Valve launches its Steam Music Player with free Half-Life and Portal video game soundtracks

Valve is slowly expanding Steam‘s functionality beyond buying and playing PC, Mac and Linux video games. Now, the company has launched a Steam Music Player which resides within the desktop client and makes it simple to play all of the tunes stored on your computer.

While this in itself is useful, removing the need to constantly switch between applications, perhaps of greater note is the integration with Steam video game soundtracks. When players purchase a game from Valve’s digital marketplace, developers often throw in the soundtrack as an extra reward. Now, it’s easier for gamers to both buy and play this music in an application they’re familiar with.

A Steam Music beta was offered for SteamOS users back in February, but today marks its official launch on all platforms. To celebrate the release, Valve is giving away the soundtracks for some of its most iconic video games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal and Portal 2. You’ll need to own these games first, but luckily Valve has dropped all of their prices by 75 percent until October 1.

➤ Introducing the Steam Music Player (Valve)