Hasta La Gadget!

Gamers looking to buy games on PC usually have several choices. They can buy directly from the developer or publisher themselves, buy the physical copy of the game from a retail store, or choose an digital distribution platform like Steam, Origin, Epic Games Store, Uplay, and so on. However, Valve doesn’t want developers to promote other platforms.

According to changes made to the Steam community hub, which is where developers can communicate with players and keep them updated about patches, bug fixes, new features, and so on, it appears that Valve is making it so that developers are prohibited from using community hub to promote the availability of their games on other distribution platforms.

According to the FAQ, “In the game you ship via Steam, and in communications on Steam, you may only promote the Steam version and its availability via Steam, and not other distribution outlets. This applies both to full versions of your game and to content patches that change the existing version.”

This means that if a game is available on Steam as well as on other storefront like Origin or Uplay, developers will not be allowed to mention it. These changes actually come at an interesting time where Epic and Apple are in a legal battle in which the former claims that Apple is abusing their dominance.

Given that Valve’s Steam platform is one of the more popular choices for purchasing games digitally, we’re sure that there will be some who might not be too pleased with these changes.

New Steam Rules Prevents Developers From Promoting Other Distribution Platforms

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When it comes to the web experience, obviously web design and its user interface plays a vital role in allowing users to have a good experience. However, there are other factors to consider, such as page loading times. After all, what good is having a fantastic website design if the pages take forever to load?

This is why Google is making some changes to Chrome for Android in which they will start labeling websites that they consider to be a “fast page”. Right now, the feature still seems rather basic where Android users will have to long-press on a link in order to see the label, but presumably in the future it will make it more obvious during search results.

According to Google, “‘Fast page’ labelling may badge a link as fast if the URL (or URLs like it) have been historically fast for other users. When labelling, historical data from a site’s URLs with similar structure are aggregated together. Historical data is evaluated on a host-by-host basis when the URL data is insufficient to assess speed or is unavailable, for example, when the URL is new or less popular.”

That being said, there are of course other factors that can cause pages to load slowly. It could be a sudden influx of web traffic, like when everyone is rushing to buy a new product that was launched. Or it could be slow internet on their end. Either way, hopefully these labels will encourage web developers to step up in their website design to make them more efficient at loading.

Chrome Will Start Labeling Websites That Load Fast

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Someone definitely knows it was Shark Week.

Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and Jimmy Fallon brought the gags about the opening night of the DNC.

The former first lady urges Americans to “vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”