Dec 23, 2021

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Fixed not being able to preview Community Market items in-game
Updated the localization files
Updated cp_altitude
- Increased capture time on A
- Increased BLU respawn time on A
- Increased RED respawn time on B
- Increased delay before BLU’s first forward spawn activates after A is captured
- Fixed RED having access to a spectator camera on A after the point was captured
- Fixed case where BLU could enter RED’s forward spawn after B was captured
- Fixed a missing respawn visualizer in BLU's first spawn
- Fixed a texture issue on C cable car tower
- Updated menu photos
- Visual adjustments

Dec 22, 2021

* The Steam Winter Sale Has Begun! *

Steam News - Christen

It's open season to hunt for games and gifts in the Steam Winter Sale, where you'll catch a glimpse of the elusive Yeti and abominable savings on thousands of titles through January 5th at 10am Pacific.

Be sure to claim your free Winter gifts in the Steam Points Shop while you're at it. Every two days the sneaky Yeti or one of his wintery friends will make an appearance as a little giftie pour vous there. Stop by the Points Shop any time before the sale ends on January 5th at 10am Pacific to claim your free stickers. Got some points burning a hole in your wintery coat pocket? Then be sure to browse the Points Shop for additional Winter Goodies on sale now.

It's also time to cast your vote in the 2021 Steam Awards! The nominees for the best games of 2021 are in. Be sure to make your voice heard by casting your vote in each of the categories before January 3rd at 9am Pacific. Winners will then be revealed as soon as your votes have been tallied. Which games will go down in history as the best of 2021? It's entirely up to you!

Happy Holidays and Warm Winter Wishes, from Yeti and friends to you.

Dec 21, 2021

Top Releases of November 2021

Steam News - andrewl

We're happy to announce our Top Releases of November 2021

As always, we look at every game released for the month, highlighting the Top 20 games and Top 5 DLC releases based on their first two weeks of revenue. We also highlight the top 5 free-to-play games, ranked by the number of unique players they acquired after launch.

The Top Releases of November 2021

Riot Forged

Many fans have been anticipating the release of new content from Riot Forge, a publishing effort aimed at creating brand new games from the wildly-popular League of Legends universe. This month features the debut Riot Forge RPG, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story™, which has captivated long-time players and new fans alike. It's great to see positive reactions from nostalgic players, fond of familiar characters and lore, alongside praise from newcomers, thrilled with the unique game design and art style.

Audiences Abroad

With development studios on Steam coming from every corner of the world, it's encouraging to see positive regional trends. For example, Chinese developers continue to bring popular new content to Steam, while finding increased success with players all around the world. This month's Top Release, Gunfire Reborn, is a perfect example of this success: developed by a studio in China, but gaining the majority of players from other regions of the world. In fact, Chinese developers have seen a 300% growth in sales from non-Chinese markets in the past year alone. It's of course awesome news for these devs, but the real excitement is for players, who now have increased variety when choosing which Top Release to play next.

Welcome New Devs

This month also features a whole new batch of games that are coming from development studios new to Steam. Several of these teams have been making games for quite some time, while others are making their very first commercial product. A big welcome and congrats go out to these development teams for their successful Steam debuts

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If you're curious about previous months, here are more Top Release lists:

Dec 17, 2021

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Fixed Your Eternal Reward ragdolls not fading
Fixed Wrap Assassin projectiles colliding with invisible map entities
Fixed ConTracker counting kills twice
Fixed Halloween: Exorcism spell not being triggered by feign deaths
Updated schema drop_type for hats shipped in the last few updates
Updated Spark of Smissmas Unusual effect
- Fixed some slight coloring issues
- Adjusted lifetime values
Updated The Giftcrafter and Beanie The All-Gnawing to fix material/model issues
Updated the Steam Workshop dialog to support skipping several pages at once
- ConVar tf_steam_workshop_page_skip controls the number of pages to skip. Default is 10.
- Supports wrapping around the beginning and end of the list
Updated/Added some tournament medals
Updated the localization files
Updated ctf_doublecross_snowy
- Fixed missing texture
- Fixed a few minor visual issues
Updated pl_breadspace
- Fixed some clipping around cliffs and BLU base
- Fixed a bug where players could get stuck behind a wall of computers near the final point
- Fixed location by BLU spawn where you can build under cliff
- Fixed an issue with sound in the final sequence
- Fixed decals
- Fixed missing Breadcrab animations
- Added updated drill model
- Added normal maps for the rock cliffs
- Added missing decals and logos
- Added bread chunks that fly when Big Mama explodes
- Optimized areas to reduce lag
- Updated backpack and matchmaking images

Dec 17, 2021

Steam Labs Experiment 13: Store Hubs

Steam News - Christen

With Steam Labs Experiment 10 last December, we introduced dozens of new genres, categories, and tags to our store’s navigation. Today we're launching Experiment 13, where we’ve revamped these destinations, or store hubs, with powerful new tools for browsing, filtering, and exploring deeper into each category.

When you join the experiment from the Steam Labs page, you will find that every category and tag page on the store has been updated, introducing these new layouts and features to hundreds of niche destinations throughout. You'll encounter these pages by exploring the "Categories" drop-down in the store menu, or by clicking on tags from a game's store page.

Including new ways to browse every niche of Steam

Rich Recommendations Carousel

The most notable feature of the new hubs is the carousel of featured games right at the top of the page. Much like our previous design, this area features new, top-selling, and discounted titles through the lens of our recommendations system which takes into account the games you’ve played, your friends' recommendations, and the curators and developers you follow. The new carousel features more metadata about each game, including tags, release date, and review score, plus a large presentation of the game’s micro trailer, a feature which you may remember from Steam Labs Experiment 1.

Recent & Upcoming Events

Keep up to date on the latest news, updates, and events happening in games across Steam, niche by niche. Within each hub, you'll find a section featuring in-game events, recent updates, and news posts from the developers of games you play, those you wish for, or those which are recommended for you.

More Personalized Recommendations

Our tag-driven recommendations are also listed for you on the new hubs, making it easy to discover titles tagged similarly to the games you've been enjoying.

Items from Your Wishlist

Relevant items you've added to your Wishlist are now conveniently displayed on every Store Hub.

Powerful Sorts & Filters

Our new content hub design features powerful new filtering tools which we first introduced with Steam Labs Experiment 12. This new section allows you to sort by new and trending, top selling, top rated, or discount amount. And you can filter by features, tags, or your own shopping preferences like language support or whether to hide some of the games you've already discovered.

Try it out, then let us know what you think!

To join this experiment and try the new Store Hubs, just visit the Steam Labs page and click on "Join The Store Hubs Experiment" for Experiment 13. It will redirect you to one of the updated hubs so you can start exploring right away.

Join the Experiment

Once you've joined the experiment, you can find just the thing you're looking for, such as upcoming co-op survival games, the new and trending atmospheric, story-rich, open world games, the top-rated roguelike space games, current deals on third-person, single player action games, or whatever your thing might be.

You can also check out an example of the themes these new hubs enable. Our Space Hub demonstrates this theming in action.

Have a feature request in the new hubs? Spot a bug? Want to express your thoughts? Join us in the discussion forums. We'd love to hear what you think.

Dec 16, 2021

Steam Client Update, December 16

Steam News - saml

Library

Fixed game images being truncated by a couple of pixels in shelves and collections

Steam Cloud

Fixed issues related to switching between two apps that use shared cloud storage, such as Terraria and tModLoader
Fixed issues with library storage of collections and shelves caused by frequent deletion and regeneration of collections and shelves
Avoid overly-aggressive reconnection attempts after server resets

Steam Overlay

Fixed Steam Overlay not rendering for some DirectX 12 games.

Steam Input

Fixed "Controller Configuration" not showing up in the Manage Game context menu
Fixed Unity games not seeing controllers at startup

Remote Play

Greatly improved VAAPI hardware decoding on Linux
Fixed touch control settings not being saved in the Steam Link app

Shader Pre-Caching

Fix a crash triggered by having a large number (>64k) of cache files

Linux

Updated linux runtime 'scout' to 0.20211207.0: add support for webp in SDL2_image
Fixed the starting directory sometimes being incorrect when launching devkit titles
Cleanly report an error if a devkit title is configured without a command line

Dec 16, 2021

Steam Client Update Released

Client Update - Valve

A new Steam client has been released and will be automatically downloaded.

Library

Fixed game images being truncated by a couple of pixels in shelves and collections

Steam Cloud

Fixed issues related to switching between two apps that use shared cloud storage, such as Terraria and tModLoader
Fixed issues with library storage of collections and shelves caused by frequent deletion and regeneration of collections and shelves
Avoid overly-aggressive reconnection attempts after server resets

Steam Overlay

Fixed Steam Overlay not rendering for some DirectX 12 games.

Steam Input

Fixed "Controller Configuration" not showing up in the Manage Game context menu
Fixed Unity games not seeing controllers at startup

Remote Play

Greatly improved VAAPI hardware decoding on Linux
Fixed touch control settings not being saved in the Steam Link app

Shader Pre-Caching

Fix a crash triggered by having a large number (>64k) of cache files

Linux

Updated linux runtime 'scout' to 0.20211207.0: add support for webp in SDL2_image
Fixed the starting directory sometimes being incorrect when launching devkit titles
Cleanly report an error if a devkit title is configured without a command line

Dec 8, 2021

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Updated the Smissmas Tree Unusual effect to improve performance
Updated El Fiestibrero to fix clipping issues
Updated The Giftcrafter to fix a problem with the materials
Updated the Unusual Cap to fix the rotation of the unusual attachment
Updated the Ominous Offering to add the counts_as_assister attribute
Updated The Argyle Ace with community Jarate fix from Andrés S. (rabscootle)
Updated/Added some tournament medals
Updated the localization files
Updated pl_coal_event
- Added a second route into C
- Detail fixes
- Optimization
Updated pl_chilly
- Fixed few models not being solid
- Fixed few gift model collisions
- Fixed few spots where players were able to stand on in thin air
- Fixed hand truck from blocking players at the indoor area
- Fixed rare case of the payload cart not exploding when round ends at the pit
- Fixed being able to stand on the tip of the end rocket
- Fixed enemy being able to shoot at BLU 1st base spawn basement
- Minor visual fixes
- Improved clipping
Updated ctf_doublecross_snowy
- Fixed a number of visual issues
- Fixed a number of clipping issues
- Added nobuild triggers to spawn doors
- Major reforestation initiative funded

Dec 3, 2021

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - Valve

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Updated the Festive Frames to add missing styles that don't hide the hat
Fixed backpack image for the Winter 2021 Cosmetic Key
Renamed Smissmas Swirl Unusual effect to Spiraling Lights
Updated Polar Forecast, Spiraling Lights, and Twisting Lights Unusual effects
Updated the Train of Thought
- Fixed model issues
- Added Genteel Smoke effect
Updated cp_altitude
- Fixed a clipping exploit that allowed players to build out of bounds
- Fixed a clipping exploit that allowed players to stand above BLU's first spawn
- Fixed a rendering priority issue with a respawn visualizer in BLU's first spawn
Updated pl_coal_event
- Fixed a clipping issue with a window
- Fixed a displacement