Jan 17
If you’ve seen the NVIDIA SHIELD handheld gaming device working with streaming PC gaming in a home network, you know how it works – potentially – with Steam’s Big Picture … Continue reading
Jan 17
The Oculus Rift Crystal Cove edition was revealed at CES 2014 and to date, we guess the closest competition they are facing would be from the likes of Sony who unveiled their own VR headset at CES 2014 as well. We had also heard rumors that Valve could announce their own VR hardware in 2014 but as it turns out, that might not be the case. Instead it would seem that Valve will be backing none other than the Oculus Rift in a bid to help the technology progress at a faster rate, and with Valve’s experience in gaming and with their resources, we can’t say we’re too surprised.
We’re not sure why Valve has decided to back the Oculus Rift rather than making their own, but we guess it might be cheaper since Oculus Rift has done all the leg work and laid the foundation to the technology, versus Valve who might have to start from scratch. According to Valve, they believe that it is possible that come 2015, we will have virtual reality headsets that will have a 20ms latency, 3ms pixel persistence, a 95Hz refresh rate, 110-degree field of vision, 1K x 1K resolution per eye, high quality optics, and capable tracking which was what Oculus Rift demonstrated at CES 2014 this year.
In any case it sounds pretty promising and we can’t wait to see what the result will be!
Valve Announces Plans To Back The Oculus Rift original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 17
Games for the PC aren’t overly expensive, but at the same time who can say no to a sale, right? Every now and then distribution platforms like Valve’s Steam holds a sale in which many of the games listed are discounted, which is great news for both developers and gamers because this causes an influx of sales, so it’s kind of like a win-win situation, or is it? According to indie developer, Jason Rohrer, it seems that he does not think that sales are necessarily a good thing to have. According to Rohrer, he believes that by having sales, it makes gamers wait for the sale to happen before buying a game, meaning that prior to that, there won’t be as many units of the game sold, which he believes will affect how much money developers will make in the long-run.
Rohrer has since pulled his games from Steam’s sales last year and is grateful that Valve never really forced developers to put their games on discounts. Interestingly enough Rohrer has an experiment that he plans on conducting, which is that he will offer his next game at a 50% off before the launch, sort of like a pre-order sale, 25% off during its first week of availability, after which the game will be sold at full price. It’s an interesting idea but what do you guys think? Do you agree that sales might not necessarily be a win-win situation for everyone involved?
Steam Sales Not Exactly Welcome By Everyone original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 16
There’s a bit of chatter surrounding the Valve event series going on this week inside the virtual reality landscape, starting with what’s called SteamVR. This system was introduced in beta … Continue reading
Jan 16
One of the most high-end-friendly builds to be shown in Valve’s first wave of Steam Machines revealed at CES 2014 was the Falcon Northwest Tiki, a tower with a price … Continue reading
Jan 16
In a manner similar to that of the annual Google I/O device (or devices) given to attendees of the developer conference comes Steam DevDays presenting of a Gigabyte BRIX Pro … Continue reading
Jan 16
Steam is available pretty much around the world as long as you have an internet connection. However if there is one drawback is that Steam does not accept currencies all over the world just yet, meaning that if you live in a country such as Australia or New Zealand, you will be subject to the whims of the foreign exchange market where currency rates fluctuate on a daily basis, or per minute basis if you fancy yourself a trader. In any case it can get pretty expensive especially if your currency is not as strong as others, but the good news is that during Steam’s Dev Day event, it was announced that Valve will be accepting additional currencies on top of what is being accepted right now.
According to the announcement, Steam will now accept Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, the Indonesian rupiah, the Japanese yen, the New Zealand dollar, Malaysian Ringgit, Mexican peso, Philippines peso, the Singaporean dollar, the South Korean won, Thai baht, and the Ukrainian Hryvna. This will be joining the Brazilian Real, British pounds, Euros, and the Russian ruble. Like we said this should help stabilize the prices but not necessarily making them cheaper either as publishers will still have to adjust the prices manually.
Steam Adds 12 New Supported Currencies To The List original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 15
Back in September, Valve showed off the Steam Controller which would be bundled and used together with its Steam Machines. Perhaps looking to set themselves as far apart as possible from regular console controllers, Valve went with a pretty unique and outlandish design which featured two trackpads and a small screen which could be used to display additional information. Admittedly it was a pretty unique design but it was met with controversy as it did seem a bit unwieldy and unfamiliar which means that gamers would have to take longer to adjust themselves to a new controller rather than being able to pick it up and play straight away.
Well the good news is that Valve has decided to do away with the outlandish design and has since revealed an updated controller that will do away with the tiny secondary display. Instead Valve will introduce a more familiar d-pad and standard controller buttons that gamers have been well acquainted with for the past couple of decades. However it should be noted that the image above might not necessarily be representative of the final design as it is merely a mockup of some of the changes that Valve has proposed during the Steam Dev Days event. There’s seems to be a lot of unused empty space in the middle where the screen used to be, which hopefully Valve will find some way to fill up as it does look a little odd, but what do you guys think of the newly proposed controller?
Valve Redesigns The Steam Controller, Adds D-Pads And Regular Buttons original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 15
Valve’s Steam has to be one of the biggest and more popular gaming platforms at the moment for PC gamers, but how big and how popular are we talking about? Well making an announcement at Valve’s Steam Dev Days, the company revealed that the amount of active users on Steam has risen to a whopping 75 million users, which is a huge jump from the 65 million users that Valve reported on back in October. According to Valve, they managed to achieve this 15% hike in active users thanks to the holiday season which saw Steam hold sale events such as Pre-Holiday and Holiday sales, causing users to sign up and purchase games at a discount.
According to the breakdown, Steam’s largest sales revenue came from North America which contributed about 41% in sales, followed by Europe who came in a close second with 40% contribution. While countries like Russia and Brazil did not contribute much, they had the largest year-over-year growth with sales experiencing an increase of 128% and 75% respectively. These are some pretty impressive numbers and with Steam Machines expected to go on sale later this year, we can only assume that those numbers will go even higher as non-PC gamers and console gamers might be enticed by Valve’s idea of being able to play their favorite games in their living room. What do you guys think? Anyone surprised by Steam’s growth?
Valve Boasts 75 Million Active Uses On Steam original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 15
Just a single slide at this week’s Steam DevDays was shown of the new Steam Controller for SteamOS, one which identified the chat earlier today on what would happen to … Continue reading
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