The good ol’ Steam Database is very rarely wrong, and today it’s proven that yet again with the reveal of the Steam Trading Cards beta.

Valve’s new system will allow users to collect cards from various games (participating games currently include CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Portal 2, Half-Life 2 and Don’t Starve). Each game will only drop up to half the available cards for a particular game, and therefore players must trade with each other to collect whole sets.

Collecting an entire set grants a Steam badge, which also grants you a special emoticon, an alternate background image to use on your profile page, the possibility of a discount coupon, and 100 XP which may increase your Steam level.

What’s a Steam level? Well, it’s a new system Valve are creating to “see how much someone has invested in their Steam account, and how valuable that user is to the rest of the Steam Community”. In other words, it’s a little number that displays on your profile, and you can level it up in a variety of ways other than trading cards, such as simply continuing to maintain an active Steam account over time.

Get all the details over here, and then read the FAQ by clicking here.

But what are ‘Steam Trading Cards’? Your guess is as good as mine: literally all that we have to go on is this database entry, which includes this image.

So — a trading card beta. Could it be for swapping CD keys legally between one another? We can already trade items, so it can’t be that.

Could it be an actual stand-alone Steam Trading Card game like Hearthstone for World of Warcraft? Mysterious mysteries. Sound off with your guesses in the comments below.

Source: PCGamesN

Free-to-play and single payment MMOs have been popping up on Steam for a while now, with games like The Secret World, PlanetSide 2 and The Lord of the Rings Online among the more prominent inclusions.

These titles will soon be joined by a range of ongoing payment games, with Valve today announcing that players “may now sign-up for, manage, cancel or renew game Subscription Plans at any time, online directly through Steam”.

The first game to benefit from the new arrangement is Darkfall: Unholy Wars from Greek studio Adventurine SA. A violent fantasy saga with a strong focus on PvP battles, it is the direct sequel to the developer’s 2009 release Darkfall Online.

This could be considered an ‘against the grain’ initiative in light of the industry’s gradual shift away from subscription MMOs. Perhaps the creator of Dota 2 hopes to utilise the system for a new or emerging game type?

Source: Steam

Steam have just launched their Indie Spring Sale today, and of course that means you, the consumer, can fill your basket with charming little titles at tiny little prices.

Titles on sale include The Binding of Isaac, down to $1.24, Castle Crashers down to $8.99, and The Legend of Grimrock at $7.50.

You can also sort by only the IGF finalists and winners, or look only at the PAX East games.

While you’re there, why not check out FTL, Deadlight, Garry’s Mod or Awesomenauts?

Source: Steam

Steam today unveiled their new Early Access section of the Steam Store, where you can see and buy into all the up-and-coming titles on the service.

Some of the games available to buy into are ones you already know such as ArmA III, and other smaller titles such as Gnomoria, a city-simulator run by gnomes, and Drunken Robot Pornography, a bullet-hell FPS where you shoot up robots and/or build your own to shoot up.

“We like to support and encourage developers who want to ship early, involve customers, and build lasting relationships that help everyone make better games,” says Valve about the service.

“This is the way games should be made.”

Source: Steam (thanks, Cas)

During an interview following last week’s BAFTA awards, Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell dropped some rather impressive figures about the company’s recent growth.

“There’s sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now,” Newell claimed.

“I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.

He went on to claim that DOTA 2 is so popular that it actually accounts for several percentage points of total internet traffic during its last update.

“And just so people understand how big this sort of scale is getting, we were generating 3.5 terabits per second during the last DOTA 2 update. That’s about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity.”

Well then! DOTA 2, everybody. It is the game with the most concurrent Steam users, after all.

Source: PC Gamer

Xi3, the company behind this tiny chassis that we all thought was the Steam Box, have released a trailer demonstrating the features of their little grapefruit-sized computer. They’re touting it as a one-size-fits-all solution with a modular setup and support for everything you love, but at a price tag starting at $900 (that’s the pre-order price, it’s $1000 normally) it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

The Piston, as this small device is now officially known, is set to launch this holiday season.

If you’re opted into the Steam client beta in your settings, then you’ll no doubt already have noticed a new and improved Community home page, along with a bunch of other changes.

The changes are part of an attempt to clean up the clutter that has arisen around the continued expansion of Community features, and include an improved drop-down navigation system to make it easier to find your favourite things faster.

A new ‘Artwork’ tab has also been added, in recognition of the fact that many users will wish to upload things that aren’t just screenshots. This will be rolling out to Valve games first and, if successful, will then move to other, third-party titles.

Source: Steam (thanks, PalZer0)

The news that Steam was now officially available for Linux has seemingly empowered many would-be Linux gamers around the world to get their act together, as the latest Steam Hardware Survey shows.

The results, posted by Valve, show an uptake in Linux usage from a combined 0.8% (across all Linux distros) to 2.02%, indicating a more-than-doubling over the total number of Linux users. Of course its only a mere percentage point when compared to the juggernaut that is Windows 7, but such a quick uptake in such a small time is undeniably impressive.

Speaking of Windows 7, that juggernaut has taken a very small downturn, dropping down to 69% of total users. Windows 8 however has made gains, indicating that perhaps gamers aren’t as opposed to the new OS as reports may have indicated.

Source: Steam via PC Gamer

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of how Google is getting ready to deploy their new Glass tech in a public test (for an enormous price), more on the upcoming stoush between AMD and Intel, and how one day — maybe soon — we’ll actually be able to lick the internet.

In news that is bound to warm the cockles of the PC gaming heart, Bohemia Interactive have revealed that upcoming ArmA III will be exclusive not only to PC, but to the Steam platform as well. Why? According to a post on their blog, they feel that limiting their release to Steam is the only way to make sure the game is available in 2013.

“Recent upgrades to Steamworks have made it an even more interesting option for us as developer and publisher,” writes BI’s Joris-Jan van ‘t Land. “These include Delta-patching and more direct administration of our games without a middle-man.”

(more…)

Steam was updated a short time ago with a brand new addition to the family: the official DayZ ArmA 2 mod page. Installing the mod should now — theoretically — be a simple, one-click operation and one that will automatically remain up to date as patches roll out.

The move comes as development ramps up on the DayZ standalone game, which is expected to supercede the original mod. This move may indicate that the DayZ team intend to keep the mod active beyond the release of the standalone, or at the very least that they’d like to archive it in an easily-accessible manner.

Source: Steam (thanks, Spkypwnsuall)