With an increasing number of spam and phishing attacks carried out on Steam users, Valve have decided to implement a new account policy in the hope that it will mitigate the situation.

Last year Valve released The Steam Discovery Update. Looking back on it, they say that the update has done marvels.

A little over four years ago, we wrote an article to announce that version 2.0 of a little community-made ‘mod’ going by the name ‘Half Life 2: Update‘ had been released in response to Valve’s infamous 2010 Mac update that brought a weak implementation of HDR (High Dynamic Range) to Half Life 2 and an insane number of crippling bugs.

Half Life 2: Update fixed many of those bugs – unofficially – and enhanced many of the HDR effects in the vanilla game and just today, the lead developer Filip Victor has announced that the third and final iteration will be released for free on Steam this Friday, March 27th.

With Steam’s 125 million active accounts, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that Valve is interested in the physical realm of hardware.

Many Source mods, new and old, have been taking advantage of Steam Greenlight as of late. From Aperture Tag, to Portal Stories: Mel, to Estranged, and many others to boot! Some authors may be coming under fire for deciding to release their projects on Steam with a price tag. However most want to utilize the Steam service for its advantages in reaching a wider audience, easy installation and regular updates at no cost to the user. The newest one to add to the latter’s list is 2009 classic Joutomaa, by Sauli “Mephasto” Saarimaa.

Remember the good old days when free weekends were only a single title? Well, those times are behind us now. Valve is throwing the biggest free weekend ever with a total of 10 titles. Shame I have midterms…

As a result of the recent public release of Steam Music, which also saw the release of the Half-Life and Portal soundtracks as free DLCs on the Steam Store, this week’s Community Spotlight features the work of DJ Anton Dubrovin (known online as “Thonidy”) who has created an awesome hour-long musical mix of the work of Kelly Bailey.

For this week’s Community Spotlight we wanted to feature a project known as “Steam Database” or “SteamDB” for short.

Essentially, SteamDB is an online tool which catalogues information about games and applications on the Steam Store. It acts as a one-stop shop for pretty much everything and anything that you need to know about every single release on Steam, from technical data such as “AppIDs” and “depot configurations” to sales information such as DLC listings and worldwide pricing, it even gathers live player statistics.

The rumors turned out to be true; we are in fact getting a new store page. The best part – It’s live as this is being written.

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.