Steam trading cards are currently in beta, and they’re really weird. An adjacent but separate system to achievements, they land silently in your Steam inventory as you play. Some are earned in-game, others through trading, and all can lead to rewards when you have a full set - Steam XP, emoticons, backgrounds, and occasional discounts.
Bar an arbitrary Friends list cap, our Tim found the new system to be fun and friendly. But that was before today’s addition to the Trading Cards FAQ, which reveals a direct correlation between cash spent in free-to-play games and cards earnt.
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The International is the biggest Dota 2 tournament in the world. With Valve slapping down over one million dollars in prize money, the best teams from the around world flock to Seattle to claim their share.
A lot has happened since the last International. No Tidehunter (now known as Alliance) stomped at Dreamhack Winter. One of the most famous teams in the world, Na’Vi, has had multiple team alterations to try and reverse their declining performance. It would be rude not to mention Invictus Gaming, The International 2012 champions who put China on the Dota 2 map. They’ve been training hard since that day, and are ready to do it all over again.
Here are the teams of The International 2013.
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I’ve just sold one of Steam’s newfangled cards. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. What makes even less sense is how quickly it went and for how much: 50p for a virtual picture of Alyx and Gordon that vanished in less than a minute.
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Team Fortress 2 has been the silent beneficiary of two updates in as many days this week, which an awful lot for a game older than you or I, or them thar hills. The truth is that nobody knows quite how old TF2 is - we don’t have its birth certificate, and geological studies can only tell us so much. What we can tell you is how it’s changing.
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We were left scratching our heads last week as to what Steam Trading Cards were. They’d been spotted in the Steam database but Valve weren’t talking about their newest initiative. Well, the curtain’s been drawn back to reveal that they’re a development of Steam achievements & badges which will reward your playing of games with a deeper profile page and money off coupons.
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While League of Legends $5 million prize pool for its entire season may still beat the prizes on offer at this year’s Dota International, that’s a pot stretched out over a whole season and final tournament. With the money raised by the International Interactive Compendium, Valve’s Dota 2 tournament is offering a almost $2 million dollars in prizes for a single ladder tournament. The largest prize pot for a single tournament in all of eSports.
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The Compendium is Valve’s handbook to The International 2013, the world’s biggest Dota tournament by any yardstick worth measuring with (prize pool, global reach, surprises). For $10 you’ll get up-to-the-minute results and fixtures, MvP polls, and match betting without fear for your kneecaps. You’ll also be adding $2.50 to the International prize pool, and pushing the total closer to a series of new stretch goals for the benefit of all.
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Valve are in the process of adding gamerscore-like community ratings to Steam. Overnight, users have begun to notice personal meta-levels listed next to their account name as part of newly-rejigged profile layouts.
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A week ago, Valve released the International Interactive Compendium - a $10 digital tome designed to guide you through Dota 2’s annual tournament as it happens. The developers have pledged to add 25% of the proceeds to the event’s prize pool, and announced three ‘stretch goals’ - the second of which promised more mounts for the International’s celebratory Smeevil courier. It’s that goal that the Dota community have ably surpassed this week.
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A reference image for something called Steam Trading Cards has been spotted in the Steam database. With no statement from Valve forthcoming it look like we need to start playing the guessing game. That, or Hungry Hungry Hippos.
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Another week, another patch. Valve are starting to make preparations for the biggest Dota 2 tournament ever, with The International prize purse getting even fatter. A new Interactive Compendium has already added another $200,000 to the 1.6 million dollar prize pool. In this week’s update, Valve have added a new solo matchmaking option. The new queue will only be populated by solo players; cutting out the chance of going head to head against pre made teams. Also in the update: a huge amount of unreleased custom UI’s that have been unearthed in the files.
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I’ve just emerged, blinking, from City 17. I’ve been tinkering with Half-Life 2 on the Oculus Rift. And I’m a bit breathless. Speechless.
The Oculus has drawbacks: the screen is too low resolution. To get a decent effect you need to tinker with calibration settings. Motion sickness is a real problem.
But know this: playing a game of the quality and caliber of Half-Life 2 in Virtual Reality is an astonishing, incredible experience. It works. It’s as good as you’re dreaming it to be.
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Internal experiments at Oculus taught us to want it; proof-of-concept videos in Garry’s Mod and six rounds on Badwater brought it within reach. Now it’s here. In the early hours of this morning, Oculus and Valve shipped a beta version of Half-Life 2 that incorporates Rift VR support.
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The latest in an increasingly morbid series of CS:GO updates sees Valve pondering the nuances of firing a bullet through one body part and hitting another.
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Last night, the tickets for the Dota 2 International 2013 sold out in two short hours, leaving many fans disappointed. However, tickets have begun to show up on the Steam Marketplace: if you’re prepared to pay over the odds.
While the tickets have now vanished, they were listed for as much as £180.
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When Steam Greenlight was first announced, the idea seemed nice and simple. The Steam community would view and rate indie games, and the best would rise to the surface, ready to be fished out by Valve and given their own corner of the Steam Store. In reality, however, new batches of Greenlit games have been few and far between. It’s been so slow going that some games in the top 10 have sat unapproved for months.
The truth is this: Valve would like to Greenlight more games, but due to the way their tools are set up, they can’t. Not yet, anyway.
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Despite the push Valve have been making the past year to bring gaming to Linux, the release of penguin-friendly games has done little to grow the Linux audience on Steam. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS is running on more than 12% of Steam users machines.
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As of right now you can now go and purchase a ticket to The International, Valve’s very own Dota 2 tournament sporting a massive $1.6 million prize pool, and then some thanks to the Interactive Compendium. If you want to be there in person between August 7th-11th, then you’re going to want to buy a ticket. They’re selling faster than a charging Spirit Breaker.
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Valve want to guide you through this years International with the introduction of The International Interactive Compendium. It’s a fancy virtual book that is host to a wide range of functions including betting on matches, MvP polls, up to date results/fixtures. Buying it will make you eligible for special item drops throughout the tournament. What’s more interesting is that Valve are adding 25% of all sales to the already gargantuan 1.6 million dollar prize pool, making the worlds biggest Dota 2 tournament just that little bit bigger.
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As part of Valve’s continuing efforts to port their back catalogue over to the open source operating system Linux, escaping the clutches of Microsoft, the developer today released the beta version of Left 4 Dead 2 Linux.
Valve have also started hosting four new community-made campaigns.
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