Posts Tagged ‘valve’

Is Steam coming to Mac users? It seems so! Check out this thread (they found some hidden TF2, Left 4 Dead and Portal images and new Steam’s UI Mac buttons): http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1157656

Just a simple poll, do you like the new user interface beta? Got any suggestions for it? Leave a comment and if we’ll get enough of them maybe we could send over our ideas to Valve Software.

And here’s the poll:

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Also check out this thread with a lot of good suggestions (official Steam forums).

And here’s an official support/bug report forum.

Some angry Steam user posted a very interesting message on the official Steam Forums. He wanted a refund for his pre-order of Aliens vs Predator game (for whatever reason, you can always refund a pre-order). But he bought the game with a discounted game Psychonauts ($2 at a time).

What’s wrong you may think? Well, according to Steam Support you can’t refund only one game if you put them both in the shopping cart. And now the guy had to “give back” (and get back the $2 of course) Psychonauts in order to get his money for AvP back.

After that he wanted a refund for his pre-ordered copy of  Battlefield Bad Company 2. I wonder why?

Whats’s our point? Watch out there kids, don’t get pre-orders with regular games!

PS Our favorite moderators already closed the topic.

Steam keeps growing even though the prices are very high in Europe – people are still paying for the digital downloads (although we can’t really say if Steam is more popular in USA or Europe).

Steam, now has over 25 million active users. Those 25 million users managed a peak concurrency of 2.5 million games players, racking up more than 13 billion player minutes per month.

But of course, the proof is in the profits: there are now over 1,000 games available on Steam, distributed by over 100 developers and publishers — big-boys and independents alike. All told, Steam sold 205% more units in 2009 than the previous year.

Gabe Newell added that Steam has grown immensely each and ever year of its existence. Steam’s only been around for five years, but in that time there have been numerous improvements and additions to the range of products provided by Valve, resulting in a greater-than-100-percent increase in sales year-over-year since its creation.

Source

Valve is going to put Team Fortress 2’s fanbase to work, giving them the chance to craft their own in-game items, weapons and avatars.

It’s part of the new "Contribute" site, which will allow TF2 fans to submit their own ideas for things like hats and guns to Valve. The good ones will be included in the game. For everybody, too, not just the person responsible.

You can submit stuff right now, gallery coming soon.

The 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in video game development, is beginning the announcement of its Special Awards for the tenth annual ceremony, taking place at GDC 2010 this March, and has named Valve co-founder Gabe Newell as the winner of this year’s Pioneer Award.

The Pioneer Award — originated by the Game Developers Choice Awards organizers at the 2008 Awards, and the first award to honor breakthrough figures in the game industry — celebrates those individuals responsible for developing a vital technology or game design at a crucial juncture in video game history, paving the way for the many who followed them.

This year, the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Harvey Smith (Arkane), Raph Koster (Metaplace), John Vechey (PopCap), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), and others has voted to give the Pioneer Award to Valve’s Newell. He is being awarded for his work in co-creating the PC key digital download service Steam, and helping to make possible some of the most important video games of the past two decades – from the Half-Life series through Portal to Team Fortress and beyond.

So it appears that Steam Store does not remember security codes from VISA card holders as we posted earlier – at least that is what Valve worker, Doug Valente, claims and I was asked to remove that information because apparently it’s false. However we still don’t know why Steam Store is insta-buying games if you store your card information and – no one explained it to us and yes we asked. Anyway we just need to get use to it I suppose.

Right now the only way to chose another payment method on Steam (after you’ve saved your card info) is to remove card details from “Your account” page in the store.

I was planning to use e-mail screenshots of my conversation with the Valve worker but he did not agree to use his words so I will make it all quick and short for you guys, Valve contacted me, I’ve asked how is it the data stored and all and then got a reply with short explanation that Steam only asks for the code for the first time and then never asks for it.

Is it security wise?

Not really, I mean imagine this, you somehow lose your precious Steam account (hijacked, hacked – whatever) worth hundreds of dollars. Then someone logs in on your account and puts in some games like Valve pack and other expensive ones to the cart, then he uses this great feature of saving the card info (without asking for the CVV2 code afterwards) to buy them – and you’re probably sleeping in that moment.

Then, lets say the intruder downloads VAC secured games and cheats on all of them, he or she has loads of fun and after that logs off.

You wake up, login to Steam, find out that you: own loads of new games, lost all of your savings from your card and are VAC banned (but this is considered to be “delayed”).

So is this all making sense to you guys? I know it doesn’t for me.

And if anyone wonders, yes, I’ve asked about the prices in Europe.
And this time, no answer. Weird, eh?

In some more fun and exciting news our anniversary is coming up and I think you guys will like it! Stay tuned!

As we find out recently Online Key Store is sending out new sets of cd-keys for the game so that people who bought it from their store can easily re-activate their game once more on Steam.

Also G2Play is refunding (according to their response on Twitter):

http://twitter.com/G2PLAYSHOP/status/5916068001

So if you bought your key somewhere else and you’ve lost your game please do not hesitate and ask for a refund or a new key. And do not be afraid to use online key stores in the future – things like that happen but we cannot let Valve threat people with removing games and such.

Have fun playing!

Update:

Here’s a cool screenshot thanks to Rad86N: