Valve

Valve has announced the free availability of 'Proto Pass' for its Dota Underlords strategy battle game. The title was released for everyone across multiple platforms last month, offering a standalone version of the Dota 2 Auto Chess mod for desktop and mobile. In the most recent update on the game, Valve has released the 'Proto Pass' for current beta testers, giving them a chance to try -- and critique -- the game's own battle pass.

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Most PC gamers probably see steam only has a digital games store but developers will tell you that the platform is a lot more than that. While it offers developers some features like controller support, statistics, and others, platform maker Valve is also thinking about other features to add to the platform itself. Now it is gathering those experiments under a single Steam Labs roof for the public to see and, for the daring, to try out.

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After spending just a few minutes with Valve's new Interactive Recommender for Steam, I can already see the massive improvement. I've been using app stores and game stores since before they were digital, and I've never experienced such a smooth process. This is a positive, well-planned, thoughtful, non-intrusive way to use machine learning, and I'm glad it was a gaming company that had to be the first to make it happen.

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The Steam Link app for iOS has gone through quite an odyssey over the past year or so, but back in May, it reappeared on the App Store and now it seems like it's here to stay. Valve pushed the first major update for the Steam Link iOS app today and it's adding some pretty big features. Chief among them is the ability to remap your controllers, which is a pretty big deal for PC players.

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Epic Games kicked up a storm when it announced its own Epic Games Store with a not so subtle challenge at Valve’s Steam and, more importantly, industry business practices. But while it presented itself as a champion of developers and gamers, both camps chided Epic Games for pushing developers and publishers to put their games exclusively on that store. Nowhere has that clamor been more audible than with the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter who will now be refunding backers who don’t feel like supporting Epic Games in any way whatsoever.

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Those who have been following the leaks over the past few days probably won't be surprised by this news, but the Steam Summer Sale has officially kicked off. As always, this means deep discounts on much of Steam's catalog, giving price-conscious gamers the chance to pad out their libraries on the cheap. That's all well and good, but at the moment at least, there's one small problem.

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Due in part to the feedback given to the group over the weekend and because of their connections with Valve, Canonical did an about-face today. They've suggested that feedback from gamers, Ubuntu Studio, and the WINE community led them to change their plan and will "build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS. Whether this will change Valve's future with Ubuntu Steam, we'll see.

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The majority of the time that Linux gets dragged in the spotlight is when there are high-profile security bugs that remind people how Linux practically runs the world behind the scenes. This time, however, the controversy is ironically around one of the operating system's weakest points: gaming. A Valve developer just "announced" on Twitter that the company will be dropping support for future releases of Ubuntu and, as expected, it has driven Linux users into a slight frenzied panic.

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There always comes a time when fans of a gaming franchise creates a mod that proves to be equally or even more popular than the original. At times, those developers get lucky and get hired by the original owners to work on an official version. Other times, those original owners try to strike off on their own to eventually wipe the mod from history. Both have happened to Dota, originally called the Defense of the Ancients. Valve has just fully revealed Dota Underlords, its own take on the Dota 2 Auto Chess mod that's taking the market by storm.

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When one thinks of Steam, its chat capabilities aren't often the first thing that comes to mind. Still, it's clear that Valve considers chat to be an integral part of Steam, as it now has its very own app. Valve has launched a new Steam Chat app on iOS and Android, allowing you to always have that aspect of Steam at your fingertips.

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Apple is being criticized, even sued, for holding its App Stores so tightly to the point of being anti-competitive. Of course, it rightfully owns that App Store and until something drastic changes, what it says goes and app developers have no choice but to find ways to compromise. That seems to be the situation Valve found itself in last year with its Steam Link mobile app. Thankfully, that may now be a thing of the past as the app has popped up on the iTunes App Store again. Hopefully, for good this time.

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Back at the end of March, Valve revealed - or at least teased - the Index, a new VR headset it's been working on behind the scenes. That teaser didn't come with any significant information on capabilities or hardware requirements, but it did suggest that we could look forward to learning more in May. With May now just around the corner, Valve announced today that the headset will go up for pre-order tomorrow.

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