Gamers are making half a million a year from selling game mods on the Steam Workshop. Not many, mind you, but just like the existence of aliens… it’s possible. Gabe Newell now wants to extend the concept to the Steam store itself.

Gabe sees Steam as just a boring old store, and wants to change it into a series of mini-stores, with games being sold in personal, individual stores created by gamers themselves. To be quite fair, he didn’t mention giving them any money, and right now, it’s just a pie in the sky.

But given the success of the Steam Workshop, could Steam actually become a store where gamers make money from selling games? “I’d buy stuff from Yahtzee”, says Gabe.

Valve have officially announced the release of Steam for Linux, following months of beta testing. The client is now available to download from the Ubuntu software Centre.

To celebrate, Valve are holding a sale on all Linux games until 5AM AEDT on February 22. You can pick up Amnesia: The Dark Descent for $5, the original Half-Life for a paltry $2.50, or Bastion for just $3.75, among others.

Team Fortress 2 players who play from their Linux installs of the game will receive a free Tux item for use as well, so get cracking! That offer is only valid until the end of the month.

Source: Steam

Steam staff struggle to cope with the enormous number of submissions for publication they receive, and Steam Greenlight, a process which allows users to preview and vote on possible releases, was one solution to this issue. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working; speaking at DICE Summit 2013, Valve founder Gabe Newell expressed his doubts about the service.

“Right now we have inside of Steam we have a dictatorship. It’s probably bad for the Steam community, in the long run, not to move to a different way of thinking about that. In other words, we should stop being a dictator and move towards much more participatory, peer-based methods of sanctioning player behavior,” he said, according to Gamasutra.

“Greenlight is a bad example of an election process. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we could just do away with Greenlight completely, because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice.”

Newell’s proposed solution seems to be user-curated stores, something he began championing at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January.

“I don’t know about you, but I think the store is really boring. It’s like this super middle-ground marketing thing. Like, oh, here’s a list of features in our game,” he said. “The stores instead should become user-generated content. Other companies can take advantage of this as well, but if a user can create his own store – essentially add an editorial perspective and content on top of the purchase process – then we’ve created a mechanism where everybody, in the same way we’ve seen a huge upsurge of user-generated content with hats, we think that there’s a lot of aggregate value that can be created by allowing people to create stores.

“I’d buy stuff from Yahtzee. I would buy everything from Old Man Murray.”

Source: GameSpy

DRM is one of the most controversial issues faced by avid PC gamers, attested to by the almost daily debates in our forums and our article comment threads. From the games that require always-on internet connections and registered accounts, to the content management platforms we now rely on to serve us new titles and keep older ones automatically updated, it’s obvious that we’re now stuck with it — at least in some form — for the near future.  But publishers are rapidly realising that given enough incentives, we’re willing to look the other way…

The news that Halo 4 would almost certainly not be coming to PC was a kick in the teeth to fans of the series, but now it looks like — just maybe — things may be set to change on the Halo/PC front in the future.

Listings pulled from the Steam Database, which are almost universally accurate indicators of future plans, indicate that not only Halo 3 but also Halo 2 and the original Halo: Combat Evolved are on their way to Valve’s service.

Also spotted in the database are listings for Fez, Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, Shadow Warrior Complete Edition, Dyad, Quantum Conundrum 2, The Witness and Second Life.

Check out the full list of uncovered items over at NeoGAF.

Source: GAF via Gamechup

If you’ve always wanted to share your wisdom with the world about how to be the very best (like no-one ever was), then you can now do so, and all from the safety of your own Steam Community window.

The Steam Guides have now launched, and users have already contributed a surprising number of guides during the beta, such as this one about how happiness works in Civilization V, or perhaps this basic guide to Torchlight II.

To access guides, simply open up the Steam overlay while playing a game and hit the ‘Guides’ tab, or visit the Community Hub for any particular game like normal. From there, you can also create a guide. Enjoy!

Yesterday we posted that Utah-based hardware manufacturer Xi3 had received investment from Valve to build a Steam box in one of their grapefruit-sized modular chassis. Today, however, Gabe Newell has explained that there will be multiple different Steam boxes, some from third-party manufacturers, and some from Valve themselves (an early prototype of which is pictured here).

“We think that there are pluses and minuses to open systems that could make things a little messier, it’s much more like herding cats, so we try to take the pieces where we’re going to add the best value and then encourage other people to do it,” said Newell in a lengthy interview with The Verge “So it tends to mean that a lot of people get involved. We’re not imposing a lot of restrictions on people on how they’re getting involved.”

“We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination.”

In the same interview, Newell also discussed how he feels that biometric controllers are the way of the future, and the place of Steam as a user-generated content provider, as well has his continued disappointment in Windows 8. It’s worth a read if you have the time, so take a look.

Source: The Verge

Valve’s Steam Box, which is expected to be in living rooms by 2013, is looking increasingly likely to be housed in an Xi3 Modular Computer Chassis, about the size of a grapefruit (which you can see in the picture, there).

Xi3 is a Utah-based hardware company, and they’ve just dropped a press release which claims Valve has invested in the company for the creation of a “new development stage product designed specifically to support both Steam® and its Big Picture™ mode for residential and LAN party computer gaming on larger high-def screens”.

“Housed in the uniquely shaped, grapefruit-size Xi3® Modular™ Computer chassis, this new development stage product is being showcased this week at the 2013 International CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada in booth #20425 in the Las Vegas Convention Center.”

“Xi3 also announced today it has received an investment from Valve Corporation. Xi3′s new development stage computer game system is also being showcased in Valve’s booth (#25730) at CES 2013. No additional details about Xi3′s new system or Valve’s investment in Xi3 will be released at this time.”

If the press release is true, we should know more about Valve’s hardware — including, hopefully, an official announcement from the company itself — later tonight or tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Source: Kotaku

A report from German tech site Golem.de indicates that Valve’s upcoming living room Steam Box is set to use Linux, and is slated for an official reveal this year.

According to the German site, Valve engineer Ben Krasnow confirmed at an event recently that the box would run on Linux only, and not include a Windows install — perhaps not an unsurprising decision given the licensing fees that would be involved in Windows, but interesting to have confirmation nevertheless.

Krasnow also hinted at more “secret projects” in the pipeline for 2013 that Valve was very excited to reveal. More information is expected to be announced at the GDC this year in March, or later at E3.

Source: Golem.de via N4G

We’ve just been alerted to the fact that somebody has apparently pulled a fast one. If you try to visit steampowered.com.au you’ll see it for yourself, as you’re redirected it to EA’s Origin store.

A WHOIS lookup on the domain shows it’s registered to someone called “David Harry” at Netfleet.com.au, with nameservers operating out of Fabulous.com, so it doesn’t look like an official EA job but rather the work of some delightful internet humourist.

So! There you go. Well done, whoever that was.

Source: Thanks, Alex!

I awoke this morning to the sound of my wallet shrieking in pain, spinning wildly around on my desk and occasionally spraying out a fine mist of blood. Demonic possession, you say? Actually, quite the opposite: the Steam Christmas Sales have kicked off, and it’s time for wallets everywhere to begin their annual suffering.

The sale is running from now until January 5, and has opened with deals like 50% off Hitman: Absolution, 50% off Borderlands 2, and Wargame: European Escalation for just $9.99.

Meanwhile, flash sales up today include War of the Roses for $15 (next three hours only!), Natural Selection 2 for $10 and Batman: Arkham City for just $7.50. Madness.

Hit up the Steam Store for more deals.

Valve are very happily announcing that the Steam for Linux beta is now open for everybody to enjoy. This isn’t a final release of the Linux client, but is a great opportunity for Linux gamers to start getting their game on, and just before Christmas too.

A catalogue of Linux-supported games is now available to browse, including titles like Team Fortress 2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Serious Sam 3: BFE and Trine 2. If you’d like to chat with other users, head over to the Steam for Linux Community Group, or submit bugs via the GitHub repository.

NVIDIA users can grab the latest drivers for Linux here.

Source: Thanks to Ken for the tip!