Valve

Despite Epic Games' attempts to overthrow it, Valve's Steam remains the king of PC games stores. As such, it has thousands of games under its roof to the point that looking through what's available can easily become overwhelming. Sure, there is a search function as well as tags but even those can be too generic or require knowledge beforehand. After baking in its Steam Labs since December, Valve is finally rolling out a major new addition to Steam's interface, organizing games into different categories that seems to encourage exploring the overloaded library of games.

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The Steam Game Festival is getting something of a branding refresh. From here on out, the Steam Game Festival will be known as Steam Next Fest, with Valve saying that it decided on the name change to "more directly communicate its focus." In addition to this name change, Valve also confirmed when the next Steam Next Fest will be taking place, and it seems to line up well with E3.

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Perhaps spurred by the pandemic keeping everyone at home, Steam has spent the last several months building out its Remote Play Together service. At first, it started as a way to play select local co-op games online with Steam friends. Then, earlier this month, it expanded again, this time allowing users to invite someone who doesn't even have a Steam account to play games with them.

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Apple is both famous and infamous for its stringent quality control over its app stores but some developers, not just Epic Games, have always criticized its sometimes incomprehensible policies that are applied inconsistently depending on the app. Valve has learned that the hard way years ago when it first launched the Steam Link app for iOS. While that has been resolved, it took two more years before the macOS version of the app finally makes its way to Apple's desktop platform.

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In a patent application made public today, Valve showed drawings and descriptions of a new sort of VR headset. This wearable head-mounted display (HMD) included an array of features, including but not limited to wireless functionality, antenna, optical subsystem, IMU sensors, a dedicated processor (or processors), onboard memory, functioning operating system, applications, games, a head tracking module, and an eye tracking module.

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Every once in a while, Steam will offer a game for free for a limited time - generally over the course of a weekend. One of those weekends is happening now, with Steam offering free copies of Metro 2033. The game is yours to keep if you add it during your library while it's free, but you don't have long to do it.

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Once upon a time, digital card games were all the rage thanks to the success of Blizzard's Hearthstone, based on the Warcraft lore, but few managed to replicate its magic formula. Even long-time brands in the real-world physical TCG/CCG industry like Magic The Gathering didn't fare as well and Mojang's first foray into that market, Scrolls, was an even bigger failure. Unsurprisingly, Valve also tried its hand at that by designing Artifact around the Dota 2 MOBA but it now seems that the end is nigh for both Classic and "2.0" Foundry versions.

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Valve released a Linux version of its Steam Link app, allowing the connectivity system to work on even MORE devices than before. This is just the latest in a line of operating systems made available to work with Steam Link, including Windows, Android, iOS, and Raspberry Pi. And it's all free, provided you have a Steam account and own a game or two.

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Gaming can be an intensely social activity, despite stereotypes, but most of the interactions among gamers happen online these days. There are video games that are meant to be played together with a small band of friends, often over a local network. COVID-19 restrictions have made it harder to get together for local multiplayer games and some friends might not even live in the same country or continent. Valve made the Steam Remote Play Together feature exactly for that purpose and soon it won't even require a Steam account to use, at least for some of the players.

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Once upon a time, Steam envisioned homes with a Steam Machine gaming box in their living rooms. The idea of playing PC games on such a large screen and on the comfort of your couch would have gone well if not for the fact that most PC games are designed with keyboard and mouse in mind. That may no longer be true today, with a variety of games across genres advertising support for game controllers. With Steam's latest dashboard feature, the PC gaming market's biggest distributor is telling developers to start caring about controller support.

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In an ongoing legal battle VS Epic, Apple's requested that non-party Valve deliver a series of data points. Apple's suggestion is that the biggest competitor to Epic's "Epic Games Store" is Valve's game store Steam. Apple's lawyers suggest that their "request is very narrow", while Valve's lawyers suggest "Apple wrongly claims those requests are narrow. They are not."

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DOTA has really come a long way. It started out as a third-party mod for WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, the popular Defense of the Ancients caught the interest of Valve. No longer tied to Blizzard's property and no longer an acronym, Valve was free to take DOTA 2 places where its predecessor couldn't even dare. That apparently includes an animated series that will be premiering on Netflix next month, an honor the very few games, even bigger ones than DOTA 2, could boast of.

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