Mar 14, 2013

Gabe Newell: Valve’s business increased by 50 percent last year

Half-Life 2

Valve boss Gabe Newell stepped up to the stage during last week's BAFTA awards to receive the prestigious Academy Fellowship for his contributions to gaming. Presumably momentarily distracted by accepting a trophy modeled after a smirking face, a bewhiskered Newell fielded some interview questions over the normally airtight subject of Valve's business performance that hinted at the monumental scale of the studio's prosperity.

Newell chalked up Valve's successes largely to user-generated content on open platforms such as Steam Workshop before sharing some jaw-dropping numbers. "There's sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now," Newell said. "I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.

"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," he added. "That's about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity."

Wait, what? We're not exactly sure what Newell meant when he dropped that bombshell of data info, apart from maybe claiming responsibility for all those times my connection speeds chugged while browsing these past few months. Still, it seems entirely plausible—Dota 2 has a lot of players, and the MOBA recently took the crown for the highest concurrent user amount of any Steam game ever. If any Steam game can feasibly take a bite out of the entire Internet, Dota 2 holds the best chance.

Mar 12, 2013

Counter-Strike 1.6 Beta update released

Counter-Strike - alfred

We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:
<ul><li>Added letterboxing of the game based upon your resolution option so the game maintains the correct aspect ratio based upon your resolution choice. If you choose a "Normal" (4:3) and play on a widescreen (16:9 or 16:10) monitor then we will now place black bars at the edge of the screen to keep the right aspect ratio. The same is true for widescreen options on 4:3 monitors. Put "-stretchaspect" in the games launch options in Steam if you wish to disable this behavior
<li>Added better detection for older GPU drivers and the functionality they support. This should fix the green bar or black screen rendering issues people have been seeing
<li>Improved copy/paste functionality under Linux
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Mar 12, 2013

Counter-Strike 1.6 Beta update released

Counter-Strike - alfred

We have released a Beta update for Counter-Strike 1.6.
Changes in this update are:

Added letterboxing of the game based upon your resolution option so the game maintains the correct aspect ratio based upon your resolution choice. If you choose a "Normal" (4:3) and play on a widescreen (16:9 or 16:10) monitor then we will now place black bars at the edge of the screen to keep the right aspect ratio. The same is true for widescreen options on 4:3 monitors. Put "-stretchaspect" in the games launch options in Steam if you wish to disable this behavior
Added better detection for older GPU drivers and the functionality they support. This should fix the green bar or black screen rendering issues people have been seeing
Improved copy/paste functionality under Linux

Mar 12, 2013

Play Counter-Strike: GO with us, please

Counter-Strike

There will be Nevgevs.

Beginning tonight, we're hosting daily Counter-Strike: GO events on our server. Because why the hell not?

Our weeks-old, St. Louis-based CS:GO server has hosted lively Steam events about twice a week. We run custom maps exclusively because the community has somehow produced 1,000 of them for CS:GO since adding Steam Workshop support last month. I earmarked my early favorites in February, but new favorites have already emerged, like the cs_sauna remake.

How to join, in four extremely simple steps

Join the PC Gamer Steam Group to be notified of events
Subscribe to our CS:GO Steam Workshop map collection (this will auto-download and auto-update the maps we run on our server through Steam—MAXIMUM CONVENIENCE!)
Join the server ("PC Gamer | The Psychedelic Den of Map Experimentation," IP: 8.6.76.59:27015) around 7 PM PST / 10 PM EST
Have fun; be the kind of person you'd like to play games with

Thanks to GameServers for being a darn good server provider. If there's a config setting you'd like changed or a map you'd like to see in the rotation, just let me know or leave a comment on the Steam Workshop collection. Messages sent to evan@pcgamer.com stir my spinal community antennae implant.

And yes, we know CS:GO isn't the only game in the universe. But we've got a good thing going there, and I'd rather do a slow roll-out of community funtimes than expand things too quickly. Look for more games and events to pop up throughout the year.

Mar 6, 2013

CS:CZ CONTINUES VALVE LINUX CATALOG

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero - Valve

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) is now available for Linux players via Steam. CS:CZ is the fifth Valve title to be released for Linux and, with its release, pushes the total number of Linux games available on Steam to 80.

Launched just three weeks ago, the Steam for Linux client is available for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. More Valve titles are heading to Linux in the coming weeks and months.

For more information, please visit http://steamcommunity.com/linux

Mar 6, 2013

Counter-Strike 1.6 update released

Counter-Strike - alfred

We have updated the public release of Counter-Strike. This update contains all the changes from the recent beta, thanks to the whole community for their help with testing and suggesting new features.

Changes in this update are:
<ul><li>Added support for localized player names, similar to the existing chat changes
<li>When m_customaccel is set scale mouse sensitivity when zoomed in, this now matches the path when not using custom accel
<li>Make the spray list alphabetical order and enforce unique entries
<li>Set the update rate to 102 if we are clamping to its max value
<li>Increased default cl_cmdrate value to 60
<li>Increased default cl_updaterate value to 60
<li>Improved support for non-qwerty keyboard layouts
<li>Set snd_noextraupdate to "1" by default, this value provides better performance for current PCs
<li>Added support for hitting Ctrl-A to select all text in the game console
<li>Improved download status when doing a fast HTTP download
<li>Better filter between normal (4:3) and widescreen video modes in the video options dialog
<li>Marked cl_sidespeed as archived so it is automatically saved to your config.cfg
<li>Fixed MOTD context menu to have localization strings for available options and for make back/forward work
<li>Fixed screenshot and snapshot when running in "-nofbo" mode
<li>Fixed first mouse press sometimes getting lost after alt-tabbing back into the game
<li>Fixed in game view jumping when going out to the main game ui
<li>Fixed crash when using viewdemo commands on some hltv recorded demo files
<li>Fixed hitting A in the game console selecting all text in the game console
<li>Fixed mouse cursor being invisible if you toggled raw input mode at certain times
<li>Fixed HTML MOTD not displaying properly if you did a resolution change and then joined a server
<li>Fixed mouse movements getting clamped if raw input is disabled and you moved a large amount (more than 100 pixels) in a single frame
<li>Fixed being unable to use the " character when using PT-BR keyboard layouts, as it is on the same key as `. Now we ignore the console key if Shift is also pressed, if you don't want this behavior use the con_shifttoggleconsole cvar to disable it

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