Upcoming 6 Of The Most Popular Apps On Steam That Aren't Games

I swear there's a good reason I have these on my work computer!

Hi, reader's boss. Yes, I can confirm as an authority on all things Steam that the service does distribute software other than games. Your honest and hardworking employee has a good reason to have installed it on their office machine. I swear Bongo Cat is great for their productivity.

Really though. Steam isn't just for Crusader Kings, despite how I have traditionally used it. At various times over the years Valve has messed with the Steam storefront to make its non-gaming offerings more apparent. Right now games definitely take center stage, but there are tons of non-gaming programs and helpful utilities available on there as well if you know where to look.

And it's convenient, because if you're going to be logged into Steam anyway, you'll get your software updates automatically without having some other proprietary background client hogging memory. Here are six of the most popular and useful non-games on Steam.

This is one I use myself on a pretty much weekly basis. You can always painstakingly edit bitmaps in Paint if you want to do pixel art the old-fashioned way. You can also churn your own butter, from what I've heard. But this snappy art tool loads up fast, has a clean, customizable minimalist interface, and tons of cool little tricks like the ability to automatically add highlights and shading based on a color offset you can define.

Aseprite is geared toward minimum fuss and quick production pipelines for indie game developers, but it's powerful enough to do some cool HD-2D stuff too. When I'm making a bunch of poses for the same character or redoing an entire area's tileset because I decided I didn't like the color of the leaves, it saves me many hours.

RPG Maker is the next step up from modding an existing game like Oblivion or Skyrim, before you get to the point of making the whole thing basically from scratch in a game engine like Godot or Unity. I cut my teeth on an earlier version of RPG Maker back in the day. If you want the newest version with all the latest features (and the best compatibility with current versions of Windows), that's 2020's RPG Maker MZ.

But even the version I was using way back in middle school, RPG Maker 2000, is still available for purchase as well. You don't really need any coding experience to get started. (Though if you go with 2000, you may only find good documentation on an archived Angelfire page with a bunch of Dragonball Z gifs and Linkin Pa

Source: PC Gamer