Tag Archive

Valve Launches Lunar New Year Sale On Steam

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Valve has launched a brand new steam sale to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Each day until February 12th they’ll be featuring new deals on the front page of the store, reminder that all of the discounts stay the same throughout the sale as Flash Sales and Daily Deals no longer exist. So if you’re waiting for one of your most anticipated games to go on sale but are waiting until payday you have time.

New to the store for the Lunar Sale are “obstacles” – questions like “There is a massive body of water in your way what do you do?” appear on the page and If you select “swim” like I did then Steam will serve you a page of aquatic themed games. Sadly there aren’t any apparent trading cards tied to this new activity.

We will update this post with some of the better deals as we dig through the thousands of games that are on sale. Here are today’s featured deals:

  • Tomb Raider Franchise Up to 75% Off
  • Rust for 50% off
  • Older X-Com games for up to 80% off (doesn’t include X-Com 2)
  • Killing Floor 2 for $21.99 CDN
  • Counter Strike GO for $8.24 CDN
  • ARK: Survival Evolved for 33% off

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Fan Made Half-Life 2 Campaign Given The Seal of Approval From Valve

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Nova Prospekt

While some fans have spent the time between iterations of the Half-Life series speculating about potential leaks and other tidbits others have used this time to create their own original content set in the Half-Life universe.

One such stand-alone game is the upcoming Prospekt which has the unique distinction of being one of the few fan creations to receive the official seal of approval from series developer Valve. Developed over the course of 18-months single handily by modder Richard Seabrook, Prospeckt has players venturing once again into the decaying combine prison Nova Prospekt, which is used to turn prisoners into striders as well as home to the Combine’s technological development.

Players will take the role of unnamed Nova Prospekt guard who is on-duty during the events of Half-Life 2. Not only does Prospekt provide a change of view for our protagonist but will also continue some story elements introduced in Gearbox Software’s 1999 expansion for the original Half-Life – Opposing forces.

Prospeckt is available for pre-order on Steam for the low asking price of $9.89 CDN and will be available later next month. It joins another well known Half-Life fan project, Black Mesa, as one of the few games to receive approval for Valve. Here’s hoping Prospekt’s 13 missions are just as engaging as the original expansion that inspired it.

Check out a list of features for the game after the jump:Read More

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Team Fortress 2: Over the Years

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Erika

Team Fortress 2

Late 2009 would be one hell of a year for me with online gaming, starting with me playing a console online for the first time: a friend’s Xbox 360. Battlefield Bad Company was still going hot, and Modern Warfare 2 would be coming out shortly. Before then, all of my online gaming consisted of PC games Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament ’99, so I started exploring “modern” online gaming. I logged into steam for the first time in a long time to see what I could get, and I eventually bought Half-Life Deathmatch. Eventually, I saw a game called Team Fortress 2 that I wanted and told some of my friends on IRC that I wanted to eventually buy it. For people wondering about the the need to buy it, it wasn’t until June 23rd, 2011 Team Fortress 2 was free to play. Read More

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Have Left For Dead 3 Details Leaked From Valve?

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Left For Dead 3

Get out your tinfoil hats and listen up because apparently if you listen really close you can hear the dead stirring.

According to outlet Express.co.uk(via Neogaf) Left for Dead 3 is currently in active production at Valve for a 2017 release although this latest report does not list any platforms for L4D3 or would that be L3F7 F0R D34D?

Apparently the creative team at Valve has dreamt up three brand new protagonists for this supposed zombie slaying sequel – three male characters and one female character named Katherine. Previous “leaks” have corroborated one of the characters being named “Katherine” with the names of the 3 male leads being “Irvine”, “Keenan” and “Garret Jr.”.

It is said that there will be six campaigns for Left for Dead 3 including some returning favorites. The six playable scenarios are said to be: Crashland, Impasse, Inquisitor Land, Early Destination, Cliff Hanger and No Mercy. Players of the original 2009 Left for Dead game may remember No Mercy as the first campaign setting in Turtle Rock’s game that featured players escaping a hospital filled with the undead.

Back in 2013 access to an internal Valve planning tool called Jira was made available to the public and screenshots found their way onto longtime Valve fan site, Valvetime. At that time 68 separate Valve employees were listed in various Left For Dead 3 development groups. The Jira screenshots were one of the first acknowledgements of the Source 3 engine which was recently utilized in the DOTA 2: Reborn client update.

Do you think that ant of these details are true? Could this just be the case of anonymous internet trolls reposting old rumors to try and get our hopes up?

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Marc Laidlaw has left Valve

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Fionna Schweit

In an email posted to imgur Marc Laidlaw lists off all of the reasons that he left super publisher Valve. Citing a large number of reasons “but mostly im just old” the email also says “I am no longer a full or part time Valve employee, no longer involved in day to day decisions or operations, no longer a spokesman for the company, no longer privy to most types of confidential information, no longer working on Valve games in any capacity.”

Halflife3

So what does this mean for the long delayed never materializing Half Life 3? Readers will remember that Laidlaw wrote both Half Life and Half Life 2 solo. With out his influence is Half Life 3 destined to never exist at all? Does anyone really care?  I mean its been so long at this point that FPS games have shifted completely away from story having story at all (see Star Wars Battlefront, and the last Call of Duty for examples). Does the gaming public really want another story driven FPS set in the world of Half Life or should we let it die?

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Steam’s Christmas Gift- A non-working store!

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Erika

After getting messaged by a friend on steam on how to clear out card info, I wondered to myself, “what the heck is going on?” I looked over onto SteamDB’s Twitter to see that  “Valve is having caching issues allowing users to view things such as account information of other users. Don’t use Store for now.” To my dismay, and possibly the ire of thousands of PC gamers, people are unable to make Steam purchases as all the store pages are just currently cashed versions. People on twitter are reporting that they are seeing other people’s cached pages due to this issue and is a possible security risk for users. It’s been suggested to avoid the store completely for now.

Here’s hoping Valve can fix this before too long

Update:

Valve has taken the Steam Store offline  and users are unable to purchase anything.

The website SteamDB has suggested via Twitter that the issue with random accounts and storefronts showing up may be related to problems with Valve’s caching servers.

Here are some of the details Steam DB shared:

image

The following post appeared on the Steam Forums by a moderator acknowledging that Valve is aware of the issue:
image

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Steam winter sale to begin December 22nd

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

DAM YOU PAYPAL YOU SPOILED IT

this image appears to tell us when it starts.

Valve has a horrid track record of concealing literally anything from anyone ever, so it really ought not to come as a surprise that the time and some details of the next steam sale have been revealed. Shacknews broke the story that an image had leaked out of a PayPal advertisement telling the public the date of the start of the sale.

We also know there will be no flash sales again, just as with the autumn sale just a few short months ago. I however think this is a good thing, as the sale is quite broken when everyone just waits for the lowest price. I actually wrote about that very thing  recently and personally im quite all right with the new format.

 

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Team Fortress 2 adds massive update

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Sometimes it can be easy to forget that before all the Overwatch hype, before Paladins, before Destiny, there was a little game called Team Fortress 2. Well Valve hasn’t forgotten. In fact they have decided to keep updating this little game that could in their newest addition the “tough break” update. TF2 has rarely gone a year with out major new additions and it seems that 2015 is not to be that year. The game has a large healthy player community, and its nice to see that Valve is still showing it some love.

Read More

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Rocket League X Portal? Yup That’s a Thing!

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Valve, the owners of Steam and the developers of the PC classic Portal, have partnered with Rocket League developer Psyonix to provide the Rocket League PC community with some pretty sweet free DLC.

Want to deck out your car with a sweet cake sticker? By playing a full match of Rocket League after December 1st you’ll get a chance to earn one of the following Portal themed items:

Cake (Topper)

Conversion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Propulsion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Repulsion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Aperture Laboratories (Antenna)

Cake Sticker (Antenna)

Companion Cube (Antenna)

Personality Core (Antenna)

PotatOS (Antenna)

Honestly I think my favorite of all of these is probably the Gels being used as Rocket Trails. Just imagine if they had the same effects as they did in Portal 2? Cars would be bouncing around all over the place… even more so!

Rocket_League2

Kudos to Valve for allowing Psyonix to use some of their most iconic imagery and giving them the ability to provide players with awesome free DLC. Perhaps they could do the same for PS4 players?

[source]

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Gabe newell is investing in Food, still not Half Life 3

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Gabe Newell is man who is known to eat. As reported by Eater Gabe it seems has now become interested in the world of cooking.  Chef Steps is a well known gastronimic cooking channel on Youtube, they feature sous vide cooking, cooking with liquid nitrogen, and other hi tech tools. Chef steps produces a product line, the top of which is a sous vide machine called the “joule“.

Gabes intrest was piqued after he won a dinner prepared by Fat Duck founding chef and now ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, and ChefSteps’ Grant Crilly. The two are often features in the Youtubes channels videos, and the sous vide method of cooking is prominently used in the videos. Evidently the science based approach to cooking impressed the Valve CEO, as he is now investing in the company’s first product, going so far as to appear in their media to endorse it.

Says Newell: “They talked to me like a scientist, like an engineer, and this isn’t how I thought people in the cooking world talked. These guys are cooking nerds. And the science is super interesting. Their understanding of what’s going on in the experience of cooking resonated with my experiences in the world of creating entertainment. In the end, your target is the subjective experience of the consumer. You have to know all this hard stuff, but at the end of the day you have to have a really good connection with the inside of someone’s head to be good at it.”

Perhaps we can look forward to seeing a Chef simulator soon on steam, or perhaps the previously digital only platform will expand to sell physical items? Perhaps not, either way take a gander at the video below to get an idea of what Chef Steps is all about

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Surprising No One Fallout 4 Is Still The 2nd Most Played Game On Steam

Posted on November 18, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Bethesda’s Fallout 4 is the 2nd most played game on Steam a week after its release with 256,000+ players. This comes after the game broke existing records when it launched last week with 360,000 players – the game went live at midnight on November 11th. Previously RockStar Game’s Grand Theft Auto V held the record for concurrent players with 301,000+ when it was released on PC this past April.

Fallout 4’s numbers are nowhere near the reigning champion, Valve’s DOTA 2, which had 318,000 concurrent players as of press time and a peak today of nearly a million players today! Comparing Fallout 4’s numbers to DOTA 2’s isn’t exactly fair since one game is a single player immersive RPG and the other is a 5 Vs. 5 MOBA.

Rounding out the top ten include PC staples like Valve’s own Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2. Surprisingly Activision’s latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops III is the last place on the top ten. I would have thought Black Ops III would have been a bit higher but I guess you can’t deny the power of the wastelands.

CURRENT PLAYERS PEAK TODAY   GAME
318,155 806,386   Dota 2
256,633 292,202   Fallout 4
250,258 586,014   Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
40,526 54,472   Team Fortress 2
37,893 58,566   Football Manager 2016
30,565 39,535   ARK: Survival Evolved
27,964 33,635   Sid Meier’s Civilization V
22,566 26,840   Garry’s Mod
21,037 26,366   The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
19,739 35,395   Call of Duty: Black Ops III

[Source]

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Valve open to user feedback on Steam Controller

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Valve is a company known for engaging their users and taking their feedback to heart. So, it comes as no surprise to hear that in a recent statement to PCworld Robin Walker said.

“I don’t think this will be the last Steam Controller design ever. We’re just about to hit the point where customers get their hands on it which, to us in the software world, that’s where stuff starts to get really interesting,” Walker said. He didn’t predict what might be done with, but said he expects “it’ll be awesome. It would be the first time our customers didn’t improve one of our products if, for some reason, they couldn’t make the hardware better,”

This is good news for those who did not buy the Steam Controller. Many will remember an early version of the controller which had no physical buttons save the 4 face buttons, and featured only two expansive touch pads. That version received negative feedback and Valve took it back to the drawing board. This statement would seem to show that Valve is prepared to do the same thing again with the current production run controller should their audience want it. I for one cant wait to get my steam controller, I pre-ordered it as soon as the final design was released, but at the same time I can understand people who might hesitate as the controller is quite non-traditional for mouse and keyboard players.

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The 2013 Steam Summer Sale Has Begun!

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Les Major

It’s official! After a heavy load of visitors brought the store to a halt, it’s now somewhat working with occasional heavy load messages. Today’s big sale? Bioshock Infinite at 50% off! Scribblenauts Unlimited, which we’ve reviewed and we’re very much fans of is on for a meer $4.99! Current flash sales include Counter Strike: Global Offense for just over $5, Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition for $8.99 (A fantastic game if you haven’t already gotten into it), GRID 2 and Skyrim: Legendary Edition top out the current sales featured every eight hours.

Things do seem a bit rough, even for the wishlist page, so at current time you may want to specifically go to the Steam page of games you’re curious about to confirm if they’re on sale or not. I know I’m eagerly checking my list.

Steam has also introduced a large focus on the recent addition of trading cards to the site. They’re virtual cards that apparently can be crafted into Steam badges. These in turn give you marketable items such as emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons. Cards can even be dropped in games such as Borderlands 2 it seems.

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Half Life 2’s “Return To Ravenholm” Episode Resurfaces

Posted on January 12, 2013 by Rae Michelle Richards

Did you know that Valve once worked with Dishonored developers Arkane on an expansion for Half Life 2 titled Return To Ravenholm? The project was cancelled over four years ago and was only acknowledged  by Valve staff last January, but we may have finally  got our first look at the cancelled project thanks to the folks at Valvetime. We haven’t had any solid details on the project, well ever, and even this brief glimpse comes with the caveat that there is no way to confirm if these screenshots are legit.Read More

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