Hawken, the free-to-play mech shooter from Adhesive Games, has been, until now, accessed through its own launcher when you downloaded the game through Hawken's website. Over the next week Adhesive Games will be moving Hawken over to Steam and removing the ability to log in through Hawken's own launcher. Steamers will be able to stomp around in mighty mechs sometime in the next week, while players who have already registered to play Hawken getting early access to the game through Steam. This is sure to be a shot in the arm for Hawken's player base, although some seem to be a little put-out by the move.

Here are some key points from the post regarding Hawken's transition to Steam from the game's website:

From this point forward, a Steam account will be required to play HAWKEN.

HAWKEN will no longer be playable using the existing launcher and the game will only be accessible through Steam.

Over the next 7 days, we'll be granting current pilots immediate access before new pilots can obtain HAWKEN via the Steam store. Read more about this process in our Steam Transition Guide.

Once you have the game downloaded on Steam, you will be able to play the latest version of HAWKEN, i.e. our February Update.

This patch will be missing some core content and you may run into some of our QA testers still working on final polish. Right now, we're aiming for a formal release of the update in the next couple of weeks.

New account creation is being disabled until the full February release.

So, there you have it. If you're itching to blow bits of metal off people Hawken might tide you over until Titanfall comes out. You can read the full post from Hawken's website here.