Category Archives: Valve

At some point this past weekend, there were 329,977 Steam users running DOTA 2. That’s a new record for any single game on the Steam platform, beating down the previous record of ~297,000 players gathered in DOTA 2 in early March. The West qualifiers for The International tournament — with a prize pool currently topping $2 million — were this weekend, and folks can watch through the client, so that probably had something to do with it.

Thanks, PC Gamer

Steam Trading Cards are in beta now, courtesy of Valve. By collecting said cards you can unlock a series of badges for your Steam profile, and intrepid gamers have posted a gallery of all current badges so far for your viewing pleasure.

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Valve has announced on the Team Fortress 2 blog that the first community created update for the game, Robotic Boogaloo, is live.

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Sales of Valve’s Dota 2 Compendium have already pushed the total prize pool for the third annual world championships event past $2 million.

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Valve has announced Steam Trading Cards, a new service that rewards gamers for gaming on Steam, is in beta. Outed on Saturday through the Steam Database, the service allows customers to earn Steam rewards for “playing the games they love.”

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Dota 2 developer Valve has added new stretch goals to sales of the game’s Interactive Compendium, the companion guide to its next tourney ‘The International 2013′. The new goals offer incentives such as bonus HUD skins and a chance foe players to vote for the game’s next hero.

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Valve has rolled out a new update on Steam which assigned gamers a personal level based on their community achievements, and linked to the store’s badge system.

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Dota 2 developer Valve had promised buyers of the game’s Interactive Compendium – a digital companion to the incoming International tourney – that if they bought enough copies they’d unlock new Smeevil courier mounts. The $250,000 target has already been smashed and the mounts are being worked on now.

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A entry for Steam Trading Cards has turned up in the Steam database, leading many to scratch their heads as to what the entry entails.As PCgamesN notes, it could mean a variety of things such as support for trading card games, Valve could be working on its own trading card game, or it could be the start of some other form of community trading of CD-keys or the like. Valve hasn’t announced anything of the sort, yet, so we’ll just have to keep guessing until something is announced.

Steam Greenlight games have been voted on by “roughly” 2 million participants since it launched in August 2012, according to a recent developer group chat on Greenlight.

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The opt-in beta version of Half-life 2 already supports your shiny new Oculus Rift headset.

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The march of DOTA 2 moving towards being some insane industry all of its own continues with the Interactive Compendium, a supplement to the upcoming International Championships.

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Valve’s experimental psychologist Mark Ambinder has been doing some interesting research into biometric feedback.

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As promised earlier this week, the Left 4 Dead 2 Linux beta is live. The beta build allows Linux owners to play the game natively, and comes with the new Extended Mutation System. Those who currently own Left 4 Dead 2 will see the beta in their Steam library, and the complete game comes with authoring tools and the beta Dedicated Server. It also includes updated Windows and Mac clients, so even if you are not running under Linux you can help by testing the Beta. Further information can be found through the link to the L4D Blog.

Portal is now available for Linux through the Steam store, according to PCgamesN. It’s possible Portal 2 is also to be made available soon for Linux as well, as it’s listed, by grayed out at the moment, according to Gearburn. If you don’t own the original Portal yet, it will run you £6.99.

Tickets for The International, Valve’s Dota 2 championships, will go on sale next week.

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Team Fortress 2 developer Valve has dropped the update-bomb today, with a brand new patch that integrates the studio’s new “Steampipe” content delivery method, among other things.

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Valve has issued a new patch for Dota 2 adding a whole new hero along with various user-friendly tweaks.

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Much-praised Half-Life 2 mod Minerva, which earned its creator a job at Valve, is now available directly through Steam.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive developer Valve has launched a paid pass for its online shooter.

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