In a perhaps not too surprising result, the case in Germany brought against Valve that attempted to demonstrate the right to resell Steam games was lost last week. Brought by German consumer group Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (vzbv), this was a second attempt to see a court rule that consumers have the right to resell their Steam games. Like you can with any physical gaming product. And for a second time, the courts ruled against it.

… [visit site to read more]

Hawken is one of the most attractive games I’ve ever seen, all shuddering steel and clouds of debris, and it is exclusively about large robots fighting. There’s no cutscene-laden narrative, no downtime and no pricetag. There are maybe six people in the world who don’t like to see mechs fighting twenty four hours a day so Hawken should be the most popular game in the world. That’s not the case though and, ahead of its full launch, publishers Meteor are moving their multiplayer bot-battler to Steam. Current account-holders will receive codes by the end of this week, allowing them to reinstall through Steam without losing their progress and items. Once the migration has occurred the game will become publicly available, some time later this month.

… [visit site to read more]

Steam Music, Valve’s latest addition to the ever-growing suite of tools in the big grey window, will be entering beta soon. Premi ring on SteamOS and Big Picture, and then dragging its heels to the desktop version soon after, the idea is to let you listen to music as you play.

“With Steam Music, you can now listen to your music collection while playing games.”

I already listen to music as I play games.

“Once you ve pointed Steam to your local music directory, your Steam Library will include Album and Artist views of your collection.”

I listen to Spotify as I play games. I don’t think I can point Steam at that.

Clearly this isn’t primarily intended for multi-tasking desktops, but for those using Steam as a console. And in that regard, it makes more sense. Once it’s running, you’ll be able to hit the “guide” button on your controller, bringing up the music player menu. Or click your way to it via the Big Picture options. It is, in effect, mimicking what the consoles already do.

Still though, there’s an ever-increasing number of people who don’t listen to locally stored music collections, but rather via Spotify or one of its rivals. It seems almost a little prosaic to create a system that requires locally stored mp3s. Either teaming up with Spotify, Google Play Music, Rdio, Last.fm, Pandora, Grooveshark, Deezer, etc, or even launching one of their own, would seem to be a far more innovative option. Or just buying one of them with their infinity money and specialising it for their needs. Why am I the one thinking of these things? Someone give me a massive cheque.

Steam go on to say,

With this beta, we re getting started with what we believe to be the most fundamental set of features to offer a great music listening experience within Steam. As always, our next steps for the feature will be influenced by your beta feedback, so please share your feature requests, thoughts, and experiences in the music discussions. Happy listening!

To be in with a chance of getting in on the first few waves of the beta, you need to join the SteamMu Community Group, which you can do here.

The first raft of people have been allowed into the beta of Steam’s upcoming In-Home Streaming tech, which enables you to stream pretty much any Steam game (and even a few non-Steam games) from your main games PC to another PC elsewhere in the house. Among those people are Graham and Alec, who’ve been trying it out on assorted hardware, and who here sit down to have a good old chinwag about their respective experiences. It’s a great idea on paper, but does it really work? Yes, obviously it does or they wouldn’t have released it. But does it work well? Sir, you are being clickbaited.

(Yes ok it works quite well, sort of, depending on your setup and which games you try, but please read the article anyway).> (more…)

This seems like a very odd feature for Steam not to have already had, but there we go. If you pre-order a game through Valve’s digital distribution service, you can now cancel that order and be automatically refunded for the cost of the game.

Previously cancelling pre-ordered items required you to contact Steam support in order to receive a refund, but now the funds will instantly appear in your Steam wallet and the game will be removed from your account. (more…)

Valve have pushed another 50 games through the Steam Greenlight system, which by my count finally pushes us over the limit. There are now officially too many games. Please cease and desist all game manufacturing immediately. This is not a drill. (more…)

Steam Machines might be Valve’s answer to consoles, but that doesn’t mean they play by the same rules as Sony and Microsoft’s increasingly indistinguishable boxes. Linux is an open platform and Steam is constantly evolving. I do not think it’s unreasonable, then, to expect elements of PC gaming to creep into Steam Machine hardware> as well. Just, uh, maybe don’t get your hopes up for Alienware to kick off that trend. The intergalactic planetary PC supplier has decided that upgrading its Steam Machines won’t be a modular process. If you want shiny new CPUs, graphics cards, or even memory, you’ll have to pick up a whole new box. While SteamOS can change conveniently and for free, hardware, as ever, comes at a price. And that’s a problem – one that hardware manufacturers should consider remedying if they want us to be at all interested in their first round of Steam Machines.

(more…)

The weekend’s just over the horizon and I couldn’t be happier. Well… except for one thing. I’m terribly afraid, actually, that my Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are going to be too tonally consistent>. No wild mood swings. No spine-separating ups and downs. What a drag, right? So thank goodness that both Company of Heroes 2 and Saints Row IV will be free all weekend on Steam. The silliest game of 2013 and the most brutal front of the most serious war, er, possibly ever. I can’t wait to cross all of my emotional wires – to giggle out world-weary tears and give stirring, morale-boosting war speeches laden with dick jokes.

(more…)

The Valve news can’t stop, won’t stop, will never> stop. Until tomorrow, at which point Steam Dev Days will conclude and Valve will clamber back under its Cone Of General Silence (Except During Very Specific Circumstances). Today, though, we get one last blast of information – namely, that Valve does, in fact, have its own “holodeck“-level virtual reality tech, but it doesn’t plan on releasing it to the public. Instead, the Newellian empire has decided to collaborate with Oculus Rift in order to further its goals for a VR-powered future in which PC is king.

(more…)

Steam, monopolizing all the news? What are you talking about? STEAM IS THE NEWS. The two have become one, a pulsating mutant announcement machine – or announcemutant for short. The latest and greatest? Word from Steam Dev Days is that Valve’s revealed the first big overhaul of its (somewhat finicky) beta controller. Say goodbye to that touch screen that never actually saw the light of day. Its variable button approach was interesting, but perhaps not in the best interest of backward compatibility. So it’s out. Don’t expect any biometrics either. At least, not initially.

(more…)