Remember how Steam used to look like crap on higher DPI settings on Windows or Linux? Not anymore! Activate the latest Steam beta to see how it looks like under other than default DPI settings. Here's a screenshot from 125% DPI mode on Windows 10 at 1080p:
There is a huge problem with Valve Anti-Cheat system at the moment. It seems that they have enabled a brand new manual rule that triggers a VAC ban on certain Steam accounts. If you launch Steam on Linux with an account name (OS account, not Steam account!) that contains "Catbot" you WILL be banned on Steam. Permanently. Why does that even happen? It's because of a certain Team Fortress 2 farming bots that got really popular lately, here's the explanation from reddit: Some guy makes a bunch of bots named like "Catbot #47" and sends them out onto Casual servers in TF2, they follow a set path based on the map and have aimbot. They're honestly really well made, and the way they're getting banned is that Steam checks the program's username on its Linux partition (not the Steam account's username). He's already changed the code to randomize the Linux username and sent them back out. So as you see the farming/hacking is working just fine once more because someone already fix their "security measures". Apparently that was intentional behavior by VAC team and according to them it's a feature... not a bug (if you believe the guy from Github):…
OK it's been crazy today, Steam launched a lot of new currencies on their platform. GOG apologized for higher prices in Poland and promised to contact developers/publishers to change that (they are higher than Steam's right now which isn't quite nice considering GOG is a Polish store). Anyway it's been pretty loud on reddit today that EA Games had removed the refund button from their system and if you want to get a refund wait in line... for around an hour (that's right) to even contact the support team. I don't quite understand why would they do that but I guess it's all about the $$$. Looks like some games are even more expensive on Steam, for example in Israel. Also there was a funny bug on Steam for some guy, he got over $4 000 000 (!) in his Steam wallet after the update. It got fixed by Valve though. Another thing is that selling Stream trading cards is somewhat broken, you see when you put it up on sale let's say for $0.03 in USA Steam automatically converts the price to be 0.03zł (in Poland for example) which means it's cheaper, anyway I'm sure they are going to…
In case you didn't know Steam is introducing a lot of new currencies to the store worldwide, including Polish Złoty. If you have any money in your Steam Wallet and it happens to be in Euros €€€ then you might get fucked. You see, they have sent an e-mail about it recently and Steam is going to convert the cash you have to your local currency. Why are you out of luck? If they convert it on their own currency exchange rates (which is 3.59zł for €0.99 instead of 4.18zł) you will loose some money. Here's a quick example: If you have charged your Steam wallet with let's say €25 you paid around 105 Polish Złoty for it. Now if they convert it with their exchange rate you're going to have around 90 Polish Złoty. If not you're all good. But if they do... you're going to loose around 15zł, if you can spend that Steam Wallet funds on something do it now I guess, but it all depends on the price of games. Valve is going to leave the new exchange rate as a suggestion for game publishers/developers but if they're going to even the prices to western Europe…
I know this is rather old news but I don't have much time to post here. I can't believe this is finally happening... after 9 fucking years (!) Steam introduces more currencies to the Steam store. Details below! This is an e-mail to all Steamworks developers from Valve Software - New currencies to expect on Steam: "Pricing should be entered as soon as possible, with display of these new currencies scheduled to go live in time for our 2017 Autumn and Winter Sales. To enter pricing, sign in to the Steamworks Developer Site and select Pricing from the Apps & Packages drop-down. You will see green-colored recommendations filled in for new currencies, based on your selected USD base price. These recommended prices can be accepted or adjusted at your discretion. As a reminder, if you do not have pricing entered for a country after a local currency is set live on the Steam storefront, your game will be unavailable for sale in that country." "We have also updated our recommended pricing matrix for new and existing currencies. Our goal is to update these recommendations annually, so as to better help developers succeed in markets worldwide. Pricing decisions on Steam are…
Steam Gifting will now be a system of direct exchange from gift buyer to gift receiver - Valve has removed the Gift to E-mail and Gift to Inventory options. Benefits from the new system: Scheduling Gifts Is Even More Straightforward. Go ahead and buy a gift months in advance and have it delivered to a friend on time, every time. Declined Gifts Resolve The Way They Should. In the old system, a declined gift would sneak back into the giver's inventory and remain on their bill. Now, if a recipient already has the title, or just doesn't want it, they can click decline and the purchase is refunded directly to the gift giver. Safe Cross-Country Gifting. No more worrying if a Gift to E-mail or Gift to Inventory is going to work for a friend, gifts sent through the new system will always work on the receiver's account. When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase. These changes are now available. Pre-existing gifts will be unaffected by this change.
Remember the last time when Valve tried to introduce paid mods on Steam? It didn't go well and it did not survive contact with the PC gaming community. When the proposal was announced in April 2015 with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a pilot game it mostly got negative feedback. Shortly after that Valve removed the feature altogether. To some gamers the notion of paying modders for their work was contrary to the spirit of modding. Many suggested a donation scheme for Steam Workshop modders as an alternative to traditional pricing. "We underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop," Valve's Alden Kroll wrote at the time. "We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here." "... modders create a lot of value, and we think that … absolutely they need to be compensated, they're creating value and the degree to which they're not being accurately compensated is a bug in the…
At first Steam Greenlight was looking really good, the idea of it, but today I can easily say that the Steam store has been cluttered with all of those shitty games that no one wants to play and fake reviews for free games. Valve has been dissatisfied with Steam Greenlight as well, even Gabe Newell described the system as "probably bad for the Steam community" in 2013. A year later, he stated outright that they have to "make Greenlight go away, not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving". The direction of that evolution was finally revealed! New system called Steam Direct is coming this spring. It will enable developers to get their games on Steam without having to pass an approval process first. Greenlight helped the indie developers. It also ended up bringing in a lot of money. Valve said that there are now more than 100 Greenlight games that have earned at least $1 million each, many of which likely would not have been released on Steam under the pre-Greenlight rules. Changes on Steam like: user reviews, refund system and the implementation of Steam Curators have all improved the experience for both users and developers, the next step "is to establish a…
Our Steam group has just been removed from Steam by someone who claims to be the new tyrant, a dickhead called TZer0, unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it because I was not the original admin of the group. So far this guy have removed me from the group and ditched everything that I've done for over last 9 years. But no need to worry! Fuck this guy and his anti-G2A attitude, that's right he took over the group and changed it's logo to anti G2A propaganda. Booo Hoo. Lets bring back the group back under the same URL, at least that's what's left. I have posted one last post yesterday on the group, it was about The European Commission getting it's hands on Steam regional locks. I have no idea what the fuck is going on and I really hope we can restore the population of the group under the new-old URL. So join in and tell your friends! :) The new-old URL is still ours: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamunpowered Also this guy claims we have had some sort of discussion and we disagreed. We haven't had any discussion at all. He also claims I have promoted G2A on the Steam…
The European Commission is going to take a look at region blocks on Steam. Can we count on non-region blocked games in the future? We all do realize that regionally blocked games are cheaper in certain regions and that's OK I guess but, according to The European Commission, Valve is breaking the laws of fair trade between the European Union's countries. I think I have sent a letter to them around 2012-2013 and even did a petition (like that ever works haha... but at least they've responded and also here) but all of my letters from back in the day were basically ignored saying that Valve can do whatever they can. It seems that now they've got a lot of requests from different countries and finally decided to do something about it which is really good for us. But Steam is not all because companies like Bandai Namco, Capcom or others are also on gunpoint because they enforce those region blocks on Steam. The whole case just started but Valve is obviously going to do something about it, question is are we going to like it or not? I will keep you posted about this issue and post more about it in the future.
This has been on the net for a while now but due to holiday season I didn't have much time to post this, anyway Valve lost its legal battle against Australia's competition watchdog earlier this year. It's all because of refunds. An Australian court has ruled that Valve must pay $2.15 million USD fine following the loss of its legal battle against the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The fine is the maximum requested by the regulatory body, and according to the Sydney Morning Herald was imposed because of Valve's disregard for Australian law when it set up shop in the country. Valve's refund policy has changed dramatically since the suit was filed—it now offers refunds on just about everything, "for any reason"—but that apparently didn't impress the judge on the case. Valve will be required from now on to post a notice on its Australian website, in size 14 type, informing consumers of their rights. Source: PC Gamer
The Steam store has been updated today. It has a lot of new functional settings and finally looks better! I bet most of you guys won't be able to switch to the new UI just yet, but lets all agree we needed a change after all these years. The new update is called Discovery Update 2.0 - the next milestone of the Discovery Update released in 20014. Valve did a lot of good work on this one. The new design reduces the number of clicks you need to do in case you want to find something. The old store was a mess. Especially with all of those Early Access Titles on the main page, you can finally hide them! Valve is now enforcing real screenshots in the store for each game - not some Photoshop bullshit ones. Here are the highlights of the update! Quick Access: More direct links to common destinations. Plus, sections you probably didn’t even know we had. Personalize (FINALLY!): Now in the upper-right corner of every game image you will find a quick menu of options including quick access to your Preferences, allowing you to further customize your Steam shopping experience. Recently Viewed: Quickly get back to…
Every time there is a Steam sale on the horizon I think of buying something but when the event launches and I see the main store page I just can't browse it. Why? The store displays all of the offers randomly, which means I can't focus on any particular offer. I really preferred the old way of presenting sales on Steam, it was much more eye friendly. The store browse function also sucks. Here's an example, when you go to the RPG category in the store and want to sort the titles by the lowest price it always shows those damn free to play games first which you can't even hide, after clicking through every crappy free to play game the store suddenly hangs you have to start over - we all know how big is the Steam store load during the sale, I couldn't even drop any cards yesterday from that queue thing. It seems that the store is getting DDoSed too easily, few years ago it was really slow for first couple of hours tops - yesterday it was unusable for the whole night. But that's not really such a big problem comparing to what I'm about to list below, check it out.…
Apparently there is an alpha version of a launcher for Bethesda games. It has Fallout 4 creation kit and even a Mods tab at the top. Check out some screenshots: [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="yes" overflow="visible"][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="no" center_content="no" min_height="none"] Do we really need another game launcher aside from Steam, Origin, UPlay, Battle.net, GOG (optional)? They really want to sell those mods, we all know how it turned out last time they pushed it on Steam... Source: Found on NeoGAF.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Here is some really bad info from reddit/r/Steam guys, Victor, a translator and ex-moderator from the Spanish Steam Translation Server team, posted a really concerning message regarding Steam Translation Server program: "Valve employee also known for being the Head Admin and creator of STS, has been harassing, lying, discrediting, creating an oppressive, intimidating environment, and overall doing questionable things that have finished with several mods being kicked, a strike of the whole Spanish team that’s still going, and another Valve employee being illegally fired for complaining about these unlawful activities. We would like to share the story with you." And more: "There has been a huge mess involving Valve’s employee and the Spanish team of Steam Translation Server that has resulted a strike from the whole team, and 2 valuable colleagues being expelled, one of them being a Valve employee that also got fired. We want to share the story to reach Valve’s attention and show the community that not everything around is pretty." Basically the Valve employee told them something about future employment at Valve just to make those guys more productive in translating Steam and it's contents for free and after many years he told them to fuck off after…
I just got back from a couple of friends from a small holiday gathering and I was really surprised that this has happened. It seems that some sort of caching issue occurred on the Steam store and users could see other random people's account information. For now I strongly advise not to use Steam at all and don't buy anything because you could be compromising your data. I'm pretty sure they will fix it asap but it's better to watch out for stuff like that. More info available here.
Hey guys, Happy Holidays! :D Please remember to buy games one by one on the Steam sale if you are unsure if you want to return any of them after you try it out. It seems that you can't return games if they were bought all together and one of them has reached the 2 hours gameplay limit to get a refund. Check out this reddit post for more details.
Some of you probably realize that Valve enforced secure trading on Steam by forcing users to use their mobile authenticator if they want their trades to go smooth. Turns out the app is only available for iOS and Android. All other people have to wait 3 days until their items are delivered to the buyer. There are also Steam Community discounts for people with this app and if you don't have the app you can't partake in those. I really had hope that someday soon we would see an universal app for Windows 10 Mobile which could be used on phones and tablets - with respective UI designs for each. There is a huge demand on Steam Community forums, here is a random thread with hundreds of replies. Windows 10 Mobile is installed on 7% of all active Windows phone devices (including my Lumia 640 LTE) and it didn't even officially come out yet on the older devices. Thinking that it's growing market share in Europe would matter enough right? Or 12% market share in Russia (bigger than Apple's iOS)? Wrong. Here is what Steam support has to say about it: [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="yes" overflow="visible"][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat"…
Hey guys, first of all thanks to Andrea for telling me about this. Secondly Valve is about to add a new trading security measurements, which holds items in every trade for a period of time likely up to several days, unless both parties have mobile app Steam Guard enabled. This is ridiculous considering the app is not available for my Windows 10 Mobile phone (at least not yet) and what about people without smartphones? I know it is 2015 but not everyone uses smartphones guys. Some people just prefer battery life and a dumbphones. Here is a confirmation of the new security method. This bit in particular: ... 'What is Escrow?', '<div class="escrow_explanation">After a trade has been accepted by both parties, if either party's account has not been secured by the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, then to protect against unauthorized trades, the traded items will be placed in escrow.<br><br>During the escrow period, the items will not be available to either user. This allows users who have not secured their accounts to cancel any unauthorized trades and recover their items.<br><br>Canceling all pending and in-escrow trades will place a trading hold on your account for a few days to prevent any further unauthorized attempts…
In recent Kotaku interview with Erik Johnson about the current Steam Support, Valve employee told that progress is being made on Valve’s side of things, it's just not visible yet: “We started by realizing we had a lot of software to write to build a new support system,” Johnson explained. “The first feature that came of that was the ability to get refunds of purchases made on Steam. That made the most sense to start with. If a customer buys something they don’t like, they can get their money back in a pretty transparent way. We think that’s a good feature, but we don’t think it was the fix for support. It had a lot more work behind it that was long-term thinking than just refunds.” And the interview continues: “The second software problem that we’re getting through now is how to deal with account security and account theft,” he said. “So we’ve been updating the mobile apps and dealing with two-factor authentication. It’s a surprisingly complicated and prevalent issue inside of Steam, and we have some unique challenges in there. A lot of the load of customer support is a function of the number of transactions you make. Our own games like DOTA…
Individual games are cheaper than bundle edition, in USA bundle costs $6 and individual games $7.98, so the win is $1.98, but not in European Union. Pricing only differs through out the tiers: Tier 1 bundle costs 8€, individual 10,30€, Tier 2 / 3 is like on screenshot below.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is alleging that Valve has not fulfilled mandatory consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law. While neither Valve or Steam has any physical presence in Australia, the company must observe Australian law when it provides goods or services to Australians. “It is a breach of the Australian Consumer Law for businesses to state that they do not give refunds under any circumstances, including for gifts and during sales,” Sims said. “Under the Australian Consumer Law, consumers can insist on a refund or replacement at their option if a product has a major fault.” - ACCC chairman Rod Sims The consumer guarantees provided under the Australian Consumer Law cannot be excluded, restricted or modified,” he continued. The ACCC will allege that: consumers were not entitled to a refund for any games sold by Valve via Steam in any circumstances; Valve had excluded, restricted or modified statutory guarantees and/or warranties that goods would be of acceptable quality; Valve was not under any obligation to repair, replace or provide a refund for a game where the consumer had not contacted and attempted to resolve the problem with the computer game developer; and the statutory consumer guarantees did not…
Dead Island Riptide is out. For some UK and Nordic gamers have been finding themselves with new copy of Dark Souls instead. It’s a code-printing mixup that is apparently now solved, the codes now activating the correct game at installation. If you’ve already been affected, contact Steam support and they’ll fix it for you. Here’s community manager Maurice Tan explaining the situation over on the Steam forums: “To the best of my knowledge, this issue would affect retail copies in the United Kingdom and Nordic countries. Now, Dark Souls is an amazing game, but you probably bought Dead Island Riptide to play Dead Island Riptide! For those of you who don’t know this, Dark Souls is also not a Deep Silver game. We are aware of this mixup by whoever printed these codes for a completely different game from a different publisher, and are working on a best possible solution to help affected players and retailers. “We’ve worked with Steam to resolve this issue. If you are getting your retail copy of Dead Island Riptide today, the code will work properly. If you had redeemed it and received Dark Souls instead, please contact Steam support. They are aware of the…
I’m really thinking of getting this one not only because of coop features but mostly because it looks old school. The key is Steam redeemable and currently at 15% off ($33.99) but with this voucher code GMG20-PJFEW-Y16HK the game is a little bit more than $27. I think it’s worth the price considering Steam sells it for 38,24€ (almost $51) in Europe! You can pre-order it here.
Watch out for Far Cry Franchise Pack on Steam Holiday Sale, it is more expensive than buying individual games. Check it out on the screenshot below: By buying the pack for 49,99€ you lose 7,52€. It applies to all regions as far as I know.
