Valve

Gaming platforms have started to realize that harm doesn't simply come from seeing or having access to age-inappropriate games, it can also come from seeing inappropriate or hurtful messages. Gamers, especially in highly competitive titles, have long used colorful language, to put it mildly, in communicating with others, sometimes without considering whether the recipient is comfortable with it or not. Valve is now rolling out a chat filtering system for Steam that puts gamers in complete control while keeping its own hands off moderating these chats.

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Valve has announced that users now have access to a beta feature that enables them to filter unwanted words from chat, preventing conversations from being derailed. The feature is available now through Steam Labs and involves the chat filtering technology the company made for its most popular games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.

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Valve has always been accused of trying to monopolize the PC games distribution market, especially after Epic Games' colorful statements last year. Warranted or not, it may have helped push the company to change a few things and open its doors to more of its competitors. Considering it was a long time coming, it may have been presumed that EA will never make good on its promise to bring its subscription service to Steam. That is finally happening this month but there's a bit of a catch.

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Years ago, many of Electronic Arts' PC games could be found on Steam. New EA releases were published there frequently, but then one day, Electronic Arts decided that it wanted to take the fight to Steam, launching Origin as a storefront all its own. Many of EA's existing games were left on Steam after Origin launched, but from that point on, all of the company's new games were only accessible through Origin.

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Half-Life Alyx is the first major game in the franchise to come out in years but its high requirements made it a no-go for many fans of the franchise. Valve may have boosted sales of its Index VR system and perhaps other compatible VR gear but that is still a small number compared to Half-Life fans still left hanging. Unsurprisingly, there have been a few attempts at getting Alyx to run on screens that are flat as pancakes but this Pancake FPS Starter Kit looks to be one of the most promising and slightly more confusing ones.

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It was only a matter of time before Valve jumped onto the game streaming bandwagon but it seems it's using the advantage of hindsight to avoid the problems its peers and rivals have bumped into. Steam Cloud Play isn't exactly technically a game streaming service but is more a platform that connects games with actual game streaming services. The first such service it is supporting is NVIDIA's GeForce NOW and it is assuring game developers and publishers that nothing really changes on their end.

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Virtual reality is supposed to give the illusion of being in an artificial yet believable world. Given today's technologies, however, that doesn't always look believable not just in graphics quality but also in how things move. Liquids are one of the hardest things to get right and Valve had a simple solution for those in Half-Life: Alyx that involved simply ignoring they even exist. The latest update, however, finally brings some semblance of reality and lets you play with all kinds of liquids that you might not even have access to in the real world.

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The HP Reverb G2 represents a team-up of HP, Valve, and Microsoft, to create a virtual reality / mixed reality headset that'll top the rest. This device works with one 2K x 2K resolution per eye, and rolls with a 114-degree field of view. This headset is wired, worked with Windows Mixed Reality and SteamVR, and MSFT spatial audio - as well as HP Labs newest spatial audio format.

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Today we're taking a peek at the Steam Top Release list for April 2020, released here on the 22nd of May, 2020. This list includes a very strange assortment of games, some for kids, some for adults... and there's a golf game too. As it was with all previous releases, the Top Steam Releases list for April 2020 was compiled by measured revenue generated during the first two weeks after launch.

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Valve's own games have long been popular not just for their intrinsic value but also for their modder-friendliness. That kind of thinking has fortunately also seeped into Steam via the platform's Workshop feature, giving rise to countless mods, some of which grow up to be games in their own right. Now Valve is extending that to its first big VR game, giving modders the green light to take what they can from Half-Life: Alyx for their own twist on the game or even completely new VR experiences.

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No longer the unchallenged king of PC game digital distribution, Valve has been updating its Steam platform not just in appearance but also in small bits of behavior here and there. Those have mostly been filed under its "Steam Labs Experiments" but, from time to time, those features do make their way to the actual Steam implementation. Just like Experiment number 008 that is now rolling out to the Steam Library to tell you you might want to play next.

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The folks at Square Enix just put a whole bunch of games in a big bundle to sell to gamers staying at home - all to fight COVID-19. This might be the start of a big push on the part of game-makers across the spectrum. If the Square Enix Stay Home & Play campaign "rewards gamers for practicing social distancing and also help charities that need support," and it works, the future's going to look a whole lot more bright than it looks today.

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