Hasta La Gadget!

Jeri Ellsworth, a hardware hacker from Seattle who was hired by Valve last year to work on game hardware, just announced on Twitter that she has been fired. No other information was offered, such as the reasons for her sudden departure or what she plans to do now, aside from “new exciting projects.” Valve hasn’t said anything about the decision, either.

The tweet showed up at 9:40pm EST, and was both simple and direct, stating: “Yup. Got fired today. Time for new exciting projects.” She hasn’t yet responded to any inquiries about what went down and what she plans on doing next. Ellsworth is perhaps most popularly known for the Commodore 64 emulator joystick she created before joining Valve, which sold over half a million units.

The folks over at Engadget interviewed Ellsworth back in September 2012, during which time she is said to have expressed enthusiasm for her job, speaking fondly of the company’s work environment. During that time, she said that her team was working on the development of a controller to make playing Steam games more enjoyable.

Per the interview, it was obvious that Ellsworth hadn’t had any plans to leave the company, having stated that her team has a one-year goal for creating the controller, among other things. What went wrong that prompted the company to fire her is unknown, and there’s a good chance an explanation will never surface. Still, we’ll be keeping an eye out for more details, so stay tuned.

[via Twitter]

Valve fires hardware hacker Jeri Ellsworth is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Valve has rolled out an update to Steam Greenlight, bringing with it a handful of improvements based on requests and feedback from users. The improvements are primarily for users, but developers are also tossed a bone with a new stats feature. Among the other improvements is the ability to better organize and discover titles in your queue.

First up is the new “Ask me again later” feature, which allows users to skip a title, which will disappear for one month, then reappear for you to reconsider. If you change your mind about it before the month is up, you can pull up the title via the new menu “Items to Revisit Later,” where it will be nestled waiting for you. For developers, statistics have been added that allows monitoring of item views, votes, and things relevant to both.

Users now have the ability to follow items in addition to favoriting them. When an item is followed notifications will be provided to the user when its developer makes any new announcements. This feature makes it easier to keep tabs on things you like without manually checking various items periodically. With this update, items already favorited will be automatically followed.

Finally, users can also create a collection of titles, which now allow announcements from the user to those who are following the collection. Such a collection can be titles that are favorites, or can be titles in a specific category or trend. Likewise, users can follow other collections, and will receive updates if the collection’s creator posts an announcement.

[via Steam Community]

Valve releases Steam Greenlight update, brings with it a handful of improvements is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Get ready, Steam users, because today’s the day Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition arrives on your digital distribution platform of choice. After a brief period of exclusivity with Beamdog, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is now available through Steam. This should net Beamdog quite a few more sales, considering the amount of people who claim they won’t buy PC games unless they can buy them through Valve‘s channel.

Whether those threats are real or not, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is one title every fan of RPGs should have in their collection. Originally released way back in 1998, Baldur’s Gate in many ways set the standard for computer RPGs, and it’s a title that still has gamers talking today. For this latest release, Beamdog has taken the beloved game and given it a makeover for a new generation of gamers, fixing bugs, adding new areas to explore, and adding support for higher resolutions (among other things).

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is also available on iPad at the moment, and it should be landing on Mac and Android at some point in the not-so-distant future. That’s the hope, at any rate, but ultimately it comes down to when Beamdog feels those versions are ready for release. Once those versions have landed, players should be able to take advantage of cross-platform multiplayer, a feature that has so far been missing from the iPad version.

So, even though this launch has been relatively slow going, it’s good to see Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition show up on Steam. There may be more of these remakes coming up in the future, but all of that is dependent on how well this first Enhanced Edition sells. Keep it tuned here to SlashGear and we’ll let you know when Beamdog announces release dates for the Mac and Android versions – in the meantime, you can pick up Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition on Steam now for $19.99.

[via Joystiq]

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition arrives on Steam for $19.99 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Steam Greenlight has been up and running since August 2012, and so far, it seems to be working out at least relatively well. Today Valve announced the fourth round of games to make it through the community voting service, meaning that more than 60 games have now been approved through Greenlight. That isn’t too bad, and if you’ve been gaming for a while, there’s at least one title in this latest round of approvals that you’ll recognize.

Without further ado, here are the ten games that have earned a spot in Steam’s catalog: Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, Asylum, DLC Quest, Eador: Masters of the Broken World, La-Mulana, Leisure Suit Larry, MaK, The Age of Decadence, Unepic, and War For The Overworld. A pair of software titles have also been approved by the community, with articy:draft (a game design tool) and GroBoto (a modeling app) given the go ahead to join Steam’s still-young line up of non-game software.

Of course, just because these games have earned the approval of the community, that doesn’t mean they’ll be available on Steam right away. Valve says that all of these titles will be launching independently over the next few months, so it’s ultimately up to the developers when these games go up on the Steam store. Valve couldn’t get more specific about potential release dates as all of the titles approved are in varying stages of development.

Steam Greenlight launched as part of a larger roll out of new features for the digital distribution service. Around the same time, Valve also introduced Big Picture Mode and launched the Steam for Linux beta. Group those with the revamped Community Hub, and there have been plenty of new things for Steam users to get excited about. Hopefully it won’t be long before Valve is ready to announce the next round of Greenlight-approved games, so stay tuned.

[via Valve]

Steam Greenlight approves ten new games is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Steamboxes are here! Well … sort of. The prototypes for various Steambox designs are certainly here at CES 2013, and we just spent a grip of time acquainting our lenses very closely with them. The devices range in size and form factor, as well as origin — several of the devices we saw originate from Valve internal, but inclusions like Alienware’s X51 and Digital Storm’s Bolt were also being held up as examples of the ongoing “Steam in your living room” initiative (note: all the controllers are off-the-shelf Logitech wireless devices, not prototypes). The idea here, as Valve hardware engineer Jeff Keyzer told us, was to show off a variety of form factors for living room-friendly designs. We’ll have more from our meeting later today, but for now you can feast your eyes on the elegant prototypes — as well as Xi3’s Pistin, and the aforementioned other two third-party PCs — that we’ll be sure to see more of as 2013 goes on.

Terrence O’Brien contributed to this report.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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