Mar 14
Back at Steam Dev Days in January of this year, Valve first showed off a glimpse of their redesigned SteamOS controller. After deciding it was silly to include a touchscreen … Continue reading
Mar 13
Steam is down, it’s not just you
Posted in: Today's ChiliThis morning at around 12:15 PM Central Time (immediately after noon) Steam went down for the count. While some users reported that Steampowered.com had been down for a period earlier … Continue reading
Mar 06
As one of the most well-received tower defense games in its day, gamers have long been chattering about a second iteration of the game Defense Grid. Hidden Path Entertainment and … Continue reading
Mar 02
In September last year Value announced a new program allowing Steam users to share their digitally downloaded titles with their friends and family. This is one major caveat of digital copies as opposed to physical ones, sharing isn’t exactly easy, with the latter people previously just used to hand over the discs, with digital copies it isn’t that simple. The Steam Family Sharing program allowed gamers to share their entire library with as many as 10 authorized computers. Initially only 1,000 Steam accounts were given access to this feature, now Valve has opened it up for everyone.
Steam Family Sharing Now Available For Everyone original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Feb 26
Everyone loves a good Steam sale, don’t they? Developers not so much. That being said, gamers might be interested to learn that Valve will be giving developers the tools they need to set their own discounts and sales periods on Steam, which the company recently confirmed with the folks at Polygon. Prior to this Valve and developers had to work together to create individual Steam sales.
What this means is that gamers will not have to wait for Valve to announce sales as developers will soon be able to be free to announce their own sales whenever they want. This sounds like a great way for developers to offer discounts whenever they want, which in turn could lead to more games being purchased. (more…)
Steam Developers Will Soon Be Able To Set Their Own Sales/Discounts original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Feb 20
Today Call of Duty: Ghosts will be updated with a collection of “customization packs” that allow the user to see their gear covered with oddities. Supposing you enjoyed the holiday-themed … Continue reading
Feb 18
If you happen to read news on the internet, you might have come across multiple stories alleging that Valve was spying on users’ internet histories. The allegation stemmed from a post on reddit which claimed that Valve Anti-Cheat was pulling DNS data from users’ computers and sending it to Valve, thus allowing the company to essentially monitor their entire internet history without them even knowing. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has personally spoken against the accusation, outright denying any possibility of Valve spying on its users.
Gabe Newell Says Valve Anti-Cheat Isn’t Spying On Users original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Feb 17
Here’s a fun fact: If you use Steam for your games—let’s face it, you do—there’s a chance Valve’s Anti-Cheat System been taking a look at all the websites you visit and sending a list back to home base. Why? No one knows for sure.
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Feb 17
Back in 2013, Valve unveiled their Steam Machines, and along with it a Steam Controller which would be used to play with the Steam Machines. The design of the controller itself was very unique and safe to say that it did not look anything like the competition, but apparently it proved to be too controversial which was why Valve announced a slightly redesigned Steam Controller which did away with the secondary display in favor of more familiar D-pads. That being said, we’re sure many of you guys are wondering how did Valve even come up with such a unique design in the first place.
Speaking during Steam Dev Days, Valve’s Eric Hope outlined how the company conceptualized and experimented to eventually come up with the Steam Controller. According to Hope, one of the goals of the Steam Controller was to emulate both the mouse and the keyboard in a single device, or as Hope puts it, “We wanted to embody everything that made Steam and PC gaming in general great inside of a controller.” To that extent Valve experimented with a variety of ideas which included motion controls and track balls, but these ideas either ended up being too expensive or too heavy, which Valve eventually whittled down to the Steam Controller that we know today. The talk itself is almost an hour long so if you have some time to spare, check it out in the video above.
Valve Explains How They Created The Steam Controller original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Feb 16
Tagging is a useful features for blogs, music, and even games as it helps identify and refine the search process. For example tagging a game with “RPG” would allow those searching for an RPG game to come across said title, but unfortunately it seems that some have gotten a bit carried away when it comes to tagging games on Valve’s Steam platform, abusing the Steam Tags feature shortly after it was launched. For example titles such as Gone Home was tagged with a “not a game” tag; Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP with a “hipster garbage” tag; and Indie Game: The Movie with “Phil Fish sucks”.
This has led to Valve making an announcement that they will be doing something about it in an update that will hopefully lead to such tags disappearing for good, or at least reduced immensely. The update basically allows users to flag tags, thanks to a flag icon placed next to a tag, that will inform Valve if the tag is offensive/abusive, not appropriate, not helping, or contains a spoiler. From there Valve will review the flag and determine if the tag should be removed. This is very different from Valve’s Steam review system in which gamers are only allowed to review games that they have actually played, versus tagging where anyone can tag a game even if they have not played it.
Valve Lets Gamers Flag Offensive/Abusive Steam Tags original content from Ubergizmo. 
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