Items tagged with Valve
Earlier this month Valve announced that it would be releasing a new app called Steam Link allowing you to play PC games on your mobile device. Steam Link was promised to land by the end of May and now the Steam Link beta is available via Google Play. The app does exactly what was promised; it allows you to stream PC games via Steam if the smartphone is connected to a PC close by over a 5GHz WiFi network. The PC also must be connected directly to your router via an Ethernet cable. Steam Link won’t function over an LTE connection, which means no streamed PC games from across town. Controlling the games on your mobile device can be accomplished with the Steam Controller or to other Bluetooth...
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Valve has enabled support for Bluetooth on the Steam Controller via a Steam Client Beta update. The update brings support for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity and Valve points out that the BLE feature is required to use the Steam Link mobile PC game streaming app that will be launching soon. Gamers can change between wireless modes when the update is applied, and Valve gives some tips on when you will want to use BLE. When streaming games to iOS or Android devices via the Steam Link app, you must use BLE connectivity. You can also use BLE when connecting the Steam Controller to a tablet or laptop that lacks a USB port of course as well. BLE will also work if you have misplaced your...
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Valve just dropped a bit of exciting gaming news on us this afternoon. The company announced its new Steam Link app, which will allow you to stream PC or Mac games from your main computer to your smartphone, tablet, or even to your Apple TV. Valve says that the app will initially be available for iOS, Android (as a beta initially) and tvOS starting on May 21st. However, game streaming (from the host PC or Mac) will only be able to take place over a 5GHz home Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection for gaming. But even with that limitation, you'll have access to your full library of games. In addition, you'll be able to control games on your iOS device using a MFi-certified controller or with the official...
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When one of the industry's biggest game publishers acquires a little indie developer, there's probably going to be a bit of a gasp from that developer's fanbase. All too often, we've seen truly great developers be swallowed by a huge beast (EA we're looking at you), and before long, those same developers disappear into the void. With Valve's latest acquisition, though, hopefully we can have more confidence that the team will be left in tact to continue its success, only now with more resources. Campo Santo, makers of a brilliant game called Firewatch, has just been snapped up by Valve, though the details of the deal currently under wraps, as Valve operates as a private company. All 12 of...
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In a blog post, Valve vowed to continue developing and supporting its Linux-based SteamOS even though "Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves." Valve delivered the message in the wake of news spreading that it removed the Steam Machines link from the Hardware pull-down menu in Steam, and is no longer selling systems through its storefront, instead now linking to external websites. Valve chalked the removal of Steam Machines as part of a "routine cleanup." While there remains a section of a Steam Store that still shows Steam Machines, Valve made the decision to de-list the heading from its Hardware pull-down menu based on user traffic, or lack thereof. "We're still working hard on...
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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 Machines section from Steam, as well as from the Hardware pull-down menu at the top of the Steam store. Now when you click or hover on Hardware, it only shows links for the Steam Controller, Steam Link, and HTC Vive. You can actually still find Steam Machines by doing a search in Steam or by loading up the old landing spot manually. However, the actual hardware is gone, now replaced by...
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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 current gaming rig. So how does this work? According to Valve's Alexa Vlachos, SteamVR will automatically determine the speed of your GPU and will choose a resolution based on what it is capable of rendering. Vlachos says that many gamers have incredibly powerful graphics cards that simply aren't being utilized to their fullest potential in VR applications. Now, however, SteamVR...
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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 Gabe Newell having announced that Valve is "going to start shipping games again." The first game is certainly not what fans hoped for; it's a game called Artifact, a Dota 2-themed card game that was announced last year. The good news is that Newell did clearly state that isn’t the only game Valve has plans for. Newell said that Artifact was "the first of several games" that Valve...
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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 ground in both CPUs and GPUs, as it is no doubt benefiting from newer architectures on both fronts. Starting with CPUs, the percentage of Steam users running AMD hardware is on the rise, after dipping slightly in January. AMD gained just over a full percentage point, and now accounts for 9.09 percent of all gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD's rise coincides almost exactly with Intel's...
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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 stock issuance with Apple, LG, Valve, and others investing over $10 million into the relatively small outfit. The company released a subsequent statement indicating an upsized $11.5 million underwritten public offering, of which it expects to net $10.6 million. It intends to use the proceeds for "working capital and general corporate purposes." More specifically, eMagin has been increasingly...
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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 after recovering from the fainting, you'd be hazily hitting up Snopes. This exact acquisition has been floating around rumorspace for a very long time, but recently, a report that Microsoft was looking to acquire either EA or Valve began to make the possibility feel more real. Either would be an enormous buy for Microsoft, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that the company...
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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 titles, top Early Access graduates, and the top played games, the latter of which is measured by the highest peak of simultaneous players. Unfortunately Valve did not go into granular detail, so instead of ranking the best selling games from top to bottom with a gross revenue figure attached, it broke them down into award categories—Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. There doesn't...
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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 Valve says it won’t take Bitcoin anymore are high fees and volatility. Valve wrote, "In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year,...
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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 thousand more concurrent players that Valve's own Dota 2 free-to-play game has been able to rack up. Dota 2 hit its concurrent player record of 1,291,320 in March of 2016 and hasn't surpassed that record since them. In the history of Steam, only Dota 2 and PUBG have passed the million concurrent player mark. PUBG's latest record is a huge gain compared to...
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