Items tagged with STEAM
When it comes to digital stores for PC games, Steam is currently the dominant force. Chinese gaming company Tencent wants to battle Steam globally and plans to roll out WeGame beyond its home market of China. The first country that WeGame will battle Steam in is Hong Kong and reports indicate that a version of the platform for that country is in the works now. WeGame launched in September of last year to replace the Tencent Games Platform and has been widely compared to Steam. It is much smaller than Steam with a current catalog of only 220 games. Those gamers are a mix of Chinese titles and...
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The kids are out of school and the weather is trending towards scorching hot (depending on where you live), and that can mean only one thing—summer has officially begun! That alone isn't reason for excitement though. Sure, we're stoked about getting outside and catching some rays, but we're equally excited that Valve has kicked off its Steam Summer Sale 2018, an annual bonanza of bargains on games and even some hardware. We readily admit we'll never get around to playing every game in our library to their entirety, but with so many tantalizing discounts, it's difficult to sit on the sidelines...
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PUBG was all the rage with gamers in 2017 until the Fortnite battle royale made hit the scene and quickly began to win out in concurrent player numbers. PUBG has been working to gain back its lost popularity to outpace Fortnite, and has in the past promised better performance to lure back gamers. Now, a new map is coming to PUBG this week and it is called Sanhok. The new map is much smaller (4km x 4km) at about a fourth of the size of maps like Erangel or Miramar. PUBG says that the smaller size will make battles end a bit faster because there will still be 100 players on the small map. To improve...
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Valve's Steam platform has been in the spotlight a lot lately, for good, bad, or simply odd reasons. The company has just overhauled its Steam chat client, which is hugely appreciated, and perhaps long overdue. At the same time, the company has deemed it appropriate to let the community decide what content should or shouldn't be available on the platform - as long as it's not straight-up trolling, content will remain on Steam. Based on the decision made a couple of weeks ago, school shooter FPS games, and those rife with anime porn, are not a problem - as long as no trolling is going on. What's...
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Valve had many gamers excited when it announced that the Steam Link app would let you stream games from your PC to your iOS device. Not so long after the announcement, Steam Link landed in beta on Google Play for Android aficionados. Unfortunately for the iOS users, Apple blocked the app with Phil Schiller explaining that the app violated App Store rules. However, revised app store rules gave hope that Steam Link might still make it. Valve is now trying to get past Apple censors by removing the purchase options inside the app that was released to TestFlight. Reports claiming...
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Valve is overhauling its Steam Chat feature and the immediate reaction is that it's essentially Valve's version of Discord, the go-to chat client for many avid online gamers. The new Steam Chat is not available in polished form—if you want to try it out, you have to download and install the beta client, which Valve has made available to everyone (it's an open beta, not a closed one, in other words). Those who do are in for a shock to the system. The beta Steam Chat is vastly different from the existing one. One of the biggest changes is being able to wrangle friends into groups, which can...
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Valve has been busy of late rolling out new features and thinking hard about how it will handle controversial games. One of the cool new features was Steam Link, an app that allows you to stream games from your PC over to your mobile device under the right circumstances. In addition, Valve recently offered insight into its decision to allow "everything" onto the Steam store short of illegal content and "straight up trolling." Valve has now announced that it will be opening the doors to Steam China this year. The launch of Steam China is in partnership with Perfect World Zhengqi Multimedia Technology...
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Quake fans rejoice, Bethesda has made an offer that many will find too good to refuse. Quake Champions, the upcoming arena shooter that has not yet been fully released, is now available as a free trial to anyone and everyone. Previously it was a $30 title as part of Steam's Early Access program. It will return to that price after the free trial period as well, but if you grab it now for free, it will remain in your library after this current trial period ends. Even if you're on the fence about Quake Champions, you might as well claim your copy now, just in case. Quake Champions will return to its...
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Some users who logged into Steam recently were being encouraged to pre-order Just Cause 4, the next game in the open-world adventure series by developer Avalanche Studios and publisher Square Enix. Normally a pre-order ad would not cause anyone to bat an eyebrow. In this case, however, Steam's listing came ahead of the game's anticipated announcement at E3. In other words, Steam is the source of a very big leak, though it is not the only one to do so. Right around the month ago, Walmart's web team in Canada posted a whole bunch of unreleased game listings with missing box art. One of the titles...
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Until recently, a remote code execution vulnerability in Steam sat unnoticed by Valve for at least a decade, leaving millions of users at risk of attack. Luckily for all involved, it seems that malicious actors were not privy to the security bug either. Valve has since released a patch that partially addresses the vulnerability, so even if an attacker does attempt to exploit it, taking over a victim's PC is highly unlikely. Tom Court, a security researcher with Context, the company that alerted Valve to the vulnerability, discussed the bug in detail in a blog post. He gave credit to Valve for quickly...
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Following a whirlwind of controversy over content versus free speech, Valve has decided to yank the game Active Shooter from Steam, but it didn't stop there. Valve also banned the developer Revived Games and publisher Acid from its popular digital distribution platform, which are actually one and the same in Ata Berdiyev, who Valve described as a "troll" with an unsavory history towards its customers. "We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher Acid from Steam," Valve said in a statement. "This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously...
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A controversial game has made its way to Valve's Steam store, and it is sure to spark a vigorous debate about common decency and what is acceptable as a freedom of expression. The game, Active Shooter, allows you to serve as a SWAT team member during an "active shooter" situation at a high school. While this might be a bit unsettling, given recent events in the US, that's not where it ends. The game features "dynamic roles", in which the player can also take on the role as the actual shooter, targeting innocent school children and teachers. Although the Steam listing for the game...
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It looks like Android fans have another thing they can hold over the heads of their iOS-using pals. The Steam Link app launched in beta form on Android earlier this month. The app had originally been approved by Apple to launch on iOS, but this week the planned launch was quashed by Apple when it reversed its decision and blocked the app's launch. Apple listed the reason for blocking the app as "business conflicts with app guidelines." There is no clarification on exactly what business guidelines Steam Link app ran afoul of. Speculation suggests that the issue was that the Steam Link app allows...
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It’s hard to believe it, but the original Unreal is 20 years old today… yes, twenty years old. The game was originally released on May 22nd, 1998 by GT Interactive and was of course the first to use the famed Unreal engine. If you’re getting on up there in age, you can likely recall fanboys proclaiming their love for either Unreal or Quake II, and the enthusiast community’s delight in eking the best framerates out of modern (at the time) Intel Pentium and AMD K6-2 processors, along with early standalone graphics accelerators. Epic Games is celebrating the 20th anniversary...
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