valve

Seriously, Valve, you're beginning to make Steam look more and more like Origin every day.

Valve rolled out its pay-for-mods service on Thursday to universal ire from the PC gaming community. In theory, the system is less dubious, if it weren't for the fact that Valve will pocket a massive percentage of the mod charge, leaving the actual modders with precious little profit to their name.

Let's say a modder makes a Skyrim mod that they want to charge $4.99 for. Setting aside the fact that DLC microtransactions are already a plague on the gaming industry, the maker of said Skyrim will only ever get $1.25 for their efforts, while the remaining $3.74 goes straight to Valve for doing no work whatsoever.

This system also introduces an endless quagmire of problems for modders who use elements of other people's mods to make their own. Case in point: the Skyrim fishing mod made by Chesko. As it turns out, Chesko used elements of an idle character animations mod made by Fore. So, that means that Fore is entitled to a percentage of the profits from Chesko's mod on top of Valve's already egregious 75% cut, right? If so, what percentage does Fore get?

As you can see, the whole system quickly becomes a mess, seriously curtailing the resources of modders like Chesko, and infringing on the intellectual property rights of Fore. No matter what happens though, Valve wins and we lose. Such a sleazy cash grab is uncharacteristic of our lord Gaben, but some say it was bound to happen eventually. As Harvey Dent once said, "something something die a hero, something something the villain."

Valve officially announced Source 2 at GDC this year, and they're giving it away for free:

The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games. We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform.

Provided they're on the same wifi network, Valve's new Steam Link will allow you to stream your Steam library to your TV so you can play from the comfort of your couch. The listing for the Steam Link has disappeared from the Steam store, but you can view Google's cache of it here.  The device is priced at $50 and launches this November.

A developer version of HTC's new headset, powered by SteamVR, will be out some time this spring, and the retail version is due out for the holiday season of this year.

From the official site:

THE VISUALS
A 1,200 by 1,080 pixel screen in front of each eye, with refresh rates of a blistering 90 frames per second, displays photorealistic imagery that fills your field of vision in all directions, eliminating the jitter common to previous VR technologies and transporting you to another world.

The team at Team Fortress teased this moonbase image a while back, and it seems the time might be upon us to see the real deal:

Check in with the countdown at around 5 PM Pacific to see what it is.

Watch the full length documentary following professional Dota 2 players through the first Dota 2 international tournament.

Bring on the self published titles!

FREE TO PLAY is a feature-length documentary that follows three professional gamers from around the world as they compete for a million dollar prize in the first Dota 2 International Tournament. In recent years, E Sports has surged in popularity to become one of the most widely-practiced forms of competitive sport today. A million dollar tournament changed the landscape of the gaming world and for those elite players at the top of their craft, nothing would ever be the same again. Produced by Valve, the film documents the challenges and sacrifices required of players to compete at the highest level.

NeoGAF user crazy buttocks on a train has come across what they claim is a confidential presentation from Valve showing images of Left 4 Dead 2 rebuilt in a new Source 2 engine. This long rumored new engine could be the basis for L4D3, so the internet has collectively worked itself into a frenzy of LFD3 rumors. Don't get too excited; we all know Valve can't count to three.

Valve's got a lot of ideas on how to improve virtual reality gaming, but for now, their prototype will remain just that, even though it's said to be the best in the world. Instead of releasing their hardware, Valve is collaborating with Oculus Rift:

According to Engadget, these companies are signed on to develop Steam Machines.

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

Steam recently passed 65 million active accounts (Xbox Live has 48 million), and the Fall sale has pushed their concurrent user count over 7 million. DOTA 2 is still holding out as the most popular game on Steam, with over 500,000 concurrent players. The PC Master Race is going strong!

Now you can! Steam has introduced a fairly straight-forward review system that allows you to write reviews for games that appear on their store pages. You'll also be able to rate other reviews, and if you happen to take a liking to a particular reviewer, you will be able to take a look at all their reviews. Now you too can be a hardcore game critic!!!!1

From the announcement:

Steam in-home streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the player's computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player's computer to the game process on the remote computer.

This means you'll be able to play a game that's running on your gaming pc on your terrible old laptop, so every time you get killed in a multiplayer game, you'll have to wonder if that dude just sniped you from his toilet.