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.

Valve’s stable of employees includes a lot of people who might not be considered traditional game designers — and experimental psychologist Mike Ambinder is one of them. He revealed at a NeuroGaming Conference last week that Valve had been working on a number of ways to measure biofeedback from players, including levels of sweat and eye-tracking.

Ambinder explained that the company had conducted experiments including the modification of Left4Dead gameplay based on players sweat levels, with one such game involving players having less time to defeat enemies as their level of agitation increased. A version of Portal 2 controlled by player eye movement also reportedly worked quite well.

“One thing we are very interested in is the notion of biofeedback and how it can be applied to game design,” said Ambinder. “There is potential on both sides of the equation, both for using physiological signals to quantify an emotional state while people are playing the game.”

“The more interesting side of the equation is what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself.”

Source: VentureBeat

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)

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 EA is exploring hooking Frostbite 2 into the Oculus Rift, what to expect from the next Havok physics engine, and how engineers at Caltech have created self-healing circuitry that can rebuild itself in a matter of microseconds.

The Xi3 Piston modular computer, which we wrote about yesterday, was supposed to be one of the first Steam Boxes — and in fact earlier this year they proudly announced that Valve had invested in them for the creation of such a thing.

Fast forward to March, and things aren’t so certain. Valve’s Doug Lombardi provided a statement to Eurogamer distancing themselves from the box, saying “Valve began some exploratory work with Xi3 last year, but currently has no involvement in any product of theirs.”

What does this mean for the Steam Box? Nobody can be sure, but we do know that Valve are working on their own hardware, some of which was detailed here. More news as it comes.

Source: Eurogamer

Microsoft’s president of Interactive Entertainment Business, Don Mattrick, has admitted that while Valve might be “doing some innovative stuff”, he doesn’t see their Steam Box as a serious competitor to what Microsoft is offering the living-room gamer.

“I love Gabe, I was there for his lifetime achievement award so it’s wonderful to see what they’re creating,” said Mattrick, but commented that Microsoft’s — and everybody else’s — offerings were “a little bit richer” than what Valve could deliver.

“The scale of products and things that are being brought to market are probably a little bit richer when I look at Sony, Nintendo, Apple, and Google,” Mattrick said.

“There’s a certain level of technical and production competency that people have to get through because we’re trying to curate great experiences,” said Mattrick when asked about moving to something similar to Valve’s more open model. “We’re trying to make sure that what exists upon our service on our system is done to a quality level and has interest for people who are likely to use it.”

Source: The Verge

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 researchers at MIT have created genetic circuits which function as Boolean logic gates, how we’re expecting a 7nm process technology as soon as 2017, and how Gamestop feels about the idea of consoles that block used game sales.

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.

Reports are circulating today that Valve has made cuts to its workforce, with a rumoured 25 employees apparently let go including high profile employees like hardware lead Jeri Ellsworth — last mentioned to be working on Valve’s controller prototypes, who tweeted overnight that she “got fired today”.

Gamasutra, reporting on the matter, claims from speaking to affected employees that they were “asked not to speak about specifics”, and that they are lead to believe the layoffs were “driven more by company challenges than by individual performance issues”.

Valve’s head boss-man Gabe Newell has taken the unusual step of directly responding to reports of the firing, releasing a statement to Engadget that reads: “No, we aren’t canceling any projects. No, we aren’t changing any priorities or projects we’ve been discussing.”

“No, this isn’t about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We’re not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn’t working here.”

Source: Gamasutra / Engadget

During a carefully-prepared presentation at the DICE Summit overnight, Gabe Newell and JJ Abrams took the stage to discuss the relative merits of storytelling across both film and game mediums — before ending on the announcement that they were going to be teaming up to work together on bringing a Half-Life or Portal adaptation to the big screen.

JJ Abrams, who was recently announced to be directing the first Disney-owned Star Wars film, also revealed that there were plans to work with Valve to bring a new game to market based on Abrams’ ideas.

Astute readers may recall that Valve worked with Abrams on creating an ‘interactive trailer’ of sorts for his 2011 film Super 8 within Portal 2, a collaboration which apparently inspired further discussion on ways the two could work together to improve storytelling across both mediums.

Source: Wired (Thanks, no-gun!

The Steam Box is on its way, says Gabe Newell, but its existence is all about doing us a favour, by beating Apple out of the living room, he told a class at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs — and not about Valve trying to beat out the console market. Let me explain.

If Apple finds its way to a living room platform before the PC does, Gaben suggests, they will shut out the open-source creativity and focus on user-generated content that Steam is famous for, and replace it with what he calls a “dumbed down living room platform”.

“The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform,” said Gabe. “I think that there’s a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging — I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily.”

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