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Watch out for the current Steam Daily deals!
List of things to watch out for is here, thanks to Vogel again – Steam Daily deals on 26.12.2011.
Watch out on some Steam Holiday Sale prices!
We haven’t done this in a while but fuck it here’s a list of games you should really look out for! Got some nice comparison thanks to Vogel:
Nuclear Dawn
http://store.steampowered.com/app/17710/
US: $4.99
UK: £3.74 (17% higher)
EU: €4.49 (17% higher)
WARNING DON’T BUY NOW:
Nuclear Dawn is going to be on IndieRoyale.com bundle!
Official confirmation here!
Steam gets support for tradable discount coupons
According to a new FAQ, Steam now supports coupons. These tickets will sit in your inventory, and can be traded. Each coupon can be used on one game, but it doesn’t look as though they’ll operate as general Steam gift vouchers. The FAQ mentions that each one can be tailored to offer discounts on a certain selection of games. When you buy a game with a relevant coupon in your inventory, Steam will automatically apply the coupon discount. From there, you can choose to remove the coupon and save it for later.
This will allow developers and publishers on Steam to offer discounts on specific chunks of their catalogue to specific customers. It’s easy to imagine coupons being offered as prizes, operating as rewards for loyal customers or high ranking community members. THQ, for example, could offer a bonus 20% off coupon to customers who have bought three games in their catalogue. The FAQ says that it’ll be possible to redeem coupons on already discounted games “unless specified otherwise,” which could lead to some spectacular savings when used in combination with one of Steam’s mega-sales.
Valve haven’t officially announced the coupon system yet. The FAQ is the only indication that they’ve been added, but the timing is good. It arrives ahead of the upcoming Steam Holiday Sale.
Source: PC Gamer
Apple investigated by EU over e-book pricing, Steam next?
Apple and five publishers are being formally investigated by the European Commission over e-book antitrust allegations.
The Commission is investigating whether Apple worked with the five publishers to form a cartel over e-book sales, and whether they engaged in restrictive business practices. The publishers are Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck.
"The Commission has concerns the publishers may have colluded to raise the price of e-books and that Apple may have facilitated this," Commission competition spokeswoman Amelia Torres told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "We are starting a formal investigation. This does not prejudge the final outcome."
Torres declined to say which concerns the Commission had over Apple’s practices or technology. Apple’s iBooks application is available for Apple devices such as the iPad 2 and the iPhone.
The Commission’s formal investigation proceedings follow a number of surprise inspections carried out by Commission officials in March, according to a Commission statement.
The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) shared similar concerns with the European Commission, and was running a parallel probe into Apple over e-books. The OFT closed its investigation before the formal Commission proceedings opened, but may reopen the probe if its concerns are not met by the Commission, an OFT spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.
"We closed the investigation on administrative grounds," said the spokeswoman. "During the course of the investigation, it became clear the Commission is well placed to address matters."
Simon & Schuster shares the same parent company as ZDNet UK: CBS Corp, a US company. HarperCollins is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, a US corporation. Penguin is part of Pearson Group, of the UK. Hachette Livre is owned by Lagardère Publishing, France. The German company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck owns UK publisher Macmillan.
Apple has not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.
Source: ZDNet
Also guess what happens with Steam and the publishers who put their games on Steam? According to the Steamworks FAQ:
3. Who sets the price for my game on Steam?
Pricing is very title specific, and we’ve got a lot of data and experience to help you decide on what the best price is for your title. We’ll work with you to figure out pricing.
So this basically means that the problem EU sees with Apple is that apple "worked with" publishers to set prices. Steam’s Steamworks FAQ says it does the same thing.
Is it time we contact the European Commission once more?
News thanks to rottencat!
Gabe Newell: Piracy is a “Non-issue” to Valve; Providing better Services Will Result in More Sales
In a recent interview with TCS, Gabe Newell explained why Valve is so successful. Recently we posted how Ubisoft were abandoning the PC market due to piracy, and imposing heavy DRM on their customers, but according to Newell that’s not really the right way to go about it.
He said that there is a general misconception about piracy, and it’s not really the high cost that forces people to pirate. It’s about the delivery service and how convenient it is to people with purchasing power:
“In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said.
“For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
Ubisoft said that, “95% of people will pirate our game.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say without releasing any sort of data and they have also cancelled Ghost Recon: Future Soldier for the PC.
Newell explained a lot more as to how they were providing better services and creating a sense of brand loyalty. He mentioned that piracy is basically a “Non-issue” for Valve.
“Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.”
“Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe,” he revealed.
If only Ubisoft and others could learn a thing or two from this man, the gaming industry would be in a much better position.
Source: Gamingbolt
Steam database compromised, what now?
Check this e-mail from Gabe:
Edit: It turns out it’s probably fake but we’ll see:
Steam got hacked pretty bad
Here’s the official statement in plain text:
Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:
Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.
We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
Gabe.
Also I just cancelled my credit card associated with my Steam account and changed my password, Sony gave away free games after their hackings. Is Valve going to do this?
Valve’s official statement (just popped up on Steam):
Official Steam forums hacked?
The Steam forums are currently offline.
"The Steam Forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated."
Valve is yet to comment on the situation, but some users have reported what looks like a breach that occurred last night.
Images, below, show the forum redesigned slightly to contain a message from FknOwned.com, a website that offers video game hacks.
And emails from Steampowered.com were sent to some users containing the following:
"Ever wanted to dominate the servers you play on with guaranteed results, but you were too afraid to cheat because of ban risks? Visit [removed domain] It’s safe, secure and undetected.
"Along with hacks, we’ve also got some general discussion sections, hacking tutorials and tools, porn, free giveaways and much more. This site has been conditioned to meet all your needs in terms of resources so be sure to take a look and tell us what you think.
"Thanks again, the fkn0wned team."
At this stage there is no evidence to suggest that users’ details have been compromised, or that Steam accounts have been breached.
The problem may only relate to the vBulletin forum software Valve uses for Steampowered. However, there may be an issue if gamers use the same username and password combination for the Steam forum as they do for Steam itself.
Happy Birthday to Gabe Newell!
After having dropped out of Harvard University Newell spent thirteen years working for Microsoft Corporation, ultimately becoming a "Microsoft Millionaire". Newell has described himself as "producer on the first three releases of Windows". Inspired by Michael Abrash, who left Microsoft to work on the computer game Quake at id Software, Newell and another Microsoft employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft to found Valve in 1996. He and Harrington used their money to fund Valve through the development of Half-Life.
During production on Half-Life 2, he spent several months focusing on the Steam project.
In 2007, Newell openly expressed his displeasure over developing his software for gaming consoles, particularly the PlayStation 3. In regard to the system, Newell was once quoted as claiming that developing processes for the console in general was "a waste of everybody’s time" and "a disaster on many levels … I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do over. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it’." Nevertheless, at E3 in 2010, Newell appeared on stage at Sony’s keynote; while acknowledging his past outspoken comments on console development, he discussed the open nature of Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform, and announced Portal 2 for the console, remarking that with Steamworks support it would be the best version for any console. Newell has also criticized the Xbox Live service, referring to it as "a train wreck".
In December 2010, Forbes named Newell as "A Name You Should Know" mainly for his work on Steam having partnerships with multiple major developers.
His favorite games are Super Mario 64, Doom, and Star Trek played on a Burroughs mainframe computer. Doom convinced him that video games were the future of entertainment, and Super Mario 64 convinced him video games were art.
Also today is Gabe’s 49 birthday and he decided to send out DOTA 2 keys. Cake is a lie…
Source: Wikipedia
Gabe Newell on pricing and free to play
Gabe Newell discussed the difference between silently discounting a game and making a big sale. When they quietly lowered prices, they found it to be elastic (sales increase proportionally, so the overall revenue remains the same), but…
“The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation.“
This experiment was successfully repeated with a third party game, and the result is the non-stop flow of heavy discounts you’ll now see on Steam. It’s no coincidence that the already massively discounted GTA games, being priced at 75% for all of them ever is the number one best selling title on Steam.
Difference between saying something is “free” or “free to play”
Now a little more about discovery of the difference between saying something is “free” and saying it’s “free to play”. Newell’s explanation is not entirely clear, but it seems that the latter implies some greater level of content and long-term support for players. He says:
“The most recent thing that also is really puzzling is that we made products available for free on numerous occasions, without significantly impacting the audience size. We recently said, we’re now going to do something different, we’re not only going to signal that it’s free but we’re going to say, ‘it’s free to play,’ which is not really a pricing signal, even though that’s what you would ordinarily think it is. And our user base for our first product that we made free to play, Team Fortress 2, increased by a factor of five. That doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to think of it purely as a pricing phenomenon.
Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have.”
And being free to play, rather than simply free, seems to bring with it profit. Newell reports that since TF2 has become free to play, they’re seeing a conversion rate of players of 20 to 30 percent, going from getting the product free, to spending money on hats, etc. Why? No one yet knows. Gabe continues:
“We don’t understand what’s going on. All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us. And there are clearly things that we don’t understand because a simple analysis of these statistics implies very contradictory yet reproducible results. So clearly there are things that we don’t understand, and we’re trying to develop theories for them.”
Make sure to read the rest of Geek Wire’s transcription, which also includes thoughts on piracy, and Valve’s impressive success in Russia.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
Latest on Tue, 06:43 pm
: Midweek Madness Skyrim 33% off http://cdn.store.steampowered.com/message/1028181507618443955/
: fallout 3 goty just received a price drop to 20€; also fo:nv ultimate edition (includes all dlc and preorder bonuses) just released
: 
: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2521400
: http://login.ign.com/prime/promos/rochard/?display=notAuth
: new indie gala bundle later this week at www.indiegala.com/
: money money money
: can anyone explain what's the friggin' deal with Age of Empires III, a 5 years old game being sold as new @40$/€ on almost every DD platform?
: Facebook is archiving the old Facebook group of ours, here's new one https://www.facebook.com/pages/SteamUnpoweredeu/260963810615450?v=wall
: 
: Checkout Crytek's GFACE, a new social platform for gaming http://www.gface.com/closed-beta
: 
: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jnk8n3WrXU
: new humble bundle live
: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMWW92UhpZs&feature=player_embedded
: 
: http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/epic4chan/15893009078/1/tumblr_lxkmq8V94p1r9t8yb
: http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet/?tta
: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/oxzje/official_steam_app_for_android_and_ios/c3l34d2
: there's still hope, first ratification of ACTA in polish parliament and even if it passes european parliament has to vote on it then
: yep, another protest today in Warsaw, and next one during National Stadium opening on Sunday
: So PL actually did sign ACTA? :( Is it right that those guy said sth like "i'll not be extorted by those inhabitants"? o.O
: the next indie royale bundle is live (serious sam indie bundle)
: 
Loading ...Cool shirts and shit
