This past weekend was the first time a game on Steam has had over 1 million concurrent players, according to SteamDB. It was Dota 2 [official site] in case you hadn’t worked that out.

SteamDB isn’t an official Valve site but it tracks player numbers and other information based on data which Steam makes publicly available. According to their tracking Dota 2 was the first Steam game to tip over the 1 million mark and that happened on Valentine’s Day.

Looking at the peak concurrent user graph for the last 12 months, Dota’s been nudging towards the million mark each weekend since the end of last year (965,572 on November 22, 2014, for example) but what I suspect might have pushed it over this particular weekend is the Year Beast event.

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$57 million US is a lot of money. So’s $58 million, but I mention $57m specifically because that’s how much Valve have paid out since 2011 to folks who made and sold in-game items for their games. It’s over $57 million dollars from hats, knives, guns, staves, and swords across TF2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. And those last two games only sell cosmetic items. And that’s after Valve have taken their cut. Crumbs!

Now non-Valve games can join in. The first games opening up a ‘curated’ Steam Workshop bringing items to sale are Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Dungeon Defenders Eternity.

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The sky, rivers, my eyes, this pustule on my hip go on take a good look get right up close is it meant to be this colour and smell like that it seems wrong – everything is streaming lately. Steam’s at it too, as Steam Broadcasting left public testing last night and came to the main client.

It builds in support for livestreaming of games and whatever else you fancy, really, but doesn’t feel like a direct competitor to Twitch. It seems more personal, more intimate, and over the beta I’ve mostly used it with friends wanting to show me something. “Isn’t this puzzle garbage?” they ask. “See how poorly I sneak!” they blush. It seems a nice and easy setup for that, at the very least.

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In a new beta release as part of Team Fortress 2’s Smissmas update, the game is getting grappling hooks! And as is well established, grappling hooks make any game’s score go up by 10%. On a site that doesn’t give scores, that makes TF2 now infinity/100.

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Steam sales are bloody confusing. That’s just a fact, as you’ll find listed in any Oxford Bumper Book Of Facts. Back in the olden days, when Steam had seventeen games on it, you could find your way around them, and come away with armfuls of games for 11p. And the best parts of it were the publisher bundles. Big name pubs would put together their entire Steam catalogue, and sell it to you at an extraordinary price. 50 for every THQ game, for instance, and you’d be set for months. But with Steam a wholly different, far busier place, this Christmas sees a terrifying 3859 games at sale prices. No, I typed that correctly. And the publisher bundles are few and far between.

So I thought it might be useful to find the publisher bundles that still remain, hidden in there, and not mentioned on the sales pages, as well as some of the highlights of game series collections.

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Here’s a thing which may mean absolutely nothing to you: Steam is reportedly now region-locking gift copies of every game. If you don’t know what that means, don’t sweat it – you’re probably not affected. If you do know some of those words and do care, I’ll explain. Basically, it’s to stop folks buying games from the Steam stores of countries where things are cheaper. While a change like this has clearly been a long time coming, it’s supposedly happening now in response to the Russian ruble’s current problems.

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It’s Chriiiiiiistmas, as Noddy Holder screams every morning to the terrified residents of Toyland, no matter what the season. Beneath a mechanical tophat festooned with mirrors and baubles, he gambols and grimaces, throwing colourfully decorated parcels containing tiny tartan trousers and other glam trinkets.

Steam is a lot like young Noddy, spreading goodwill whatever the season with its regular sales. But now is your chance to grab gifts for one and all (yourself included), because the Holiday Sale has just begun. Highlights below.

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Yesterday, Hatred was removed from Steam Greenlight. Despite having more than 13,000 votes and being the seventh ranked game of 2,000+, the isometric killing spree simulator had its page removed and Valve told the developers, “based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we ll be taking it down.”

Now it’s back and developers Destructive Creations have posted what appears to be an apologetic email from Gabe Newell regarding the decision. That’s below.

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Destructive Creations’ Hatred looks horrid. There’s little doubt about that. It’s a mass-murder simulator, created seemingly in order to offend, and it looks tacky and unpleasant. But then, you know, it’s allowed to be that if it wants to be. It’s not, however, allowed to be sold on Steam. Valve has taken the move to delist the game from Greenlight within a couple of hours of its appearance, despite its showing enormous popularity amongst potential customers. Which asks the question, what are> Valve’s criteria for accepting a game?

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Major update: Cor, this didn’t go well! Currently the Steam Winter Auction is a big “nope”. Head there now and you’ll see a message saying there have been “some issues” with it, and it’s closed until they can fix it. Those issues, we’ve heard, are that bugs meant people were getting millions of gems, and the whole economy went kaput. Of course Steam’s fervent community was going to find exploits right away, and it looks like they found the mother lode. Quite how Valve will repair everyone’s sales, swaps and crafts in the last 12 hours it’ll be interesting to find out. I expect a lot of strops.>

From today, until next Thursday, Valve has just announced they’re running a Steam Auction. This is a way for users to trade (“recycle” they say) unused items in their inventories for “Steam Gems”, which can then be used to bid – from next Monday – for games in an auction. Because it’s come to this.

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