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Valve on bringing the PC to E3

E3 is still the biggest noisiest industry event of the gaming calendar. Before the show has even started the big console developers hold marathon press conferences for some vigorous tub-thumping about upcoming releases.

While a lot of the E3 showings are made up of loud noises, hot air and hype, it would be nice to have a way to celebrate PC gaming’s brightest and best on a big stage. With no single representative to put a show together, the PC loses out.

We discussed this exact topic with Valve’s Doug Lombardi recently, mulling over the idea of a more mellow event that could be shared between some of the world’s biggest PC developers.

Valve launches Steam Collections: hand-picked mod packs for Skyrim and Team Fortress 2

Valve have just announced Steam Collections: a new feature which will let anyone create lists of Steam Workshop mods that let players subscribe to the lot in one click. You can make Collections of anything in the Steam Workshop, but right now only Team Fortress 2 and Skyrim have Workshop content live. Skyrim is where it works best: all the mods in the Workshop are available to play, and Collections make it even easier to get them into the game.

Case in point, we’ve created two to get you started and show how they work: The PC Gamer Skyrim Mod Collection: Improvements, for the community’s best tweaks and touches, and another for our favourite New Content – much more substantial additions that change the game, but still for the better. You can subscribe to either in one click, add both, or even pick and choose from within our selections.

CD Projekt co-founder: “I don’t want The Witcher to be sold by crappy stores”

“I don’t want Witcher to be sold by crappy stores which don’t care about the consumers.” That’s what the impressively titled Marcin Iwinski – co-founder, Member of the Board and Business Development at CD Projekt Group – had to say at GDC last week.

The diversity of video game retailers is a contentious issue at the moment. UK retail chain GAME‘s share prices are at an all-time low. If the cover of industry magazine, MCV is anything to go by, they’re already dead. Marcin has been predicting the decline for years: “It’s funny because I’m speaking at the conferences, lectures and whatnot for the last six years of saying ‘digital, digital, digital’ and nothing happened. Then… kaboom! We’re at the tipping point and off we go.”

Steam Box: the truth, direct from Valve

Remember the Steam Box that was rumoured to be announced at GDC? The one that was supposed to sit under your TV and use biometric signals to shape your games? We’ve been squeezing the truth out of Valve.

“Yeah, of course it’s a big story and obviously, it doesn’t surprise me that you asked the question.” said Doug Lombardi, Vice President of Marketing at Valve, when quizzed about its existence.

Gabe Newell listed among world’s richest people, Valve estimated to be worth $3bn

Forbes have published their latest list of the planet’s richest people, and have declared Valve co-founder Gabe Newell the Newest Video Game Billionaire. Of the 1226 billionaires on the planet, Newell is the 854th richest with an estimated worth of $1.5 billion.

GDC 2012 has just kicked off. We’re live on the show floor

The Games Developers Conference has just begun in San Francisco. Devs from every corner of the industry are congregating to talk about their craft. It’s a very exciting time.

GDC is less console iteration and booth babe than E3. It’s more about quiet announcements and candid industry chatter. That said, this year’s show is already shaping up nicely, especially for us PC gamers. We have men on the ground, sniffing out scoops in real-time.

Will Valve open the Pandora’s box that is the Steam Box? What’s the mystery game that EA are due to announce on Tuesday? What will Sid Meier have to say in his keynote speech? Are Hitman Absolution’s crowds extremely good or a bit good? Read on for the highlights.

Valve rumoured to be working on “Steam Box” mini-PC

There have been huge rumours this weekend suggesting Valve could be working on a “Steam Box” mini-PC designed to sit under your TV in your front room. The Verge dropped a payload of as-yet unconfirmed information on Friday which suggested that a prototype of the box was shown off to potential partners at CES. The Verge suggest that it would be an open platform capable of running different types of client software, not just Steam, and would receive regular hardware updates at set intervals every few years, allowing developers to plan their games around a predictable upgrade cycle. The base unit is said to contain a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GPU.

Kotaku have dug up a tweet posted by Valve’s Greg Coomer showing him working on a mini-PC with very similar specs back in November. The Verge also have word that Valve are working on a controller for the Steam Box. A patent filed last year suggests that it could have swappable components, and it’s thought that Valve intend to put biometric measuring tech into the controller.

That might sound insane, but Valve have previously talked to us about how they use gaze tracking, skin galvanic response and pulse rate to gauge player reactions. They also made some surprising discoveries when they let players in a co-op session together see each other’s pulse rates. Here’s what Gabe Newell had to say about this back in 2010.

Borderlands 2 will use Steamworks

Gearbox say that they’ll be using Valve’s stat-tracking set of Steamworks tools to support Borderlands 2. As players, that means we get the traditional raft of associated features, like “Steam Achievements, downloadable content, auto-updating, multiplayer matchmaking” and Steam cloud support. The “multiplayer matchmaking” part of all that hopefully means Borderlands 2 won’t use Gamespy this time around. This is potentially very good news for anyone who found it an absolute pain to get into online sessions for the first game. The less services we have to sign into to get into multiplayer, the better things tend to work.

Borderlands 2 will be out in the US on September 18 and the UK on September 21, dates that will prove hard to erase once the latest Borderlands 2 trailer has scorched them into your brain in a blaze of screaming electronica and hyper-violence. It will also have “bazziliondier guns,” and not many games can make that claim.

Realm of the Mad God: free co-op bullet hell action RPG hits Steam

This may well be the “first ever cooperative MMO bullet hell shooter,” but I pray to the mad god that it isn’t the last. Realm of the Mad God is a massively multiplayer action RPG with all of the quest text and story stripped away, leaving only a lean, arcade style blaster in its wake.

In the beginning, you’re just a wizard with a weak wand, but as you hoover up experience for each kill, you’ll level, grab new weapons and unlock new classes. There are a few roguelike genes caught up in Realm of the Mad God’s weird, tangled DNA. If you die, your character stays dead forever and all his items are lost to the void. It’s so fast paced it’s hard not to just start over again instantly on death, making this very, very moreish.

It’s been free to play for a while on the Realm of the Mad God site, but its arrival as a free to play game on Steam gives us a good excuse to recommend it. Its Steam debut means its scatological collection of worlds will be packed full of low level wizards rushing around shooting chickens. 85 players at a time can jump into Realm of the Mad God’s instanced zones, which results in some spectacular, chaotic co-op monster slaying. Give it a go, you almost certainly won’t regret it, until your clicking finger falls off.

Skyrim beta patch removes 50 mod limit, free official iphone map app released

The latest Skyrim patch has gone into Steam beta testing with a fix for the “issue with downloading mods when you are subscribed to more than 50 mods,” which seems to suggest it’ll fix the current 50 mod limit. That’s great news for those of us who just can’t stop whimsically adding user made updates, slowly turning our copies of Skyrim into a fairground of monocled mudcrabs and gianter giants. You can apply the beta patch by opting in via your Steam settings menu, though Bethesda warn that it is currently in beta, so you’re applying it “at your own risk.”

Also, if you’re unsatisfied with Skyrim’s map, or have the urge to perch an ipad next to your monitor so you can plan your route and scout ahead with a few gentle strokes, the Bethesda blog has word of a new official app that you can download to your Apple device right now. The free version will give you the map of Skyrim and the nine major cities. Interior maps and more locations can be bought as extras. You can grab that from the App store now. Meanwhile, here are those patch notes from Bethblog.

Gabe Newell grows spectacular beard. Also says something about DRM

“If you’re not making your customers happy you’re doing something stupid,” says the new-look, full-bearded, Gabe Newell. Penny Arcade have been chatting with Valve’s managing director about his job, the state of PC gaming, and more. They also have an image of Gabe with a beard that we’re not sure we can use yet, hence the artist’s interpretation up there. EDIT: I’ve just got permission from The PA Report. Find the real-life beard embedded below.

Gabe even went into depth on DRM and how it affects game sales. He reckons intrusive measures can result in a false economy: “You know, it’s a really bad idea to start off on the assumption that your customers are on the other side of some sort of battle with you.”

“We tend to try to avoid being super dictatorial to either customers or partners. Recently I was in a meeting and there’s a company that had a third party DRM solution and we showed them: ‘Look, this is what happens, at this point in your life cycle your DRM got hacked, right? Now let’s look at the data, did your sales change at all? No, your sales didn’t change one bit.’”