Gamasutra today reported that several employees from Valve Corporation were laid off on Tuesday, terminations said to involve "large decisions," according to their report.

Further, Jason Holtman, Valve's director of business development, is among eight persons no longer listed in the company's public employee directory.

Valve has not responded to requests for comment on the matter. Gamasutra said the cuts affected the company's hardware and android development departments. The total laid off is rumored to be 25, but that number is unconfirmed.

The noted animator Bay Raitt also is no longer in the directory, nor is 10-year Valve veteran Tom Leonard, a programmer with credits on Left 4 Dead and Half-Life 2.

Yesterday morning, Jeri Ellsworth, an engineer working on next-generation hardware technology, said she had been dismissed. No reasons were given.

[Update] Valve boss Gabe Newell, in a statement reported by Engadget, refused to comment on the reasons for the dismissals other than to say "No, we aren't canceling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing."

Several out of work as Valve makes 'large decisions' about its future [Gamasutra]

Holtman latest to leave in Valve twist, says source [Develop]

The original headline for this article read "Layoffs Rumored at Valve, Business Director No Longer With the Company."

A week after it happened, you can now watch the DICE Summit's kick-off talk between Star Trek/Star Wars' JJ Abrams and Steam/Half-Life 3's Gabe Newell.

It was a fun talk that ended with Abrams and Newell talking about making games and movies together. That's the news you probably saw last week. But watch everything that comes before it today: lots of great exchanges—with specific examples—about the best and worst things about games and movies.

Bonus: Go 12 minutes into the clip to see Abrams actually talk about the R2D2 cameo in his 2009 Star Trek movie. Not a new easter egg, but it's rare to see Abrams talking about it. Gee, why would he be more chatty about that all of a sudden?

When even Gabe Newell calls the approval process behind what content goes on Steam a "dictatorship," hell, when even Gabe Newell calls the Steam storefront "boring"—well, that's when you know there's a problem.

Judging from his recent talks, though, it sounds as if Valve hopes to change that—there is the possibility of Valve stepping back and letting users create storefronts sometime in the future. The idea is to set Steam up as a distribution mechanism where users can decide what goes through instead of having mostly only Valve decide.

How that'll work is not clear yet, but already there are fears. Many are responding negatively: isn't the fact that Steam is curated exactly what makes it so good? What if I don't want to wade through a bunch of bad games? Won't we all drown in a deluge of mediocre content?

Oh no, not mediocre content! That stuff has killed entire families!

No but seriously though: I don't think it'll be as bad as people fear. Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing Steam open up for users. Think of the possibilities! Here are a few.

I've quoted mostly silly ones, sure. But they're also interesting and specific to my interests. Sorting through stores like that—stores that speak to me, curated by people I know or trust—would make me excited to look at Steam. I want to see what people can come up with, I want to be amazed. With a more open Steam, that's possible.

But right now? Right now, like Gabe Newell said, Steam is boring.

I also have faith in our collective ability to sort through the awful stuff. We already do it practically every day on the Internet—where much of what we consume is self-selected amidst an ocean of awful content. Or to be more accurate, there is always a smaller selection of people who bite that bullet for us and we look to them for guidance on what we should be paying attention to and why.

Plus, if a more open Steam means giving opportunities to developers who might've otherwise never had eyeballs on their work, then to me it'll be completely worth it.

Obviously there are awful implementations of the idea—XBLIG comes to mind. And then there are services like YouTube which don't really suffer despite being so incredibly open. Which will it be here?

The real issue, in a way, isn't the possibility of mediocre stuff slipping through. Hell, that already happens on Steam while it's a "dictatorship," so obviously it'll keep happening if it opens up its doors. The issue is how the content is sorted and presented, and whether or not we'll have tools tools to make sure we mostly/only see what is relevant to us, specifically.

But the idea of having a Steam store that can both surprise me and speak to my specific sensibilities is exciting. I want that. It's just up to Valve to deliver something worthwhile.

Ars Technica's Kyle Orland recently found a security issue with Valve's online marketplace, Steam. "Out of respect for the privacy of Steam's more than 50 million users", Ars didn't immediately publish the article. Instead, they contacted Valve.

Barely three hours after being notified, the exploit had been fixed. That's fast. But what's really interesting is that Valve kept their mouths shut the entire time, neither commenting to the site or even publicly admitting that the exploit had been discovered.

The full piece on Ars details how the exploit was discovered and how easy it was to do, while also raising the point that, by keeping quiet on the matter, Valve is potentially discouraging further acts of voluntary "white hat" security existence.

HTML holes exposed sensitive data for "private" Steam user accounts [Ars Technica]