Sales of virtual items goes full Steam ahead

The Steam Inventory Service is open to business.

You might be aware that hats (of the virtual kind) is a pretty big thing in games like Team Fortress 2. So far the sale of virtual items has only been at Valve's discretion in most cases, but not anymore.

The Steam Inventory Service - to use Steams own words - "is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase [sic] or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user's inventory".

In other words developers can now mark virtual hats etc. as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace.