Football Manager series from SI Games is going to be released on Steam on 14th November for $49.99. For the first time ever Football Manager will be utilising Steamworks, the publisher and developer tools that allow games to plug into the Steam service. Steamworks will be present in both the retail and Steam versions of the game, and more importantly those with the retail version will be able to register their copy of the game on Steam to fully utilise the Steam experience.

Miles Jacobson, the studio director at Sports Interactive had this to say regarding the announcement:

“Many of us at Sports Interactive have been big fans of Steam since it’s inception, so to be working with them properly this year across releases of Football Manager on the PC is fantastic. It gives us the opportunity for all of our games players to get any patches or updates that we make available quickly and easily, as well as a place for us to host any other downloads, such as demos and promotional videos, with super fast broadband speeds for download, and no issues with bandwidth, which we are hit with each time we release a demo”.

The demo for Football Manager 2009 will be made available via Steam a few weeks before the release of the game. You can pre-order the game on Steam now which will allow you to pre-load the game 48 hours before the game is unlocked at 9.00 GMT on the 14th November. Further information regarding pre-orders can be found here.

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Valve have announced that the Steamworks SDK has been made available for all developers wishing to use it.

Steamworks currently provides a suite of publishing and development tools for PC game developers and publishers providing them with many tools used by Valve themselves. These include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating and loads more.

The Steamworks SDK now includes a fully functional API for all the components available in Steamworks. The SDK also includes an multiplayer game example to show foff how to use many of the features available. The Steamworks partner website has also been updated with loads of information and options.

Obligatory press release statement:

“In working with developers on the pre-release SDK, our focus has been on making it as easy as possible for them to integrate Steamworks into their games,” said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. “They get access to these tools and services in a proven, scalable, and simple to work with package that has already been deployed to millions of gamers worldwide.”

All hail Valve and Steamworks! All hail!

Steamworks, the ultimate developer’s companion from Valve has been picking up some good support over the past week.

First off was the announcement that Red Orchestra was getting the Steamworks treatment which was soon followed by the addition of Ninja Reflex onto Steam in a ‘Steamworks Edition.’

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