Valve invited our mate Ian Video Games to their Steam Dev Days conference this week because “they recognise his genius potential”, or so he’d have you believe. Suspicious sorts have observed that the never-before-mentioned ‘twin brother’ housesitting to water Ian’s plants looks just like him, down to the same red wine stain on his jeans, with a stick-on moustache. Other say that the tweets and photos he’s ‘sending back’ from Seattle look suspiciously like tweets from actual developers who are actually there. No matter. Either way, Valve have been gabbing about prototype new Vive motion controllers, Steam Links included with Samsung televisions, and other Steamstuff. … [visit site to read more]

Digital Homicide have dropped their lawsuit against 100 pseudonymous Steam users, explaining that they can’t fund it because their business is now trashed. The two-man studio are known for bad games like Galactic Hitman and The Slaughtering Grounds – or, perhaps more accurately, for the stink raised around them. This came to a head last month, when Valve pulled all Digital Homicide games from the Steam store after Digital Homicide subpoenaed them to reveal the identity of 100 Steam users – users whom the devs claimed had harassed them and harmed their business. Well, now Digital Homicide are getting out of games and taking this lawsuit with them.

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GOG Connect is a pleasant little scheme from the DRM-free digital distributor, letting people who own certain games on Steam get GOG versions too for free. Now it’s back. GOG today launched another round of GOG Connect, with another seventeen games for Steamers to redeem. Because, y’know, it’s nice to have a DRM-free backup without buying a game twice. The lineup this time includes Hotline Miami, The Last Federation, the Shadow Warrior reboot, X Rebirth, and Teslagrad.

Oh, and GOG has launched another big sale too.

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Valve have reversed some of their recent changes to Steam user reviews. Most notably, they’ve made store pages once again include all reviews, no matter how players obtained the game. Some developers we’d spoken to were concerned that excluding people who had got games by activating Steam keys – by backing Kickstarters, buying in other stores, and so on – could harm them by making their games seem worse and less popular. But some devs were glad for the change, an attempt by Valve to crack down on fake reviews. Well, now all reviews are once again shown by default, though overall ‘scores’ will ignore reviews from key copies.

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Digital Homicide are known for two things: releasing a great many janky, junky games; and being fiercely, litigiously protective of those games. The small studio were best known for suing games critic Jim Sterling over his videos tearing into their games, but they’ve probably one-upped that. After Digital Homicide launched a lawsuit against 100 Steam users, Valve have pulled all the studio’s games from the Steam store.

Digital Homicide allege these users were involved in stalking, harassing, and even impersonating them. Valve say they have “stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”

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Recent changes to Steam reviews, which filter out reviews from keys that weren’t purchased directly through Valve’s digital store, have caused all sorts of worry and concern. The intent is to remove false positives in the form of reviews exchanged for keys and the like, but legitimate reviews are also affected. Games that were Kickstarted no longer have their backers’ assessment contributing toward the rating Steam displays at the top of the page, and people buying through Humble Bundles or elsewhere are similarly excluded by default.

We contacted a variety of developers and publishers, including Larian, Stardock and Mode 7, to hear if they thought the move might stamp down on unfair practices, or whether it would end up hurting rather than helping.

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Valve have again shaken up how the Steam store presents player reviews, this time adding new filtering options which, by default, don’t include reviews from people who got the game by activating a Steam key rather than buying direct from Steam. Valve say this is to prevent score inflation from devs throwing out free keys in exchange for reviews. That’s a noble goal, but the change also means discounting reviews from players who backed Kickstarters or bought the game direct from devs – groups likely to have genuine strong opinions – not to mention from other stores like Humble and Itch. Some devs are not best pleased.

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British Telecommunications (BT) have filed a lawsuit against Valve claiming patent infringement. The action was brought “based on Valve’s continued willful infringement” of four patents (I’ll go into what they are in a moment) and was filed in Delaware on 28 July.

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Quantum Break [official site], the latest from Max Payne folk Remedy, was a Windows 10 store exclusive on PC, and thus cruelly sent to die a miserable death. However, it has just been exhumed from its Microsoftian grave, and will receive a Steam release next month. Can the heavily-mo-capped, time-twisting story-shooter possibly live a second life at this stage? … [visit site to read more]

Valve will soon introduce yet more restrictions on what items you can trade in an effort to chase dirty, rotten cheaters out of their digital shop, according to a new entry on its support pages. You will no longer be able to add certain multiplayer games to your inventory for gifting or trading later, it says. This applies to over 400 hundred games on Steam, including Ark: Survival Evolved, DayZ, Garry’s Mod and many others. If you want to gift any of these, you have to do it there and then. It’s all part of a crackdown on cheaters who would stockpile games and gift them to their own clone accounts whenever they got banned, using the loophole to continue playing. But wait, there’s more.

… [visit site to read more]