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.

EA exploring avenues for delivering Frostbite directly into your eyeballs

Frostbite 2, the engine behind Battlefield 3 and Dragon Age 3 may well be getting Oculus Rift support, Eurogamer reports. In an email conversation with Neil Schneider over at MTBS3D, DICE Creative Director for Frostbite Frank Vitz confirmed that an enthusiastic portion of the Frostbite team are looking into the possibility of having the engine worth with the Oculus Rift, and claims to be “one of the guys on the frostbite team pushing hard for it. I am really eager to see how the Oculus Rift works with Frostbite.”

Vitz is careful to make it clear that this is very much an exploratory action at this stage, and implies that that the development kits that they will be working with are owned by members of the team, rather than EA, “I have one of the first Rift dev kits coming my way in March. We have an internal community eager to work on it… I know of at least four kits on order,” he says. Vitz is cautiously optimistic, saying “There are multiple titles in the works that would be awesome with the Rift. Of course it will be the responsibility of each game team to ensure that their game works in S3D and with the Rift if it proves to be viable.”

He mentions that the basic integration with Frostbite 2 should be “pretty straight forward,” but that getting 3D to work with “different kinds of game play cameras,” can be difficult and that he has “worked with several VR headsets in the past and they all fell short.” (Thanks to Darren for sending this in)

Nvidia to provide PhysX and APEX support to Sony PlayStation 4

Nvidia have announced via press release that they are providing PhysX and APEX support for the Sony PlayStation 4. The traditionally GPU-punishing physics technologies are used for “collision detection and simulation of rigid bodies, clothing, fluids, particle systems,” and will be actively supported by Nvidia. Despite the fact that Nvidia state in the press release that these technologies perform best on “any CUDA® architecture-enabled NVIDIA GPU, GeForce 8-series or higher,” the PlayStation 4 is reported to be shipping with an AMD APU, and a Radeon-based graphics adaptor.

Havok Physics to get even more physical in next version

In more physics tech news, Havok have announced the next-gen version of their prolific middleware physics solution, Havok Physics. The next version of Havok is designed to support next-gen consoles, and modern PC configurations, while maintaining support for current generation systems. According to Andrew Bond, Vice President of Technology at Havok, “Beta versions of the technology have been in the hands of a number of leading developers for some time and we have seen dramatic performance gains with simulations running twice as fast or more, and using up to 10 times less memory.

Additionally the new core’s performance is extremely predictable, eliminating performance spikes. We are genuinely excited to see how game designers will harness the additional power that we are offering with this release.” These claims are backed up in the press release by Laurent Gorga, Technical Director at 2K Czech who says “we’ve been blown away by how Havok’s new physics technology is able to make highly efficient utilization of all available hardware cores with a very lean runtime memory footprint.” Havok make no mention of new engine features, but the performance improvements alone make the prospect of physics-heavy simulations far less daunting for a wider range of hardware profiles.

Valve and Xi3 curtly tango atop the incorporeal Steam Box

In a recent statement, Valve seemed to be distancing itself from Xi3 and the Piston console, saying “Valve began some exploratory work with Xi3 last year, but currently has no involvement in any product of theirs.” In a prepared response, Xi3 Corporation President, CEO, and founder Jason A. Sullivan said, “We reaffirm the fact that we received an investment from Valve Corporation (as we previously disclosed during the 2013 International CES trade show), and we did so with Valve’s written permission.” He goes on, “Second, we were asked to build a product specifically for Valve, and both companies showcased this product – the Piston console – in their respective booths at CES 2013.”

He then went on to explain the distancing, “the assumption of many in the media has been that Piston is the ‘official’ Steam Box,” said Sullivan. “We’ve never said that and neither has Valve. That hasn’t changed. But just because Valve may not ‘currently’ have any ‘involvement with any product of (ours)’ doesn’t mean that such involvement won’t exist in the future.” He closes with a cheeky invitation, “what Valve does or doesn’t do with its Steam Box will be up to them. So Gabe, it’s up to you. The ball is in your court.”

Self-healing chipsets could be the harbinger of our doom, but will be super-convenient until then

Last week we learned about growing semiconductors, and this week we continue inexorably toward the robo-destruction of humanity with the discovery of self-healing circuits. Engineers from the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science, have developed a series of self-healing integrated circuits that can automatically recover from damage that would render other circuits inoperable. Whether it is something as simple as unreliable battery power, to full transistor failure, these self-healing circuits are able to automatically work around the problem transistors in less than a second.

As engineers are wont to do, the Caltech boffins tested the chips by subjecting them to multiple blasts from a high-power laser, “It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits,” says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. “We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance.” The full results of the tests are available in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

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.

Your body is a temple, and could one day be a computer

Synthetic biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, have developed a set of simple genetic circuits which function similarly to the Boolean AND, OR, and NAND logic gates that form the basis of all modern complex computing algorithms.

James Collins, a synthetic biologist of the Boston University in Massachusetts and the inventor of the genetic ‘toggle switch’ that makes all of this research possible, told nature.com that “these developments will more readily enable one to create programmable cells with decision-making capabilities for a variety of applications.”

Timothy Lu, one of the synthetic biologists at MIT responsible for the study, says that the approach could be useful in biotechnology. Manufacturers could grow cell cultures that could permanently start the production of a drug, while others could halt production when an arbitrary threshold has been reached.

32 nanometre process technology? Pshaw. 7nm could be here as early as 2017

GlobalFoundries, the world’s second-largest independent semiconductor foundry, announced their long term plans at the Common Platform Technology Forum earlier this month, including their goal of developing incomprehensibly small 7 nanometre process technology by 2017, reports Xbit Labs.

Current generation Core i7 processors make use of a 32nm process, which is widely considered to be an efficient platform for today’s computing requirements. GlobalFoundries plans to initiate production using 20nm process technology in 2013, which will then be used to enable production of hybrid 14nm/20nm process technology in 2014. This will lead the way to hybrid 10nm/14nm process tech in 2015, all in an effort to make it to 7nm, a process so small it has me struggling to find a word that will describe it more accurately than “miniscule”.

Gabe Newell hitches Valve’s cart to PC-to-TV streaming

During his Day 2 keynote at the DICE 2013 summit, Gabe Newell made it quite clear that he believes that PC-to-TV streaming will be the standard method for playing high-spec PC games in our living rooms, and will arrive in the form of three tiers.

According to Newell, the “good” tier would initially involve a traditional PC, dedicated to in-home streaming. It would only need to be powerful enough to stream video to any HDTV on your network, and should only initially cost around $100. This price would eventually drop to zero as manufacturers begin to build the capability directly into HDTVs.

The middle, or “better” tier, would take the form of a small, low-powered PC connected to your TV, which seems to most closely resemble the Steam Box that Valve and Xi3 announced in January. Newell went on to note that Apple already have a significant foothold in this tier, due to their “huge unit advantage,” and that “Apple has a much more natural progression into the living room with fundamentally industry-to-industry competitive advantages that I think are more threatening to the PC moving into the living room than anything that would be happening on the console side.”

Finally, Newell described the “best” tier, a more traditional scenario of a standalone gaming desktop that users can build and upgrade as they wish. He believes this to be the most scalable solution, noting that “if you want a $4000 living room box, I’m sure there are lots of PC vendors who are going to send that to you.”

Apple and Samsung: Enemies with benefits

Apple CEO Tim Cook was initially opposed to suing Samsung for patent infringement as part of Steve Jobs’ “thermo-nuclear war” approach to keeping clones off the market, reports Reuters. Citing the role that Samsung plays in providing critical components of both the iPhone and iPad, Cook opposed Jobs in his litigious stance against the manufacturer of the ever-increasingly popular Galaxy series of Android-based smartphones. Analysts report that Apple bought some $8 billion worth of parts from Samsung in 2012, so it would be safe to assume that an all-out war between the two would make Cook nervous.

Despite the fact that Cook would “highly prefer to settle,” he has remained steadfast in his obligation to see the lawsuits through to completion, and has stated that he believes that Apple’s competitors need to “invent their own stuff.”

According to GameStop, 60% of customers won’t buy a new console that blocks used games

GameStop CFO Rob Lloyd recently defended the used game trade during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference (as reported by VG247), stating that “Consumers want the ability to play pre-owned games, they want portability in their games; they want to play physical games. And to not have those things would be a substantial reason for them not to purchase a new console.”

Lloyd made reference to research conducted by GameStop which backs up his claims, “I think it was 60% of customers who said they wouldn’t buy a new console [if it blocks used games],” he said. It should be noted that it is unclear exactly how this research was conducted, but it is likely that the results come from self-selected customers filling out an online questionnaire.

Forbes’ reported that nearly 40% of their price estimate (based on their third fiscal quarter 2012 earnings report) for GameStop was attributed to 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.

Making money with user content

Right now, there are two main ways gamers can make money with user content—the Steam Workshop, and YouTube.

The Steam Workshop allows you sell your own individual creations for moddable games like Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2. However, these must be your own creations—you can’t rip off anyone else, or risk being permanently banned from the Workshop.

Youtube lets its “partners” (which is anyone who’s signed up to be a partner) receive a (miniscule) portion of the ad revenue from those annoying YouTube ads shown at the start of videos. The more popular a video is, the more likely it is to have ads, and the more people these ads reach.

A YouTube partner example is FPSRussia, whose entertaining videos of blowing things up with no safety standards whatsoever are watched by millions around the world. FPSRussia occasionally references video games, such as dressing targets up as Far Cry 3 characters…

So given these are the existing models, could a Steam user store work in a similar way?

Ain’t no free lunch

What’s most important here is that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In both of these user content schemes, the user must bring substantial original effort, rather than just shoving random crap online and turning a profit.

This is because copyright gives the original maker a watertight right to exploit their work for profit. A game developer created their game, and so is entitled to decide who profits from the game, and how.

There’s a very good reason The Workshop only allows people to earn money from Valve games—those are the games Valve has full rights to as a developer and publisher. As the full copyright owner for both Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2, Valve has the right to allow modders to profit from the games. Valve doesn’t, however, have the right to allow modders to profit from their Skyrim mods. That belongs to Zenimax.

In the FPSRussia video above, while snippets of Far Cry 3 were shown, most of the video was original content, and he was making money from the people viewing ads who came to watch him almost get himself blown up. That said, it’s clear he was trying to avoid copyright infringement, since the game footage shown is very short.

How a Steam store would work

This is a problem for any Steam user store. Presumably, any user revenue would be funded from sales of games. Copyright’s right to profit certainly includes the right to decide who can receive profits from the sale of the game, and so stands in the way of developing any user stores.

The first thing Valve will need to do is to convince every publisher it deals with that they should assign this right to the individual Steam users. Currently, Steam’s distribution agreements only give Steam the right to sell games of other publishers. These agreements would have to be extended to every single Steam user.

Next, Valve would need to ensure there was at least some semblance of original content in the user stores. Steam doesn’t run any original advertising for games. It’s just a boring old store with shelf space for the screenshots and videos chosen by publishers.

The reason, of course, is that copyright in the screenshots and videos belongs to the publishers, not Steam or its users. While no one gets shirty if someone posts a gameplay video on YouTube, I highly doubt publishers would give away the right to decide how videos and screenshots of their own game were used for advertising. That just rocks the boat far too much.

And what would be the point of users just reposting the standard advertising trailers, without any of their own commentary? That’s not a user store—that’s a pyramid scheme. Ultimately, this means that the only way I can see Steam user stores as working is with users posting pure, original content. The good ones will rise to the top, while the bad ones won’t make any money. Best get working on those video skills.

Feature image courtesy The Great Jug on DeviantART.

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.”

Only adding to his selflessness, he says that Valve are happy to lead the way — mostly because others will follow, and the people will have more choices.

“We’re happy to do it if nobody else will do it, mainly because everybody else will pile on, and people will have a lot of choices, but they’ll have those characteristics. They’ll say, ‘Well, I could buy a console, which assumes I’ll re-buy all my content, have a completely different video system, and, oh, I have a completely different group of friends, apparently. Or I can just extend everything I love about the PC and the internet into the living room.’”

What do you think, noble reader? Gaben definitely has a point about the Apple thing, I think. Will you be buying yourself a Steam Box when the time comes? Or do you prefer your PC gaming in front of your PC, thank you very much? Tell us what you think! Tell us where you stand! Tell us if you think Mr Newell is a prophet or a fool!

Source: Polygon

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

Latency is the biggest stumbling block when it comes to virtual reality, according to Valve engineer Michael Abrash. The “holy grail” of virtual reality is a 7ms latency, which just isn’t feasible with current technology — not yet, anyway.

“For reference, games generally have latency from mouse movement to screen update of 50 ms or higher (sometimes much higher), although I’ve seen numbers as low as about 30 ms for graphically simple games running with tearing (that is, with vsync off),” says Abrash. “In contrast, I can tell you from personal experience that more than 20 ms is too much for VR and especially AR, but research indicates that 15 ms might be the threshold, or even 7 ms.”

“AR/VR rendering on PCs will have to be roughly on the order of five-year-old games, which have low enough overall performance demands to allow rendering latencies on the order of 3-5 ms (200-333 Hz). Of course, if you want to do general, walk-around AR, you’ll be in the position of needing to do very-low-latency rendering on mobile processors, and then you’ll need to be at the graphics level of perhaps a 2000-era game at best. This is just one of many reasons that I think walk-around AR is a long way off.”

Take a read of the full post over at the official Valve blog.

Source: Kotaku

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!

We’ve all been frustrated in games before, but rather than hitting up Google, Valve would like us to start bringing up the Steam overlay and taking a browse through their new Game Guides section.

Members of the Steam Community Beta Group are the first ones to have access to this new Game Guides section, and will be able to create guides using text as well as screenshots that they’ve uploaded to their Steam cloud. YouTube videos can also be inserted.

“You’ve probably got some favorite games that you play a lot and know pretty well,” writes Valve. “Or maybe you’ve mastered playing as a certain class or character in Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty. Or maybe you’re just really good at finding all the hidden secrets in the latest Elder Scrolls game. How do you put that knowledge to use and help fellow gamers? Create a game guide on Steam!”

Source: Steam Community

Valve’s Linux support for Steam rolls inexorably closer, and now Linux site OMG! Ubuntu have spotted that several games have begun to list Linux system requirements.

PC Gamer notes that the Linux requirements seem to only be visible on Linux operating systems, and screenshots taken for games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent list components like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Mint 13 LTS, or Fedora 16, fully updated, as their OS. TechGage has screenshots showing the requirements for games like Serious Sam BFE.

It’s also widely speculated that the Steam Box living-room-console-PC, whose existence was yesterday confirmed by Gabe Newell, will use Linux as its backbone.

Source: PC Gamer

Well, the rumour have been swirling for ages — but thanks to some fairly candid chats with Gabe Newell at the recent VGAs over the weekend, it looks like Valve’s console-like PC for the living room is actually confirmed.

“Certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment,” Newell said to Kotaku. “If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that’s what some people are really gonna want for their living room.”

“The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them.”

Gabe also explained that he expects companies to start selling living-room-friendly, ready-to-go PC packages within the next year. “I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them,” claimed Gabe. “Cause they won’t have to split the world into thinking about ‘why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?’ So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments.”

Source: Kotaku

What do you think Valve would be doing with FreeToPlayTheMovie.com? What about AheadOfTheGameMovie.com? Or AheadOfTheGameTheMovie.com? Well, those last two are pretty similar, it’s true. But anyway, keen-eyed Redditors have spotted that Chris Grinstead, IT Manager at Valve, quietly registered the three domains back in August.

Current speculation is, naturally, that Valve are producing a documentary about the success of their free-to-play titles, namely Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2. But that doesn’t really explain “Ahead Of The Game”. Still F2P, or something more corporate perhaps, about Valve itself?

That is, unfortunately, all there is to tell — feel free to put on your own speculatin’ hat in our comments section.

Source: PCGamesN

Valve has announced the category winners of its second annual Saxxy Awards, which challenge machinima makers to produce short films using assets from the developer’s titles. This year’s release of the Source Filmmaker has led to a marked increase in both quantity and quality of entrants, but after two weeks of community voting, judges have chosen four standard-bearers to represent the best of the best.

All four category winners are available on YouTube. Go check out Best Action winner Meet the Dumpster Diver, or Best Comedy prize-holder Wishmaker. Bad Medicine took out Best Drama, while Best Replay went to EPIC High Five Fail.

All four winners scored a Saxton Hale statue, but whoever nets Best Overall will win a trip to Valve’s offices for a session with the creators of Source Filmmaker. The Saxxy grand champion will be announced during Spike TV’s VGA ceremony on December 7.

Source: Team Fortress 2

If you’ve ever thought about a Half-Life film-adaptation, well, join the club really. I think everybody’s thought about it at some point or another. But Valve and Gabe Newell have pretty steadfastly said that it’s not going to happen. And if it is, they’re going to make it themselves. As a thought-exercise though, Marc Laidlaw, the writer for the Half-Life games, was asked who he would pick to direct if a film was being made.

“If Paul Verhoeven returned to science fiction films, he would do something insane with Half-Life… maybe something objectionably insane, but at least not boring,” said Laidlaw. “Peter Jackson has proved himself an amazing purveyor of faithful adaptations.”

“Guillermo del Toro has the horror vibe that I think a lot of people miss out on when thinking about a Half-Life movie. Half-Life is essentially horror after all. The science in it barely passes as hand-waving, but when a headcrab jumps at your head, it’s a precisely engineered jolt. There are probably a lot of good potential directors, but I think most of them are busy pursuing their own visions.”

What do you think of these directors? Could they make a film you’d enjoy? Personally, I think they’re all good choices. Though I’m not sure I’d called Jackson a “purveyor of faithful adaptations” exactly. The Hobbit is now three movies like the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Amazing films, but still. And I’m not sure del Toro’s style would suit Half-Life, though Valve obviously feel otherwise. Who else would you pick? Let us know in the comments.

Source: New Rising Media

Enjoy your Steam trading, but don’t have Steam Guard enabled? The word on the street is that now is the time to turn it on, as all accounts will be required to have Steam Guard enabled for at last 15 days before being allowed to trade.

This new restriction, spotted by Reddit, will come into effect on December 12. The move is speculated to be part of an effort by Valve to push back against last year’s Winter Sales exploits, where users were purchasing hundreds of Humble Bundles for $0.01, generating Steam keys, and then using those to farm achievements, items, and unlock free games.

Still, with over six million Steam users active over the weekend, there’s no doubt that any extra security is welcome. What do you think?

Source: Reddit via PCGamesN

PC gaming is dead? Think again, turkey: Steam revealed last night at the London Games Conference than they have over fifty million users worldwide. What’s more, there are currently over 500,000 subscribers to the Big Picture beta, and the user-centric Steam Workshop now stocks over 300,000 items, with about 106 million community contributions.

Let’s take a moment to relax and soak in those figures. Fifty million Steam users. Beautiful.

Alright, carry on.

Source: PCGamesN