In order to share your library, you'll need to authorize both the computer and account of the person you wish to share games with. Under this new system, you'll be able to authorize up to ten account/computer combinations.
Want to trade games? You better plan ahead; there's now a 30 day wait period between time of purchase and tradability in an effort to deter fraudulent resellers.
From the announcement:
All new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser's inventory will be untradable for 30 days. The gift may still be gifted at any time. The only change is to trading.
We've made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We're hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser's payment method.
A thirty day wait period makes sense by this logic, but it sure has messed up my holiday trading. But don't worry, any gifting you're planning to do out of the kindness of your heart remains intact.
Steam's got a massive free weekend today through 1 pm on Sunday, with 10 free titles to play all weekend long:
Awesomenauts
Blade Symphony
Company of Heroes 2
Don't Starve
Grid 2
Injustice
Killing Floor
Payday 2
Trine 2
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Shut up and take my m--er, bandwith!
300 lucky beta testers will soon be receiving their steam machines to begin testing. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be able to try out the Steam operating system:
SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships. It will be downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs. (But unless you're an intrepid Linux hacker already, we're going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.)
¡ɹǝpun uʍop ǝɹɐ sǝɔᴉɹd ǝsǝɥʇ
Are you ready for this Attack on Your Wallet?
From the article:
Valve's added an option for developers and publishers to disallow cross-region gifting and trading. In addition to the obvious ramifications, this may pull the rug out from people who use those features to get around arbitrarily raised regional pricing and/or censorship.
Mouse & keyboard PC gamers, do you want to try the Steam controller? Would you ever switch?
Besiege is arguably the best $7 you will ever spend on a game.
After previously stating that the Alienware Steam Machine wouldn't be customizable, Alienware has clarified that consumers can upgrade components, but the system isn't designed with that in mind:
The Alienware Steam Machine, announced at CES, is designed to deliver a great gaming experience in the living room and we will enable customers to upgrade components. Considering we've purposefully designed the Alienware Steam Machine to be smaller than the latest generation consoles, upgrading the internal components will not be as easy as compared to other platforms, such as the Alienware X51, but we will not prevent a customer from upgrading.
Does this change your opinion on their Steam Machine?
In an interview on what makes Valve tick, Gabe Newell had this to say about Steam and the company's direction:
When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game.
Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do with your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."
In retrospect, it was a great idea, right?
I don't know Gabe, as much as I appreciate what Valve has done for gaming, I for one would really like you to waste some time on Half Life 3.
Washington Post via NeoGAF
