It's good to see them giving back.<p>They ran a similar program back 2005 for universities where you could buy a perpetual cyber cafe license for $10 / seat. I think they realized it wasn't such a great deal for them and it is annual now (Source U). I bought some licenses for our computer club and Valve gave us contact info for one of their engineers who ended up sharing their Maya export tools.<p>More and more companies are opening up to this sort of stuff but us students were flabbergasted to get "real" tools from a studio that we could learn and use in the lab.<p>Keep it up, Valve!
Here's the non-print link for people who don't mind content producers actually making a livng:<p><a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/20/steam-for-schools-is-a-free-version-of-steam-for-students-fac/" rel="nofollow">http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/20/steam-for-schools-is-a-fre...</a>
Ah, this is a bitter reminder that I purchased Portal 2 when it came out (for the Mac) but do not yet have a computer fast enough to run it...one of my few regrets about getting an Air.