Microsoft's strategy of giving away free upgrades to Windows 10 looks to have been worthwhile, as a year and a half on from its release, most gamers on Steam are running it. While Windows 7 64 still maintains a foothold, nothing else even comes close. Windows 10 adoption rate has …
Read More »CS:GO now has aesthetic glove options and unlocks too
It's probably a good thing that Valve helped crack down on Counter Strike: Global Offensive skin gambling earlier this year, as it's just introduced a bevy of new aesthetic items that many more people would have been wagering if it hadn't. Gloves! They're the new gun skins and come in …
Read More »Valve has tied in the Steam Autumn Sale with an awards ceremony
Valve has been attempting to spruce up its sales over the last couple of years in an effort to try and turn buying games into some form of meta game. However, with the Autumn Sale this year, Valve has chosen to try something different- The Steam Awards. For the first …
Read More »ACCC wants court to fine Valve $3 million
Since 2014, Australia's consumer rights group, the ACCC, has been hammering down on Valve due to the ‘no refunds' policy that was enforced on Steam prior to June 2015. In fact, this court case is likely one of the major catalysts that forced Valve into implementing its current refunds policy. …
Read More »Steam store update gets personal, streamlines information
If you open up your Steam account this morning, the Store page will look a little different than you remember. In a large update, Valve has overhauled the aesthetics and layout of its storefront once again, this time easing back on the free-flowing look that had dominated for a while …
Read More »Steam VR public licenses now include more commercial options
If you want to let members of the public try out Steam VR games and experiences using your hardware, you need Valve's free commercial license to do so. However that limits you to only a few pieces of software for people to play. To expand that further, you need paid …
Read More »Gambling Commission wants Valve to end game skin gambling
Following on from the revelation that not only were lots of people gambling away their in-game skins for games like CS:GO, but that Youtubers were marketing the practice to children, a lot of people have asked Valve to do something about it. Throwing their weight behind that cry now, is …
Read More »Steam tweaks: a helpful review is a helpful review
Following feedback from the community and developers, Valve has made changes to the way Steam's review system works once again. Although reviews from those who activated the game from a source other than Steam, still won't contribute to the game's rating, those reviews will now at least be easy to …
Read More »Steam reviews by gamers with free codes no longer count
If you ended up with a Steam key for any other reason than you purchased it, your review will no longer contribute to the review score. This is part of a new update Valve has released to try and halt the practice of developers and publishers incentivising positive reviews with …
Read More »BT is taking Valve to court over patent infringement
British Telecom (BT) has announced that it's taking Valve to court, over what it claims are patent infringements by the longtime game developer and publisher. While there does seem to be some merit to the suit, all of the patents are rather generic, so there will likely be some wiggle …
Read More »Valve turned 20 yesterday: happy birthday!
In a world where game developers and publishers come and go, folding, founding, merging and being bought out by larger entities, Valve has been a real constant for the past two decades. It's given us a lot of big games and big milestones in gaming, so today we celebrate its …
Read More »Valve doubling down on office space in big move
Valve's inner workings always feel a little shady. It works on secretive projects we don't hear about for years at a time, has a strange, horizontal team structure – it's hard to figure out how it all works. We do know one thing though, and that's that it's run out …
Read More »Valve is opening up to custom VR tracking hardware
It looks like Valve is opening up its room-scale tracking system for all hardware makers to play around with, allowing custom hardware to be built for the HTC Vive headset, which means companies could end up releasing their own custom motion controllers to compete with Valve's own wand-style design, which comes bundled with …
Read More »Too legit to quit: CS GO betting site seeks gambling license
One of the world's largest Counter Strike: Global Offensive betting sites, CSGO Lounge, has announced that it is applying for an official gambling license, in order to legitimise itself. This comes after it received a cease and desist letter from Valve, as well as a lot of negative attention from …
Read More »Valve launches first big VR game sale, offers expensive starter bundle
With the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift VR headsets now having a few months under their belts to settle down in the wild, there's a lot of new VR content to enjoy. Valve wants to help those who've fallen out of love with VR, or just gotten into it, with …
Read More »Valve begins sending Cease and Desist letters to CSGO gambling sites
After a few lawsuit filings and a scandal or two involving highly popular YouTubers, Valve officially put its foot down on CS:GO gambling. The announcement that the company would take legal action if necessary was made last week and sure enough, Cease and Desist letters are now starting to roll …
Read More »Update: More Youtubers embroiled in CS:GO skin betting scandal
Update: Following revelations surrounding a pair of popular Youtube content creators and their underhanded involvement with a Counter Strike skin betting site, other Youtubers have now been caught up in the scandal, with some looking to hide their tracks. Josh Beaver, otherwise known as JoshOG, admitted in a recent stream …
Read More »Left 4 Dead 3 mistakenly appears in Valve employee screenshots
Valve is a very secretive company so it is hard to really know what is actively being worked on and when. However, right now it would seem that Left 4 Dead 3 is still actively being developed as new evidence came to light this week, with the upcoming game showing …
Read More »Someone is suing Valve over CSGO skin gambling
One of the core elements to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's success is the item skin trading system. People buy keys to crates, sell old skins and buy new ones on the Steam marketplace constantly but there is also a vert successful, though unofficial, gambling scene for CS:GO. Valve is pretty hands-off …
Read More »A third of Valve is currently working on Virtual Reality
When it comes to Valve, what goes on in its offices is kept very secret, we can never really be too sure on what's being worked on or how far along any particular project is. However, we do know that right now a third of the company is involved in Virtual …
Read More »Palmer Luckey on exclusives: Sony is doing it too
Ever since the big exclusivity debate kicked off between the likes of Oculus and the virtual reality community, Palmer Luckey has been rather quiet online. Once a regular Redditor and Tweeter, he's been almost silent for the last few months. At E3 though he made a few statements, one of …
Read More »Valve gives VR developers funds too, but with no strings attached
Poor Gabe Newell. It seems he can't go five minutes without someone emailing him asking about Valve's stance on exclusive games. We should know it by now: it doesn't like it. Still, it does seem like each time he opens up about it, Newell tells us a little more. In …
Read More »HTC Vive virtual reality headset indepth review
The HTC Vive has proved to be quite a formidable piece of kit. Not only did it surprise when it stole much of Oculus' pre-release thunder with roomscale and hand tracked controllers, but it surprised post launch by being more widely available. Where it does not surprise us though is …
Read More »Valve has sold over 500,000 Steam Controllers
Valve's journey into producing its own hardware started all the way back in 2013, when it first revealed the Steam Machines and Steam Controller. The controller itself went through many changes in the two years leading up to release but it seems that quite a few were interested enough to …
Read More »Valve employee claims Oculus Rift is ‘direct copy’ of Valve prototype
Although Oculus might have been the first company to really get the world thinking about virtual reality as a viable future, it might not be as impactful as you think. In-fact Valve may have overtaken it so much in developing VR gear, that Oculus' Rift CV1 is to some, just a …
Read More »Steam Summer Sale simulator lets you buy games forever
Although Valve might spend much of the year offering big sales at discounted prices, with all of the gamification that goes along with that, for some people it's still not often enough. Fortunately, you may soon be able to play a game, about buying games. Summer Sale is currently in …
Read More »DotA 2 International Compendium wants to break $18.5 million
With the DotA 2 International competition kicking off at the end of June, that means it's time to generate some prize money. In what has become a tradition, Valve plans to build that with gamer dollars, by offering them prizes, upgrades and unlocks for DotA 2 through the sale of …
Read More »Steam updated to prioritise more recent user reviews
These days, games often change quite a bit over time, somebody's experience with a title at launch may not accurately reflect the state of things a few months down the line. In keeping with that logic, Valve updated Steam this week, so that user reviews now prioritise more recent opinions …
Read More »170 Team Fortress 2 pro players banned after VAC update
Team Fortress 2 should now be a fairer place to play, whether competitively or just for fun, as Valve's latest update to its Valve-Anti-Cheat (VAC) defence system has been detecting users of the LMAOBOX software all weekend. It's led to many players being banned from the game, including almost 170 professional players …
Read More »You can now buy games on Steam using Bitcoin
While the fanfare surrounding digital currencies like Bitcoin seems to have settled down a bit over the last year, plenty of people still have some left over to use and now, you can use your Bitcoins on Steam. We first heard that Valve may roll out Bitcoin payments on the Steam …
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