Moderator: JC Denton
by zak » 14 Jun 2006 15:23
by icycalm » 14 Jun 2006 20:55
by zak » 14 Jun 2006 21:38
by Molloy » 16 Jun 2006 21:24
by Victory » 26 Feb 2010 14:05
by recoil » 12 Mar 2010 08:02
Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform
Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately. Interested developers should contact Jason Holtman at jasonh@valvesoftware.com.
by Joshua » 12 Sep 2013 01:20
Valve wrote:Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.
Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another's Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.
“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.”
Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.
For more information about Steam Family Sharing and the beta program, please visit store.steampowered.com/sharing.
by icycalm » 12 Sep 2013 04:36
by icycalm » 04 Nov 2013 23:35
thefil wrote:Is anyone else using Steam Big Picture mode regularly? Impressions within.
I've recently become a pretty regular user of Steam Big Picture Mode. I have my desktop in the same room as my TV (I live in a 4 room apartment) and run an HDMI cable from one to the other.
With all the talk of SteamOS and Steam Machines, which I desperately want to succeed, I have been testing some stuff out. My impressions are pretty negative, and I'd like to hear if things are working better for anyone else.
First of all, in Windows. I own 147 Steam games with controller support, but it feels like less than 25% of those have full controller support, which means I'm configuring them on my PC, or often going through an intermediate "launcher" to get started. This is fine for me now, but what about people who aren't going to have a mouse plugged into their Steam Machine? Will they have to read the tiny config popup text from the couch while using the trackpad to click "Go"? For example, Skyrim is horrible to click "play" on from the couch, even with a wireless mouse. Note not even many of Valve's games have full controller support - Half Life 2 does not, and TF2's controller support which I recently tried is serviceable, but the UI needs a "big" mode for configuring from a TV.
Plus, Big Picture Mode is still BUGGY. Pretty much half the time I launch a game in it (lately I've been playing Dark Souls, Spelunky HD, Poker Night 2, and Geometry Wars), after popping in and out of the overlay a few times, the interface gets confused. The most common error is that even though I'm in the overlay and I can HEAR it responding to my actions, what I see is a chat screen, or game info screen, or what have you frozen in front of me. So the visual part of the interface is frozen while it's clearly still working in the background. The only way to fix this seems to be quitting Steam and restarting, not a good option on a TV-only Steam Machine.
Another bug I have is that sometimes when I quit a game I don't go back to big picture, but rather to the windows desktop with big picture in an unfocused window in the background. Again, not a big deal when I have a mouse, but a huge pain in the ass without one.
I've also put some (though admittedly much less) time into testing Steam out under Ubuntu. Multimonitor support in Linux is a train wreck for another year at least until the X stack gets phased out, so I'm forced to change to single monitor, TV-only mode to even get basic behaviours working, such as putting Big Picture mode on the correct screen. Once I do this, launching a full controller support game like Mark of the Ninja is still liable to change my system resolution until I change it back manually in the system settings (it feels like trying to run 16bit color mode games in Windows XP). This may actually be the most surmountable of the problems for Steam Machines and SteamOS though, as they can pretty much consistently expect an unchanging 1080p display - but if the games don't take that as the default, the problem may still show up.
Another problem under Linux is load times. First of all, disk performance on Linux is generally bad. But I think what's really killing it is the need to compile shaders just in time. Loading up Crusader Kings 2 takes literally 10 minutes on my i5 3570K and GTX 660Ti. This is exactly the opposite of the "pick up and play" mentality we want on a console-like platform.
So basically I'm pretty disappointed in the level of polish here. Things are not as "good to go" as I'd hoped. The Steam software has traditionally been pretty bad (it had hanging problems and would delete categories/favorites until quite recently) but I'd hoped Valve would have gotten it together by now for this much more entry-level platform.
Is anyone else using BPM or Steam Linux regularly? Are you experiencing similar issues, or have things been better? How ready is Valve for this leap deeper into user space?
by icycalm » 07 Aug 2014 05:31
Hello Anthony,
Thank you for contacting Steam Support.
We apologize for the delay.
If you are using IP proxy or VPN software, disable it or remove it from your computer. Such software is known to cause issues with purchasing through the Steam Store and connecting to the Steam network or game servers.
Regardless of whether or not you were knowingly using IP proxy or VPN software, please test the issue again. Let us know if this does not resolve the issue.
I wrote:Hello again.
I am an American citizen who currently resides in Spain and has a Greek credit card. Therefore, I cannot buy ANYTHING from your store. I tried:
1. The $50 in my account. No good.
2. My Greek credit card. No good.
3. My Spanish PayPal account. No good.
Will you PLEASE press whatever buttons you need to press over there so I can use your ***damned store?
Sincerely,
An extremely pissed off potential client.
by icycalm » 17 Sep 2014 17:53
by icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 03:42
by icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:48
by icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:50
by icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:50
by icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 05:06
by icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 06:27
by recoil » 25 Sep 2014 07:56
by icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 14:12
by icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 14:25
by Some guy » 22 Dec 2014 18:42
Brenna Hillier wrote:Steam’s gifting system has been tweaked, preventing users from trading between certain regions.
Steam users in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe can no longer freely trade Gifts with users in other territories.
Although Valve hasn’t made an announcement regarding the change, Reddit users have gathered screenshots of notifications warning users of the restrictions in a large number of countries.
There’s no confirmation as yet, but we assume Valve is looking to block users from taking advantage of major currency fluctuations through Gifts, trading and proxy purchases.
As Gamespot notes, the recent collapse of the Russian ruble motivated Apple’s decision to close the Russian App Store, so it’s quite likely something similar has happened here.
This is the second batch of changes to Steam Gifts and trading in as many months. With these actions Valve is gradually chipping away at a slightly dodgy culture of occasionally unscrupulous traders – sort of like cracking down on gold sellers. It’s a bit of a shame for those who bend the rules to access cheaper prices (say, transferring money to a friend in another country where a game is cheaper, who then buys the game and Gifts it to you) but it may help prevent scams, too.
by icycalm » 04 Jan 2015 06:54
recoil wrote:The whole process to buy and craft the badges takes about 5 minutes, so it would be a bitch to do it.
by icycalm » 01 Jul 2021 00:16