Valve

This year's Dota 2 tournament at The International 2017 e-sports event has been full of surprises. First fans were treated to a special demonstration of an AI bot crushing one of the game's top professional players, and then developer Valve used the second to last day to reveal that two new characters would be debuting soon. A quick teaser video showed the pair in action, as well as announced that a new update titled Dueling Fates is on the way.

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There's a good chance you've already heard of Artifact, the newest game on the way from Valve. Revealed at Valve's massive annual Dota 2 tournament, The International, Artifact has been the topic of much discussion since its debut. A lot of that discussion has been negative, and thanks to one International attendee, we get to see how Dota 2 fans reacted to the news in real time.

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When it comes to the relatively young genre now known as MOBA, short for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, there is no name that rings louder than Dota. Be it the original DotA or the Valve-owned Dota 2, the game formerly known as the “Defense of the Ancients” has become both the poster boy as well as cookie cutter for MOBAs that followed. The franchise, however, has mostly been confined to that. At the International Dota 2 tournament, Valve surprised everyone that it was ready to break into new ground while still carrying that beloved name. Artifact: The Dota Card Game is coming next year and it has Blizzard’s Hearthstone in its cross-hair.

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The annual Steam sales in winter and summer are events that a lot of PC gamers look forward to, but what if you woke up the day after the sale to discover that your Steam account has been VAC banned? That was the reality for more than 40,000 Steam users on July 6 - just one day after the Summer Sale ended. That, in case you were wondering, is a lot of VAC bans for a single day.

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Reviving old games seems to be a trend now. And, no, we’re not just talking about a case of “retro” fever. This is about old titles having their dust brushed off, shaken, and updated for the modern age. Blizzard did that with the original StarCraft, not the Remastered edition mind, and now Valve is apparently doing likewise for its debut game. Half-Life just got its first ever update in like forever, nearly two decades after it first took PC gaming by storm. At least back in 1998.

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Valve's Steam Link is a pretty handy tool if you're looking to play your PC games on your TV, especially if your PC and TV are in separate rooms. The only problem is that the Steam Link box currently costs $50 from the Steam store, making it a somewhat expensive accessory. The good news is that Valve and Samsung have teamed up to the throw the physical Steam Link requirement out the window, provided you have a certain Samsung Smart TV sitting in your living room.

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One of the remaining problems with VR, AR, and MR platforms is input. All of them use one form of stick or another, and none of them currently emulate the feel of a hand moving and grasping in the real world. Valve, however, might be coming close to a solution without having to resort to gloves or exoskeletons. The "Knuckles", Valve's nickname for the next gen Steam VR controller, does this by having nearly a dozen capacitive sensors in it.

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Back in February, Steam announced that it would be ditching Greenlight in favor of a new submission platform called Steam Direct. With Steam Greenlight, developers entered their games into something of a popularity contest, submitting previews and allowing users to vote on which games they'd like to see in the Steam store. That's all going away, and it's being replaced by a system that allows developers to publish their games to the Steam store after paying a per-game fee.

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Smartphone makers are jumping on the virtual reality train and most of them, unsurprisingly, put the smartphone at the center of it. That’s true even for Samsung, even though it has gone its own path rather than get behind Google’s Cardboard, and now Daydream, platforms. LG is finally following suit but it is following HTC’s lead instead and in more ways than one. Not only is it aiming for a PC-powered VR experience, it is also using the same SteamVR platform as the HTC Vive.

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Virtual reality equipment, especially the big, standalone ones, is no small matter, both in size as well as in price. The headset kit alone, which usually comes with controllers and sensors, costs upwards of thousands of dollars. That’s still not counting a VR-ready PC rig, if you don’t have one yet. That is partly why VR is pretty much still an exclusive club that very few can afford. Reducing the build costs of equipment goes a long way in making such equipment more accessible. Which is why Valve is working on a next gen base station for its SteamVR platform that will not only be smaller but also cheaper.

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HTC's latest financial report for the three months ending on December 31st, 2016 show the company in flux. The first several financial highlights the company made in this call were of positive revenue but an operating loss and a net loss after tax. Revenue for this quarter sits at NT$22.2 billion with a gross margin of 10.5%, while HTC's quarterly operating loss was a cool NT$3.6 billion with an operating margin of negative 16%.

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This week the folks at Valve have revealed that they have three new "full" games in development for the virtual reality universe. This information came from a media roundtable held by Valve in Bellevue, Washington, where other messages were released to the media as well. It was also there that it was announced that Steam Greenlight was being shut down in favor of a new program that'd take its place.

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