Do you remember when Valve had grand aspirations of taking over the gaming PC scene with Steam Machines? Not only did that never happen for various reasons, but it looks like Valve is finally ready to put the initiative in its right view mirror. Without any sort of fan fare, Valve has gone and removed the Steam...Read more...
Valve has announced a rather significant update to the SteamVR Beta that will be a boon to owners of both current and future virtual reality headsets. The SteamVR runtime has been upgraded with a new auto-resolution scaling routine that is able to enhance your visual experience based on how powerful the GPU is in your...Read more...
One of the most popular game franchises to ever grace the PC was Half-Life, which hailed from Valve. Fans have wanted to delve back into the world of Gordon Freeman for many years now, and have all but given up any hope of Half-Life 3. The flames of hope for Half-Life 3 are starting to be stoked again with Valve's...Read more...
Steam is the largest digital distribution platform for PC games. As such, its monthly hardware and software surveys provide a good way to put your finger on the pulse of the PC gaming sector in general, and to identify trends in the hardware space. Looking at the results for February, we can see that AMD is gaining...Read more...
Some big names are ponying up millions of dollars to own a piece of eMagin, a producer of miniature organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays that have mostly been deployed to military, medical, and industrial fields. In a recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), eMagin announced a new...Read more...
Given some of the major mergers and acquisitions we've seen in the past five, or even ten years, it's becoming increasingly difficult to be truly impressed or shocked about a move. But envision a headline saying that Microsoft acquired Valve. If you were a PC gamer, your heart would probably skip a few beats, and...Read more...
It is customary to reflect on the past, even if just for a brief moment, when a new year rolls around. So it goes with Valve, which has compiled a series of lists highlighting the best selling games of 2017 on Steam. They include the top selling games in terms of revenue, top selling new releases, best selling VR...Read more...
Valve's love affair with Bitcoin is going through a rough patch even though the cryptocurrency was trading at $10,000 in late September and even higher today. Valve announced that as of December 6 it had decided to stop supporting Bitcoin as a payment method for games on its Steam platform. The specific reasons that...Read more...
Playerunknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) has turned out to be a massive hit for the developers and it is one of the most popular games in the world right now. Currently, the game is only offered on Steam for PC gamers, but a console version is in the works. PUBG recently passed 1.5 million concurrent users on Steam, which put it at over one hundred Read more...
Sometimes in the entertainment world, we don't receive all the answers we want. Take the '80s flick "The Last Starfighter"; geeks of that generation have waited for a sequel to that film for decades. The same can be said for the Half-Life franchise, a hugely popular game franchise from Valve and from all indications...Read more...
A pricing war has been initiated in the virtual reality (VR) headset market. Facebook struck the first blow back in July, and now HTC is getting in on the discount bandwagon thanks to a $200 price cut on its Vive VR headset. In this case, the price falls from a lofty $799 down to a slightly more manageable...Read more...
If you happened to tune into Valve's "The International" Dota 2 esports tournament, you were treated to an announcement that seemingly came out of nowhere. Without any prior rumors to ruin the surprise, Valve teased a new game called Artifact, which is a card game themed after Dota 2. Beyond that tidbit, there is not...Read more...
Last Thursday was a banner moment for honest gamers, and a ban hammer moment for tens of thousands of rotten cheaters. That is because Valve lifted its mighty VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban hammer and with one mighty blow, it obliterated more than 40,000 Steam gamers who had been caught cheating. It was the the largest...Read more...
Augmented and virtual reality is starting to take off now that we have computing hardware that is powerful enough to provide a compelling experience. However, interacting with a virtual environment can be a bit tricky if you don’t have the proper controllers to supplement your experience.
The Oculus Rift has its...Read more...
Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) is upping its security game. DOTA 2 ranked matchmaking will soon require players to enter a phone number upon registration and Valve hopes that this will cut down on the amount of “smurfing”.
First off, what is “smurfing”? In the DOTA world, smurfing is when a player creates a new...Read more...
In the VR space for the PC, it is largely a two-horse race between Facebook-owned Oculus and its Rift headset and the HTC Vive, the latter of which has the backing of Valve. Interestingly enough, it appears that Valve is also working with LG Electronics on yet another VR headset solution, one that will utilize SteamVR...Read more...
Five years after announcing Steam Greenlight, Valve today said that it will be pulling the plug on the “democratic” system that allows Steam users to choose which game is worthy enough to be vetted for inclusion via the software distribution platform.
Valve says that it has learned some key lessons from Greenlight...Read more...
Valve releases more updates to Steam than we care to count, but the latest one, which dropped over the weekend, is going to make a lot of people very happy. With this update, players can finally move their games from one location to another, pain-free.
Power users have been able to move their games via manual...Read more...
It’s not very often that we get lengthy commentary from Gabe Newell, Valve’s reclusive CEO, but things definitely took a turn for the better yesterday when he took place in a reddit AMA session. As expected, Newell took questions on a number of topics near and dear to the hearts of gamers, including the mythical...Read more...
Microsoft may have caused a few grumbles when it limited support for DirectX 12 to just Windows 10 and not earlier versions of Windows, but even so, gamers do not seem to be holding a grudge. Just the opposite, more than half of all Steam users are rocking Windows 10, according to the most recent hardware and software...Read more...
You have to hand it to Valve, it created an ecosystem that virtually solved the tug-of-war over digital rights management (DRM) between publishers and consumers, making everyone happy in the process (mostly, anyway). As the largest digital distribution platform for games, Steam puts Valve in a unique position to pulse...Read more...
"Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you!” You hear that console lovers? The PC Master Race sees your Xbox Store discounts and laughs out of pity. That’s because the wildly popular online game service Steam has discounts of its own to appease gamers that know that a mouse and keyboard is...Read more...