Empire: Total War Launches with Steamworks

March 4, 2009

Empire: Total War Launches with
Steamworks

Sega and The Creative Assembly
Leverage Suite of Services for Development and Marketing

Empire: Total War from The Creative
Assembly and SEGA is now available via Steam, a leading platform for the
delivery and management of PC games with over 20 million accounts worldwide, as
well as retail outlets around the world.

Empire is the latest in the
award-winning Total War strategy game series and the first to extensively
utilize the Steamworks suite of Services for both development and marketing
purposes.

For multiplayer support in both the
electronic and retail versions of the game, Empire: Total War leverages
Steamworks for Achievements, statistics, authentication, matchmaking, and
support for the Steam Community. On the marketing side, Steamworks was used to
fulfill a variety of promotional offers.

"By providing deep integration of
Steamworks into their product, the team at The Creative Assembly was able to
focus on the multiplayer game play of Empire and not worry about the back end
services," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve.
"Meanwhile, the marketing and sales organizations at Sega were able to use
Steamworks to create and fulfill unique pre-order campaigns at retail and online
with exclusive content offers such as special units and offering incentives such
as Rome: Total War for no charge."

"Working with Steamworks was very
straightforward," said Mike Simpson, Creative Director at The Creative Assembly.
"The small investment of time to integrate Steamworks not only saved us
development time, it helped us develop a better product that we can easily
extend with updates and downloadable content post launch."

Empire takes the Total War franchise
to the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment and introduces a host of
revolutionary new features, including the introduction of true 3D naval combat,
new systems for Trade & Diplomacy, and much more.

Empire joins F.E.A.R. 2: Project
Origin and Dawn of War II on the list of leading Steamworks-enabled PC games
released this year.

For more information, please visit
www.steamgames.com.