Previously they stated, that any game (gift) which was bought in Steam Store will not have any regional restrictions to add to the library and play (it is well known that CD keys usually have various restrictions on activation and playing). Actually steam support still claims that gifts will not be region locked, but it is not true, there were several solid confirmations that restrictions exist.

Right now you should be aware of following gifts.

Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (CIS) – sub id 14524 The gift has following parameter in its cdr record:

onlyallowrunincountries = AM AZ BY GE KZ KG MD RU TJ TM UZ UA LV LT EE

which means it can not be runned outside CIS countries

Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (RU) – sub id 14623 with parameter

onlyallowrunincountries = RU

which means that it will be playable only inside Russia.

Also note, that there is another gift with the same name (Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (RU)), but different subscription id ([4] 14100). It is not locked, but Max Payne 1 & 2 form this gift will contain russian language pack ONLY. It was available to purchase in Russia till 12 of May. From this moment only restricted version (sub 14524) is available for Russians.

Other region locked gifts:

• Confrontation Russian (sub id 13915) (playable only in Russia)
• Ridge Racer Unbounded (RU) (sub id 13946) (playable only in Russia and CIS countries)
• The Witcher 2 (RU) (sub id 13944) (playable only in Russia and CIS countries). Note, that there is another gift with the same name and different sub id without any restrictions. It was available to buy in Russia and CIS till 27 of March.

Source: reddit

NOT cool Valve/publishers.

Join the Official Rockstar Games Community on Steam at http://steamcommunity.com/games/rockstargames by 10 am Pacific Time on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, and receive one non-giftable copy of Midnight Club 2 in your Steam account by May 29th.

Eligibility: User must have an account with at least one successful purchase, gift or retail registration in the account. The offer is not available to users who already own Midnight Club 2.

Patch for Windows Vista/Windows 7: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=730578

No pre-loading? Not a problem anymore. Queue up your game at work and play when you get home. Same goes for being out of town for lets say future Steam holiday sales.

Here’s a screenshot of the remote installation progress:

Lots of Steam on Linux news this week after Michael Larabel visited Valve office and confirmed Steam and Source Engine on Linux.

Now, in a Live QA session for Ubuntu 12.04 release, Ubuntu Developer and Community Manager Jono Bacon said that he knows Canonical has been in touch with Valve to ensure top notch support of Steam client on Ubuntu.

Check out the video, skip to 52:14 for Steam part:

Probably Canonical already had idea about Steam on Linux before Phoronix broke the news? Also, according to Michael Larabel, Ubuntu has worked out a gaming deal from a big publisher. These games may be available in Ubuntu Software Center later this year.

It seems, Canonical has plans to push Ubuntu as a gaming platform this year to increase mainstream adoption.

Source: Ubuntu Vibes

And another quote here:

@michaellarabel
#valve does have Linux games coming plus other very positive Linux plans… I’ll briefly post some screenshots and such tonight.

And even more info here.

“Gabe Newell denied meeting Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple in a recent podcast with Seven Day Cooldown, but that’s not all he said. He also mentioned that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play, but with a twist.

“It’s going to be free-to-play — it’ll have some twists, but that’s the easiest way for people to think about it,” he revealed.

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?,” he mentioned when asked about what kind of “twist ” players can expect from the game.

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated.

“We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would  be on the other side of the planet.

“It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people,” he added.

He said that the free-to-play model Valve has in mind for DOTA 2 is completely unique and hasn’t been done before.

“When you start thinking about the different games that people play and you try to think about how people can create value or a service in one game and benefit somebody in a different game, you can start to see how the different games sort knit together,” Newell said.

“[You can see] how somebody who really likes Team Fortress 2 (TF2) can still be creating value for somebody who is playing DOTA 2 or Skyrim, or if somebody is a creator in one space how it can translate into another.

“In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.”

Source: Gaming Bolt

Nexuiz Beta (Steam key):

WDZF3-FRCTW-9GRIC

Tribes Ascend Soldier Utility Pack (activate in Extras menu in-game):

U1332CDC88019A4A8

Go go go!

YES! Finally Valve Software has decided that soon all Steam users will be able to sell or give away their own “used” games off their Steam accounts. Here is what Gabe Newell said:

“We are happy to announce that soon (May 1st) all Steam users who bought at least one game using Steam will be able to give away or resell their own Steam games to their friends. All of the funds gathered from their sales will either directly show on their credit card balance or Steam Wallet, so right now you don’t have to worry about buying a shitty game as you can simply sell it to someone else.” – Gabe Newell said.

Additionally Newell mentioned the new, improved refund policy:

“We really like how Google Play (former Android Market) handles refunds so we’re about to introduce a similar refund policy. You’ll have 12 hours to return any game whether you played it, liked it or hated it. Simple as that.”

Here are some leaked screenshots of the upcoming feature:

The idea, it seemed, was to take the console approach and provide a set list of hardware that developers could rely on from multiple manufacturers. There’s no indication that Valve was looking to create a single console to compete with the current and next-generation crops, but rather to have a standardized PC platform that lasts for up to four years at the most. There’s even talk that the Alienware X51 rig was built based on an early Steam Box spec.

According to a November 2 tweet by Valve employee Greg Coomer, a hand-built prototype consisted of a quad-core Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a Zotac Z68 mini-ITX motherboard with an on-board Nvidia mobile GPU. According to Zotac’s website, the Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme supports socket LGA1155 2nd generation Intel Core processors and features the Intel Z68 Express chipset, Nvidia’s GeForce GT 430 GPU with 1 GB of DDR3 VRAM, 802.11n and Ethernet connectivity and more.

Coomer said his prototype ran Portal 2 FAST.

Still, regardless what seems to be going on with Steam Box, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi claims the company is currently focused on prepping and shipping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI. He even admitted that Valve is building boxes to test the new Steam interface only. This new UI will reportedly make the online gaming service easier to use for people who want to play Steam games on a PC that’s connected to their TV.

“We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount,” he admitted. “All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.”

Yet hardware is not out of the question, as even Valve bossman Gabe Newell recently said that Valve will sell hardware if it becomes a necessity to keep the doors open.

On top of that, Lombardi didn’t actually refuse to say that Valve isn’t working on a hardware platform. Instead, he agreed that there’s definitely nothing coming any time soon, nothing at GDC or E3. Like Newell said, there’s a possibility that maybe some day Valve will make hardware, but Lombardi made it clear that (a) Valve partnering with hardware manufacturers and/or (b) Valve building its own hardware will not be happening anytime soon. End of story.

As for the prototype seen back in November, Lombardi said that Coomer is one of the guys leading the Big Picture effort. “The idea is that you can take Steam to any display,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is say, ‘here’s a box that we’re going to use for testing that’s common for Big Picture mode and get performance at a base level.’”

“We’re always putting boxes together,” he added. “Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render… it’s just part of development.”

Sound like he just nuked any speculation that Coomer’s rig was a Steam Box prototype

.

Source: Tom’s Hardware m.tomshardware.com/news/Valve-Steam-Box-Zotac-Alienware-Big-Picture,14959.html#xtor=RSS-993

In June of 2011, Valve Software took its four-year-old online first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 and made it completely free-to-play — and ended up increasing revenues by a factor of twelve as a result.

Valve’s Joe Ludwig ran a GDC session Wednesday that explained exactly how four years’ worth of content updates, tweaks, and community engagement helped Valve transition TF2 from a triple-A boxed title to a free-to-play game built around microtransactions.

Updates keep players hooked

Building large updates with additional content was key to maintaining player interest and expanding the player base.

"Although small updates to the game started immediately after launch, it wasn’t until the medic update in 2008 that significantly changed revenue," Ludwig said. "Adding so much stuff at once gave the press and community a reason to talk about it, which got more people to try it for the first time."

However, Valve soon found that the business model for a triple-A boxed game didn’t quite mesh with their development strategy.

"The trouble is, when you’re a AAA box game, the only people who can earn you new revenue are the people who haven’t bought your game. This drives you to build new content to attract new people," Ludwig said, "There’s a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players."

In order to resolve this tension, Valve continued to release updates that delivered new maps, game modes, weapons, and even entire new game systems (in-game items, a marketplace, and a trading system, for example) with the eventual goal of switching over to free-to-play.

Community engagement key for maintaining player interest

In order to make a successful free-to-play game, Valve needed to make sure that its players were constantly coming back to Team Fortress 2 and checking back in. Part of its strategy entailed engaging its player community in as many different ways as possible.

Ludwig showed TF2′s Sniper-focused update as an example. Each content update started with a teaser trailer that hinted at several possible new items or features, and Valve developers would monitor the community reaction in the forums to determine which aspects caught the players’ attention. "We found people in the forums talking about how cool it would be if the Pyro could light the sniper’s arrows on fire. To be honest, we hadn’t considered it, but we were able to implement it by the time the update shipped," Ludwig said.

In another instance, players picked up on a blueprint displayed in passing within the teaser trailer for the Engineer-focused update of a mechanical hand item. Ludwig explained that "[The players] didn’t realize it, but they were indirectly voting on the content of the update. When the update shipped, it included that robot hand."

If Valve was going to engage its player community outside the game itself to try and maintain interest in TF2, it was going to have to do it well, Ludwig stressed. "It’s important to make the out-of-game components to the updates just as compelling as the in-game components. This is something that MMOs do really well. In our case, this means telling a story with multiple parts."

But the community relationship wasn’t limited to soliciting and monitoring feedback. Valve gave its players several opportunities to contribute to the game itself as well by designing game maps and proposing in-game items. "At this point, more than half of the items in TF2 are contributed by the community. Pretty much every place you give the community a chance to change the game, they’ll do it, and they’ll probably do a better job than you would," Ludwig said, "One more way that the community contributed to updates is by building maps. Up to this point we’ve shipped 19 community maps."

Anticipate negative player reactions and design around them

Once Valve rolled out the in-game item system, it needed to get the players used to the idea of paying for them. "This wasn’t a change we made lightly, but it was something we had to do to get our game into the free-to-play business model," Ludwig said.

"They had never paid for an item in TF2 at any point in the past, and we weren’t sure how willing they’d be to pay now."

Ludwig outlined the players’ possible objections to the item store, the first of which was TF2 turning into a "pay-to-win" game:

"We dealt with the pay to win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there’s no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying. The only items we sell exclusive to the store are cosmetic or items optional to gameplay."

Players also hated the idea of getting nickel-and-dimed with intermediary virtual currencies, like a point system. "Players actually object pretty strongly to the idea that they’ll have to take their money and buy a block of some virtual currency, when they only want to spend a fraction of that on the item they want," Ludwig said, "TF2 uses the Steam Wallet, which supports all currencies you can normally use on Steam, and lets you load it to the exact amount you want to use. It’s now used by 22 games on Steam."

Valve’s audience concern extended into the actual free-to-play transition, as well; it needed to make sure that players who paid for the game didn’t feel ripped off. "One thing we did was to give paid players a hat called ‘Proof of Purchase’. We also made a distinction between paid and free accounts; smaller backpack sizes, and fewer crates. What we didn’t include was any restriction on how you could play the game itself," Ludwig said.

Fortunately for Valve, its four-year efforts ended up paying off. Once the item store was introduced, revenues from item sales alone were four times larger than revenues from sales of TF2 itself, and after the free-to-play transition was finished, overall revenue was up 12 times higher than monthly TF2 sales were. "This is just the beginning of taking the lessons we’ve learned from TF2 and applying them to Steam itself," Ludwig said, "It was risky, everything could have gone horribly wrong, but we felt it was worth the risk to try the new business model."

Source: GamaSutra

Forbes editors have decided to estimate Gabe Newell’s fortune recently. As you realize there’s a list with the richest people in the world on which Gabe turned out to be… 854. This may sound not that great right? But as it turns out, if he wanted to sell his shares to someone else, he would be richer by $ 1.5 billion.

Just imagine how much does he earn by month… congrats Gabe I guess? Now make your service (Steam) better…

So far we’ve added around 100 people.  We’re taking turns with Zuko, possibly someone else later on. We still have plenty coupons left (569! Wahhhh!?) – just add us and tell us what you want, but browse first.

Remember that if you have any spare coupons feel free to donate these to us, maybe others will want it.

I’m back to installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which came out today.

We’re giving away hundreds of coupons gathered for weeks from all our friends and users. It’s around 600 coupons and all you need to do is to add this account http://steamcommunity.com/id/sucoupons and browse them.

Found coupon you were looking for? Just add us on Steam – and no you can’t have more than 3 or 5, let others play too.

That is all, take care! I will be adding all requests over time today until 24:00 which is March 1st – when coupons disappear.

Remedy is very pleased with the performance of the PC version of Alan Wake. It turns out that they made back the money they invested on the PC version of Alan Wake in just 48 hours.

“I wanted to chime in here. We are very happy with the sales and hitting #1 on Steam at launch was nothing short of amazing,” Aki ‘AJ’ Järvilehto, Remedy’s executive vice president wrote on the developer’s forum.

“We recouped our development and marketing expenses during the first 48 hours. And yes, we’re certainly very excited about PC.”

Mikko Rautalahti, who is the game’s writer was plased as well and said: “We’re pretty happy with how things have been going this far.”

Source: GamingBolt

Also, learn Ubisoft, just learn and shut up.