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Dota 2 International playoffs are live today
The International Dota 2 championship kicks off today with phase one of the playoffs – matches are best of three, with the losing team eliminated. The International finals kick off in full July 18 - 21 at the Seattle Key Arena, but matches are also streamed online. This year's International has a prize pool of more than $10 million, with $4.8 million reserved for the winning team. Twitch has all of the live streams, or you can watch via the Dota 2 website. For uninitiated Dota 2 fans, there's a Newcomer's Broadcast that provides commentary aimed at helping new players and viewers understand what's going on. [Image: Valve]
Steam Family Sharing exits beta, now available to all
Following January's official release of Steam Family Options, Valve Software has removed Steam Family Sharing from its long beta test and made it available to all Steam users. As its name suggests, Steam Family Sharing allows those with blood ties (or those willing to lie about blood ties) to freely share access to retail PC, Mac and Linux game releases via Steam. "Players who share computers can now also share their available libraries with one another, each earning their own achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam Cloud," reads Valve's official description of the service. "It's all enabled by authorizing shared computers and the familiar accounts that log into them." Full details on how to enable Steam Family Sharing can be found on the program's website. It's a quick process, which should leave you plenty of time to decide who is worthy of membership in your new virtual "family." [Image: Valve]
Invites issued to testers as Steam in-home streaming enters beta
Though Valve Software missed its initial 2013 estimate, the company has now begun beta testing its in-home game streaming service. As its name suggests, this initiative will allow users to stream and play any game from one PC to another as long as both are on the same network. Valve hopes that this will speed adoption of Steam Machines by alleviating the hassle of moving your current favorite games from your PC to the new device. If nothing else, being able to stream games from an extant computer to another gadget will save users the hassle of having to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of video game data. Invites to the beta test have been issued at random to members of the Steam Homestream community. If you have yet to receive an invitation, don't fret: Valve will be adding more participants to the test as time rolls on. For more details on Steam in-home streaming, have a look at Valve's official FAQ.
Valve wants Dota 2 playable on Steam Controller
Valve Software readily admits its unconventional Steam Controller isn't likely to replace the keyboard and mouse PC gamers are familiar with, but the company still aims for a future in which the new controller can be used with such complex games as strategy hit Dota 2. "[Dota 2] is a really complex game that uses a good half of the keyboard," Valve engineer Jeff Bellinghausen told Polygon at CES. "And it's a real challenge, but would also be really exciting. To be able to play Dota from the couch is a really neat opportunity." Crucial to this plan is the upcoming debut of Steam Controller API support in Steamworks, which should make it easier for developers to tap the full functionality of the Steam Controller in their games. Even with the new API support, Bellinghausen believes it will be impossible to perfectly replicate the experience of using a keyboard and mouse with the Steam Controller. "We're thinking we'll get 90 percent of the way there," Bellinghausen told Polygon. "Team Fortress 2 players who are really happy with their mouse and keyboard, we're in no way saying that's changing or going away," Bellinghausen added."What we're trying to do is find a way to get close to that performance, but [from] your couch. That's the goal, to get close to that performance level."
Valve: Trust in employees is key to good game development
If you treat your workers with kindness and compassion, they'll reward your support with better work - at least, that's the stance Valve Software takes. In an interview with the Washington Post, Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell explains this philosophy by examining how the company handles employee sick days. Specifically, Valve doesn't handle them, and employees are trusted to be responsible with their time. "[W]e don't track vacation time or sick time - we just tell people we trust you to make all of these other decisions, of course we are going to trust you to manage your own time," Newell said. "It's actually a pretty minor issue in terms of how much time people actually spend on vacation or sick leave." "But it's a really important issue for someone who is say, coming out of Hollywood," he added. "When you tell them that - and it's really true - it seems to be useful in getting them to start to realize that there is a rationale behind how the company works. There's sort of the flashy public things like desks on wheels, but it really is intended to create a better environment for a highly technical set of tasks that vary fairly quickly over time." While other companies have different tactics in dealing with the inevitability of employee illness, it's hard to argue against the games Valve has produced. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 regularly feature on "best games of all time" lists, and Team Fortress 2 is heading into its seventh year of operation with no indication that it will lose popularity any time soon.
Bridging the gap between casual and pro at the Chicago Dota 2 Winter Open
At Ignite Gaming Lounge in Chicago, Illinois, the crowd is losing its mind. It's grand finals of the Chicago Dota 2 Winter Open, a two-day, double-elimination, 16-team throwdown, and for some reason someone has just picked Meepo. For those of you who aren't in the Dota 2 loop, suffice to say that Meepo isn't a standard hero pick for a tournament. Picking Meepo in a match with $1,000 on the line is a lot like jumping out of a plane and wishing for a parachute -- an incredible, amazing story if it works and an embarrassing, painful death if it doesn't, with the odds heavily on the latter. The announcers, broadcasting the match simultaneously on Dota TV (Dota 2's in-game spectating client) and Twitch, are dumbfounded. The chat channels are exploding. And as everyone witnesses the Meepo gamble pay off in the most incredible way, the excitement only expands and intensifies. But perhaps what's most special about this Meepo pick, about this final game between two local teams that have bested challenger after challenger, is not the risky strategy or the money on the line. What's special is that anyone is watching it at all.
Steam Machine teardown reveals 1TB hybrid drive, 16GB RAM
The Steam Machine is just a tiny PC designed to attach to your television, so when the gadget surgeons at iFixit pulled a beta Machine apart, they were unsurprised to find common components. Inside the Steam Machine - we stress that this is a beta version of the device; things may change before it hits retail - iFixit discovered an NVIDIA GTX 780 with 3GB of on-board RAM, 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1TB Seagate solid state hybrid hard drive, a 450W power supply and an Intel Core i5-4570 CPU running at 3.6GHz. These are all items you could find at your local computer retailer, though according to iFixit's math, purchasing these items piecemeal would set you back about $1,300. Overall, iFixit gave the Steam Machine high praise, citing the ample buttons and comfortable nature of its controller, alongside the ease with which users should be able to upgrade their Machine. The only real issue the site found was that the Machine's RAM can occasionally be difficult to replace, but if you've ever put a PC together, you're more than familiar with the finger-slicing difficulties of switching out RAM sticks. [Photo: iFixit]
Steam kicks off holiday sale with BioShock, Batman, more
It's that time of year again, boys and girls. No, not time to express your love for the people who raised you, but instead, it's time for Steam's holiday sale. This year's sale runs from December 19 to January 3 and as in previous iterations, it offers a wide swath of discounts. First, there are the daily discounts, which collect a handful of games and slash their prices. At the moment, you could pick up BioShock Infinite for $10 or Batman: Arkham Origins for $25. Then there are the Flash sales, which usually offer larger discounts than the daily discounts, though they only appear for eight hours. Right now you could pick up Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for $3.74, but eight hours from now you'll be out of luck. Not just a sale, Steam's holiday celebration is also a community event. Every eight hours three games will be offered up for the community to vote on. Whichever receives the most votes gets a deep, public discount. Voting also entitles you to one free Snow Globe card with which can unlock rare items in Steam games such as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Or you could simply horde your cards until you have enough to craft the Snow Globe 2013 badge. This won't help you in-game, but it's a nice reminder of how you spent this year's holiday season.
Garry's Mod tops 3.5 million sold, continues to pick up steam
In the nearly 10 years since Garry's Mod first debuted as a modification for Half-Life 2, the open sandbox physics simulator has sold over 3.5 million copies, while doubling its sales each year. Garry Newman, the game's creator and namesake, cites a number of reasons for its success: the ever-increasing popularity of Steam, user-generated content, additions from other Valve games like Team Fortress 2, and the modern prevalence of video game footage on YouTube. That last one is crucial, as Garry's Mod thrives on its weirdness. The game itself allows players to place any Source Engine object into the world to manipulate as they see fit, and as the above screenshot demonstrates, the best results are often bafflingly weird. Surprisingly, Newman believes that Minecraft – a similarly open, wildly popular sandbox game – is more of an aid than detriment to sales of Garry's Mod. "You'd think Minecraft would kill GMod's popularity ... but it's kind of the opposite," Newman told Rock Paper Shotgun. "People play Minecraft to death – they love it ... so they go out looking for other games that are a bit like it. Minecraft has attracted a lot of people that aren't really PC gamers too. They play the game on the 360 or the iPad and everyone tells them that the PC version is better." While current monetary figures don't exist, Newman revealed in March that at the time Garry's Mod had generated $22 million in sales so far – quite a haul for a $10 Steam title that's never seen a proper retail release.
Dota 2 gets new heroes, crafting, and Diretide
Last week, the folks at Valve apologized to the Dota 2 community for silently skipping the game's Halloween-themed Diretide event. In the apology, the Dota team promised that Diretide would go live with the next big update, which they hinted would include a bunch of other features the community would be happy to see. Today, Valve announced the update, titled Three Spirits. And true to the Dota team's word, it's a big one. It includes two new heroes in the form of Earth Spirit and Ember Spirit (counterparts to the existing Storm Spirit), an in-game coaching mechanic that enables teams and individuals to improve their play, and a crafting and socketing system that provides for customizing existing items or combining unneeded ones to make something better and more useful. The patch also brings a new showcase view of matches, a lane-picker, colorblind mode, new training missions and more. Oh, and yes, Diretide is coming; the event runs from November 14th to November 28th. Check out the full patch notes on the official Three Spirits site.
Valve responds to fan outrage at Dota 2's missing Diretide
Halloween events might just seem like a trivial little thing to you, but they are serious business in Dota 2. Valve didn't turn on the game's Diretide event this year, and the resulting fan outrage could probably be bottled up and used to start fires. So what in the world happened? A week or so out from Halloween proper, the company has finally addressed the controversy in a new blog post explaining why the event failed to materialize. In short: The team was working on a major update that was meant to be ready around Halloween, so the assumption was that it would be easier just to launch that. Then it got delayed, and there was no time to stop working on that and start working on Diretide. Once the time came and the event was still missing, what happened was more or less a matter of figuring out how to fix it rather than simply stating that the company was aware. It looks as if the game's next update will contain a somewhat belated Diretide, which may not fix the problem but will at least help ameliorate lingering hurt feelings.
Live-action Portal fan film explores the birth of GLaDOS
GLaDOS is widely considered one of gaming's finest antagonists, but like all malevolent robots she too was once a child - A brutal, sadistic child with no sympathy for terrified scientists. That's the basic premise behind Portal: Survive!, a new live-action fan film which explores the violent early moments of GLaDOS. Despite being an amateur production, Portal: Survive! proves surprisingly well-crafted. Colin and Connor McGuire, the duo behind the short, claim that the total budget for their project was less than $500. The claustrophic interiors you see in the vignette are almost certainly a compromise made for monetary reasons, but the film's creators did an excellent job of making these limitations work toward the short's advantage. Instead of feeling cheap, these small sets lend an appropriate level of tension to the rise of GLaDOS.
Valve unveils prototype Steam Box specs
Valve Software has plans to ship 300 prototype Steam Box machines to eager testers by the end of 2013. This morning the company revealed the hardware to be included within these computers: The 300 prototype units will ship with the following components: GPU: some units with NVidia Titan, some GTX780, some GTX760, and some GTX660 CPU: some boxes with Intel : i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3 RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB DDR5 (GPU) Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD Power Supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high Instead of shipping top-of-the-line technology to each tester, Valve has opted to ship a variety of configurations. This allows the company a more accurate view of how Steam Box will perform in the hands of the public, as not every player will have access to the latest, greatest hardware. However, if you grow tired of how your Steam Box performs, Valve claims that each of these prototypes is fully upgradeable using relatively common components.
Alliance wins The International 2013 Dota 2 tournament, earns over $1.4 million
The winner of The International 2013 Dota 2 Championship is Alliance, a group of five players from Sweden. Alliance beat out team Natus Vincere in a five-game match to earn the title and win more than $1.4 million. The five-day event was held in Seattle, Washington this year, and had a prize pool of over $2.8 million. Natus Vincere won the tournament in 2011, the first year it was held during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, and took home $1 million. Valve is offering replays of the event on the official Dota 2 site.
I went to a Dota 2 tournament and not one person called me a noob
There are many things you could say about people who play MOBAs. Most of those things would be negative. Games in the MOBA bracket, most notably League of Legends and Dota 2, have a reputation for being unkind to new players, both in terms of the mechanical skill required to play and the vitriolic communities that tear apart new players for not being instantly granted that skill upon downloading the game. Conduct in MOBAs is so awful that it has become a design issue. Riot Games created a Tribunal system that allows players to report the bad behavior of others, and Valve has done much the same thing. Every new developer showing off an in-development MOBA is at some point asked the question, "How are you going to deal with all the jerks?" Built-in mechanisms for handling abusive teammates and opponents are now considered mandatory features. There is no question that some MOBA players are bad apples. But something has always bothered me about the pigeonholing of these gamers into this negative space. Surely not all MOBA players are elitist snobs waiting to smack down any new player stupid enough to join a public match. Surely not all of these passionate gamers are horrible humans waiting in the dark to pounce on unsuspecting noobs with a barrage of verbal abuse; there have to be some friendly diamonds in the manure-piled rough. I swung by the first-ever Chicago Dota 2 Open, billed as the biggest open Dota 2 tournament in the Midwest, to find out.
Left 4 Dead 2 adds Helm's Deep Reborn to official servers list
The fanmade map Helm's Deep – wherein Left 4 Dead 2 players attempt to defend the iconic Lord of the Rings castle fortress from relentless hordes of the undead – is now an officially supported map.It's part of the latest update to Left 4 Dead 2, which addresses consistency issues when playing on dedicated servers – Valve also decided to add Helm's Deep to the official servers list. If you want to add the map to your game, all you have to do is head to the Steam Workshop page for Helm's Deep Reborn and click to subscribe to download the map.The Steam beta version of Left 4 Dead 2 recently added an Extended Mutation system, where players could tweak existing game types and maps or come up with entirely new ones of their own design. To date, the Left 4 Dead series has sold more than 12 million copies.
Valve's two talks at GDC 2013: VR is hard, Team Fortress 2 in your head
Valve will be giving two talks at GDC 2013, one to discuss porting Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality goggles, and the other focused on hurdles in developing for virtual and augmented reality.Valve programmer Joe Ludwig will lead the TF2 talk, titled "What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality," and Valve research and development man Michael Abrash leads the second talk, called "Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where it Might be Going)." Abrash will focus on head-mounted displays. Not "displaying mounted heads" – that's at the Big-Game Developers Conference.GDC 2013 is at San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 25 - 29. Other notable talks include a postmortem on FTL: Faster than Light, a talk from Capy on paid apps, one on The Walking Dead's art, and talks on mainstream games such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Assassin's Creed 3, Spec Ops: The Line, Hitman: Absolution, Mass Effect 3 and more. Peruse the list here.
Report: Valve acquires Star Filled Studios talent [Update: Valve responds]
Update: We got a response from Valve's Doug Lombardi, who did confirm that Valve hired both Tod Semple and Jeff Gates; however, he did wish to clarify this doesn't necessarily mean Valve is opening up an office in San Francisco, despite what Semple's LinkedIn profile says. "As a point of clarification, this is probably better categorized as Valve hiring two new employees instead of an acquisition of a company or opening of a Valve SF office."Original story: Star Filled Studios is a two-man outfit, founded by ex-Popcap and Blizzard guys Tod Semple and Jeff Gates, who both worked on Plants vs. Zombies and Diablo 3. "We are opening a new Valve office on the San Francisco peninsula," Semple's LinkedIn profile reads, revealing Valve's acquisition took place in November.Semple doesn't say anything in regards to what Valve plans to do with this satellite offices in San Francisco, though current speculation is that this move mirrors Valve's acquisition of Turtle Rock Studios in 2008, buying the developer and then finishing Left 4 Dead development on its own. Star Filled has not announced any projects of its own, so it is uncertain what the studio was working on previous to acquisition.Semple's blog talks about going up to Seattle to visit Valve in September, so we can only imagine this is another Turtle Rock scenario. Again, that's only speculation at this point – we've inquired with Valve for more information and will update accordingly.[Thanks, FHorrigan; image credit]
Valve's Gabe Newell inducted into AIAS Hall of Fame
Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve, is the 17th inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, earning the title for 2013. Newell joins Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, John Carmack, Michael Morhaime, Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuck, and Tim Sweeney, among others, in the AIAS Hall of Fame.Newell will also be a keynote speaker for Thursday's conference at the 2013 DICE Summit. Epic Games President Mike Capps will present Newell with the Hall of Fame Award at the 2013 DICE Awards."Gabe is a living legend of the video games industry, and his relentless focus on customer experience has made our whole industry a better place," Capps says. "Valve's unconventional success is an inspiration for us all, and I couldn't be more pleased to present Gabe's Hall of Fame award."
Left 4 Dead 2 free to play this weekend on Steam
Celebrating the pre-Halloween weekend, Left 4 Dead 2 will be free on Steam this weekend. Valve announced that starting Thursday the co-op shooter will be gratis to play and is currently available to pre-load.This weekend adds a new achievement titled "Good Guy Nick" for current players who join up with a free weekend warrior.It should also be mentioned, in case you haven't paid attention the multi-million selling franchise in a while, that Left 4 Dead 2 added many of the maps from the original Left 4 Dead as free DLC on PC a while back.[Thanks, Bean]%Gallery-64704%
