If you have been following Valve employee Marc Laidlaw on Twitter, you might have noticed that his account recently disappeared.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) are issuing a lawsuit against Valve.

While Valve doesn’t have physical presence in Australia, they still serve clients and customers there. This means that they are bound to Australian law. The ASCC states that Valve has not fulfilled its requirement for mandatory customer guarantees.

Which game developer would you most like to work for?

A recent survey by the Independent Game Developers Association reveals that most of the surveyed industry members picked Valve.

As a result of the tragic news about the recent death of Robin Williams, he’s being remembered all over the world as a comedian, actor and visionary.

But what many have forgotten is that he was also an ardent PC gamer, frequently showing up to major gaming events and proclaiming his love for the medium, even to the point of naming his daughter “Zelda”, after Nintendo’s oft-reincarnated princess.

But was he – along with other celebrities like fantasy-literature icon Terry Pratchett, British TV personality Jonathan Ross and nerd-darling director Guillermo del Toro, a Half-Life fan?

Is Counter Strike: Global Offensive not enough to satisfy your Counter Strike needs? Well you are in luck; Nexon is going to release a new CS game.

Valve is once again attending Gamescom, Europe’s largest gaming trade fair, which takes place on August 13th-17th at the Koelnmesse exhibition center in Cologne, Germany.

As in recent years, they’ll be set up in the Business Hall, so there will be no public access to Valve’s booth.

LambdaGeneration confirmed this in an email to Valve’s Doug Lombardi earlier, who said that there will be no press or public showings planned this year and only business related meetings will be taking place.

But that still begs the question, what will Valve be doing there?

Whilst many of us have been waiting very patiently (or not so patiently) for news on the next Half-Life sequel, web designer Tom Bennet has been busy putting together a rather stunningly designed retrospective in celebration of Half-Life 2’s 10th anniversary.

A proposed Russian magazine entitled ‘LambdaPreviews’ is looking for people to help kick-start what could be an interesting community project.

Managed by PivotBot a.k.a ‘John Freeman’ of the VK Half-Life Community, ‘LambdaPreviews’ aims to showcase the works of the Valve community via a free online magazine.

Update 11th August: Thanks to everyone who emailed in!

If anyone is still interested, we are still looking for contributors to cover the following specific topics:

• Garry’s Mod – Modding news, playthoughs, gamemode/map reviews, comics! etc.
• Portal Series – Modding news, mod/map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films, artwork etc.
• Left4Dead Series – Official news, modding news, map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films
• DOTA 2 – Official news, events coverage, community projects

We are also appealing to anyone who is interested in producing video content, such as playthroughs, mod/map/gamemode reviews and video tutorials.

Also, if you are someone who is interested in producing very occasional articles for the site, we are always interested in publishing ‘guest articles’ as opposed to dedicating yourself as a contributor.

Many moons ago, you might remember an article we posted about how Valve had given the Black Mesa team (now known as the Crowbar Collective) the opportunity to sell their mod as a full retail product. Despite announcing that a Source SDK 2013 version of Black Mesa would also be available for free, the announcement was met with mixed criticism. There was an overwhelming amount of support for the team, but there were a number of people who were concerned with what ‘ethical’ implications this choice to go retail might have. Should community made content that has always been available for free suddenly be given the chance to be monetized?