Steam smashes yet another concurrent record with 36.4m simultaneous players recorded earlier today
Steam's done it again: another weekend, another concurrent user record broken and a new one set.
Valve News
Gamer Creates Dual-Screen Steam Deck Inspired by Nintendo DS
A gamer managed to turn their Steam Deck into a dual-screen system that borrows ideas from the Nintendo DS. Players enjoy having the ability to take their video games on the go with them, which has led to the creation of a number of different handheld consoles, including the highly successful Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck.
Valve likely earned over $1bn in Counter-Strike 2 loot boxes last year
Valve likely made over $1bn last year from loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2.
Valve squashes Team Fortress 2 and Portal fan projects after years of leniency
Valve may have had a change of heart about fan-made tribute projects “borrowing” its intellectual property. GamesRadar+ reported on the Steam maker’s DMCA takedown notice sent to the creators of Team Fortress: Source 2, a passion project porting TF2 to the more modern Source 2 game engine. In addition, the Steam maker squashed a Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, hinting at a possible shift toward a more protective corporate strategy from the typically lenient Valve.
Valve's new guidelines will allow for more AI content in games
Valve has introduced new rules to abide by that will allow the company to add more games with AI content to its Steam gaming platform. To start with, it's updating its content survey form for developers so that they can give the company a description of how they use artificial intelligence in their games. If they used AI tools to generate art, code, sound or any other kind of content for their title, developers must ensure that they do not include anything illegal or anything that infringes on someone else's copyright. Valve says it will evaluate each game and check if the developer has submitted truthful information.
The creator of the canceled Portal 64 demake says, 'Don't be mad at Valve here'
Programmer and Nintendo Jedi James Lambert has spent the last couple of years working on a demake of Valve's first-person puzzler Portal for the Nintendo 64, a machine I wasn't sure could even display a proper circle let alone a moveable hole in reality you can use to teleport through 3D space in real-time. That project, Portal 64, was recently canceled after Valve's lawyers asked Lambert to take it down.
Valve continues to improve the gaming performance of Linux open source drivers for AMD GPUs, as part of the Mesa project
Mesa is a long-running project that started life as an open-source driver, bringing the OpenGL graphics API to a host of different platforms. Today, developers from AMD, Google, Intel, and others all take part. One of the most well-known Mesa drivers is RADV: A Vulkan-based driver specifically for AMD's GPUs running on a Linux operating system. A recent update to them, created by Valve's developers, has added a neat little performance boost for any device using them.