Valve has updated their policy on game trading in Steam, requiring a one month wait period before giftable games can be traded.
All new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser’s inventory will be untradable for 30 days. The gift may still be gifted at any time. The only change is to trading.
The move is part of an ongoing effort to clamp down on steam key resellers using fraudulent credit cards to buy and quickly distribute keys. Games can still be gifted normally.
(Source: Steam)
Social media has brought many great things to the gaming community, chief among which being a much closer and more personal connection with the people who make our games. Unfortunately, it has also had the effect of giving faces to the otherwise faceless, a voice to those who for the sake of the company’s public image, perhaps shouldn’t be given an open microphone.
Paranautical Activity has been removed from Steam and Valve has terminated its contract with the developer after Mike Maulbeck posted a profanity-laced rant on Twitter. In his tweets, Maulbeck called Valve “incompetent,” lamented the company’s monopoly, and expressed his hopes that the platform would no longer be a monopoly by the time his next game released. Maulbeck posted another tweet that has since been deleted, stating “I am going to kill gabe newell. He is going to die.”
Whether or not the “threat” was genuine is irrelevant to what transpired. At the end of the day, video games are a business and companies like Valve expect a certain amount of professional conduct from their partners. Business issues should be dealt with professionally via email, not through vitriolic rants on Twitter.
Line of Defense went into early access last week and while the idea was that players would need to purchase one of the game’s founder’s packs to gain access, a mistake in the game’s Steam listing caused the title to be made available for free to anyone, buyer or not. The mistake was fixed by Valve, but not before several thousand players had managed to start the client download. Since the players had not purchased the game, however, they were still unable to access the servers and were thus unable to play. Several of those players then took to Steam’s review system to show their anger.
In a news piece on the Line of Defense website, Derek Smart responded to complaints, noting that while the game will eventually be free to play, the current box price is to weed out players simply looking for something new and free to toy around with.
We know that a lot of you are excited about the game; but the whole purpose of pricing this Early Access tiers this way is so that we can attract a specific dedicated crowd during the next three to four months of testing. It is a very large and involved open-world game. We’re a small indie team. For those reasons and aside from the fact that we do not have the resources, we simply don’t want to be distracted by large numbers of players who – for the most part – won’t contribute any meaningful feedback to the game.
Line of Defense is currently in early access on a heavily staggered release system.
(Source: Line of Defense)
[Insert December holiday here] is upon us, and that means the Steam holiday sale is invading our wallets and making us choose between dinner and a pile of cheap games. As always, prices are in USD and may vary slightly based on your location and may not be available in all areas. Most of these sales last until January 2nd.
Path of Exile is finally ready to shed off its skin of being in fake-beta mode (no wipes, open cash shop) with an official launch on October 23rd. Alongside its official release, Path of Exile will also be coming to everyone’s favorite digital download location: uPlay. Actually it will be launching on Steam, but uPlay is your favorite store, right? The launch of Path of Exile will also bring with it the release of the Scion, the seventh class to be made available. Unlike her fellow exiled souls, the Scion isn’t just a character you can jump in and play with. In fact, you can’t even choose her as a class until you find her out in the world. The Scion is the first in a line of prestige classes and will be more difficult to play than the others.
Players will also enjoy an addition to the game’s main story, as well as new zones and expansion on PvP and guild functionality. You can read more at Massively’s lengthy preview.
(Source: Massively.com)
Star Vault has announced that Mortal Online has finally been approved by Valve for release via Steam’s Greenlight program. The sandbox MMO has sat near the top of Valve’s list for a good while now, seemingly passed over with every month’s release set. Well the good news is that players will soon be logging in and running around buck naked or clothed if you’re into that sort of thing.
Thank you to our awesome community for voting us up to the very top of 15,000 game titles and earning our place on Steam, the worlds largest online PC game distribution platform. More information concerning our plans for Steam will be announced shortly; we just wanted to shout out a big “thank you” to our incredible community. Mortal Online’s future is getting more exciting by the day!
Hopefully the influx of new Steam players will bring much needed profit to the Swedish developer.
(Source: Mortal Online)
As previously announced, Jagged Alliance Online is now available for download and play on Steam. The free to play MMO was originally launched on browsers via Gamigo’s game portal, and is expanding its visibility to the Steam community. The game weighs in at a rather light two gigabytes of storage space and recommends a 2.4ghz processor and at least four gigabytes of ram. As with the browser version, Jagged Alliance Online is always online and naturally requires a constant internet connection.
While the original game is free, Steam is offering 10% off until June 12th on two DLC packs. Each pack costs $29.99 ($26.99 on sale) and contains 80 new contracts, extra rewards, achievements, prestige contracts, an exclusive mercenary and $150,000 in cash. Check it out at the link below.
(Source: Steam)
This Eve image is still current, right? I’m sure someone will tell me if it isn’t. Rejoice, netizens, for Eve Online is on Steam! What’s that? Eve Online has been for sale on Steam for longer than MMO Fallout has existed? Oh. Well, starting today (if today is May 30th), you will be able to purchase Eve Online subscriptions as well as PLEX through Steam itself, rather than through CCP’s billing system. The program to allow subscriptions directly through Steam was launched alongside Darkfall: Unholy Wars.
Enough about that, though. According to CCP, the developer is looking further into Steam integration, including the Community Hub and even Steam Workshop, a hub where players can create and submit their own custom content for various supported titles.
“Other aspects of Steam we are potentially very interested in are the Community Hub and Steam Workshop. Our community team has already started looking into the possibilities here, and we would love to hear your feedback on this as well.”
No clue on what players would be able to create via Workshop, and hopefully more details will be coming in the next few months. It is worth noting that the new subscription plan does not extend to existing accounts at the moment.
(Source: PC Games N)
Congratulations are in order for the team at Mechanist Games for the successful Greenlighting of City of Steam on Steam Greenlight. City of Steam joins as one of the twenty titles approved in the sixth batch of games to be given the go ahead by Valve to release on the mega-platform. City of Steam is an upcoming browser game built for the UNITY web player and set in an industrial fantasy world with Steampunk elements. Players are able to take control of eleven races of creatures with four classes to choose from.
City of Steam is currently in between beta stages and is set for release sometime before Tupac finishes releasing new albums.
Cliffhanger Productions has some good news. The latest update from the Shadowrun Online Kickstarter deals with introducing armor and what effect it will have on players in the upcoming MMO when it comes out (hopefully) later this year. On the other hand, the folks had some good news about Jagged Alliance Online, which not so long ago launched its 2.0 version: It is coming to Steam.
We are bringing our current released game Jagged Alliance Online to Steam and we have been getting in more artists and QA to help us work on SRO.
Jagged Alliance Online can currently be played via web browser through Gamigo’s game services.
(Source: Kickstarter)
MMO Fallout 