Valve

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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It would appear that the days of Steam Greenlight are numbered. Many PC gamers who have used Steam for the past few years will be familiar with Greenlight, which allows Steam users to vote on independent games that are looking to get a listing on Steam's storefront. Greenlight has been around since 2012, but Valve announced today that it will be shutting down this spring.

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Digital copies are games are quite convenient. Without the need for physical access, they are easier to distribute and can reach as many as possible. In theory, of course. In practice, however, games don’t always reach all countries, even countries that belong to the same region. That situation has prompted the European Commission, the European Union’s legislative body, to take a closer look into the business of “geo-blocking” games practiced by Steam owner Valve and five game publishers to see if this almost ordinary way of doing things is, in fact, an anti-competitive practice.

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Valve's own Steam Controller may be one of the most interesting hardware peripherals for PC gaming, but it comes with a steep learning curve. The trade-off to this, however, is that it's deeply customizable, thanks to its software that allows any game's controls to be reassigned and mapped to buttons of a user's preference. A few months ago, Valve began opening up this software and making it compatible with the PS4's DualShock 4 pad, but now it's doing the same for Xbox controllers.

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The folks at Ilium want to create a device that'll be tracked in virtual reality to make the reality of shooting games in VR more real. What could possibly go wrong with this situation? If they're able to create this accessory in a limited fashion and keep it supported through the largest platforms available - very little could go wrong. Of course they need to get some funds for it, first.

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If buying games digitally, either on PC or console, has taught us one thing, it's that the idea of refunds is quickly disappearing. That's not always the case outside the US, however, where some countries' consumer protection laws still enforce refunds on digital purchases. It seems gaming giant Valve is learning that lesson the hard way, as an Australian court has fined the company AUD$3 million (nearly US$2.2 million) for not offering refunds on Steam purchases for several years.

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Bad news for those of you looking to snag some tasty gaming deals: Steam is down at the moment. If you're having a problem accessing the store, any of Steam's community features, or game servers based on Steamworks, the good news is that this problem isn't on your end. The bad news is that this seems to be a fairly massive outage, and there's no word when Steam will come back.

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