LambdaGeneration Community Join our new Community Platform — Share Half-Life news and community content. Built by fans, for fans.
We Are The Lambda Generation. LambdaGeneration is a website dedicated to the video game Half-Life. ( We're basically really passionate about crowbars, headcrabs and anyone who has goatee with a PhD in theoretical physics… )

Article Format:

Report

Report articles

Dota 2 beats Skyrim’s record for most concurrent players on Steam. Again.

Dota 2

Hello there readers of LambdaGeneration! My name is Vyacheslav ‘MrFreemanBBQ‘ Konchits. I’m Russian, and I am a new writer at LambdaGeneration. I came here from the Russian Social Network ‘VKontakte’ a.k.a. VK where I am the lead writer and founder of the Steam VK public page. I will be covering mainly Steam related news but also general gaming industry news that is related to Valve.

Anyway, today Dota 2, one of the most popular Valve games, has just set a new record for the number of concurrent players, namely — 326,072 people. This is a huge milestone for both the game and for Valve themselves! Here is a graph showing overtime playerbase statistics for both the Dota 2 beta and the previous record-holder, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Valve Loses Business Director And Reportedly Lays Off Over A Dozen Developers In “Great Cleansing”

Valve

UPDATE: Gabe Newell has released a statement responding to these reports (Engadget and Forbes were among those to receive a response):

We don’t usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I’d take the unusual step of addressing them.

No, we aren’t cancelling any projects. No, we aren’t changing any priorities or projects we’ve been discussing. No, this isn’t about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We’re not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn’t working here.”

And that’s it. It’s a reassuring response, but it all but confirms that the reported layoffs have, in fact, taken place after all.

Valve has one of the highest employee retention rates in the entire video game industry – and just a few years ago, their Jobs page touted a 98% retention rate. But though we haven’t really heard of any significant layoffs from the company, ever since its inception, that doesn’t mean they don’t fire people at all. In fact, according to Gabe Newell (in his first talk at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin), due to Valve’s inherently flat structure and hierarchy, they have to be really aggressive about firing people, and he adds that they haven’t done a very good job with interims or new employees.

But again, we’ve never really seen that process in action. Well, until now.

In Less Than Two Days, 9 Of Team Fortress 2’s Oldest Hats Will Be Permanently Retired

Team Fortress

Way back in May of 2009, Valve introduced Team Fortress players to the Sniper vs. Spy Update, which at the time was TF2’s most ambitious game update yet – providing both the Sniper and Spy classes with three significant new weapons each, as well as several new maps, alongside a brand new gamemode. But this update brought us something else, something which would leave a lasting impact not only on TF2 itself, but on all of Valve’s future work, as a whole… hats.

Yes, the Sniper vs. Spy Update was when TF2 got its 9 first rare cosmetic headgear items – one for each playable class. Since then, Valve (alongside numerous item designers from the Team Fortress community) have added 259 more hats to TF2- and so, by now, most people have forgotten about those 9 original hats… which makes it all the more interesting that Valve has actually decided to permanently retire them from the game’s item circuit.

Valve And Xi3 Corporation Reveal Steam-Centric Modular Mini-PC, Designed For The Living Room

Valve

UPDATE: Remarkably, it appears Polygon has some exclusive details on this Steam-centric mini-PC that Xi3 is working, on alongside Valve.

Dubbed “Piston” (see what they did there?), it will be based on Xi3’s high-end, performance-level X7A model. In addition, TIME and Eurogamer have more information on the Piston, straight from CES 2013.

Generally, a computer is pretty big. Which is why Valve’s great big master plan to get us to move our computers all the way into the living room, and somehow connect them to our TVs might not have made much sense, at first glance. But as we all know, Valve has an active hardware lab, with the immediate design goal of making Steam games more fun to play in the living room.

And as Gabe Newell himself has confirmed, Valve are in fact developing their own unique “living room PC“, alongside other hardware companies. And according to Gabe, we can expect to start seeing these little PCs in stores, some time later this year. In fact, just a few days ago, it was reported that Valve hardware engineer Ben Krasnow had confirmed, at the EHSM 2012 conference in Berlin, that Valve’s hardware lab would be releasing a few of its currently secret projects, in the course of 2013.

Could that include this mythical “living room PC” that some call the Steam Box? More importantly, will anyone please come up with a better name than that? How about… Steam Engine? Well, in any case, one great big announcement has finally emerged from this sea of uncertainty! And it’s a very big announcement, for a surprisingly tiny piece of hardware. Read on!

Steam’s New Community Market Beta Goes Live, Lets Players Buy And Sell In-Game Items Using Steam Wallet Funds

Steam

Though we may take it for granted these days, Steam Trading might just represent one of the most significant innovations in the field of in-game community interaction in recent years. Trading games, coupons, and items, all within the Steam community. The Team Fortress 2 economy alone was estimated last year to be worth 20 million dollars – and that was a very conservative estimate, made only 6 months after the game had become free-to-play.

And a lot of people have made some a lot of money by buying and selling these in-game items. But since so much of that activity takes place outside the Steam ecosystem (in the so-called gray market), it could be quite difficult to track what’s going on in the marketplace at large. But it seems as though Valve have found a way to remedy that problem in a pretty unique way. Read on!

Voting Goes Live For Team Fortress 2’s Second Annual Saxxy Awards!

Team Fortress

The only time voting has ever been exciting, terrifying, and completely nerve-wracking, (all at the same time) in the history of humankind… was probably when Valve had us shooting the hell out of each other like never before, then patiently re-editing the footage into a cinema masterpiece (also like never before), all in the name of attaining a foot-high Australium bust of Saxton Hale. Evidently, I’m referring to TF2’s First Annual Saxxy Awards, which took place in May of 2011.

Well, I hope you’ve been keeping your voting finger in good shape, for it’s all going to come rushing back very soon. And by “very soon“, I mean “literally right now“.

Gabe Newell On Valve’s “SOB”: “‘Stars of Blood’ Was An Internal Project That Never Saw The Light of Day”

Valve

Let it forever be known that the best way to get interesting information out of Gabe Newell is to buy him a hat on his birthday, surround him with fans, and ask daring questions like never before! After all, you saw how it helped us find out about Valve’s upcoming next-gen game engine!

But what if it can also help us find out more about Valve’s fabled space-centric game, known only as “SOB”? As you can tell from the title above… yes, it can! Read on.

1 11 12 13 14 15 16