Valve expected to showcase Steam Box hardware next week

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently reignited talk of a Stream Box during a keynote at LinuxCon 2013. As part of his speech, Newell promised to offer more information about the hardware opportunities Valve sees for bringing Linux into the living room as early as next week.

Valve announces TF2 "Pyromania" event, Meet the Pyro video

Valve has announced plans to release a long-awaited introduction video for the Team Fortress 2 Pyro coinciding with a large update. The company has only detailed part of its three-day "Pyromania" event, with the first day bringing a new map as well as a game mode called Doomsday, in which two teams compete for "the honor of transporting a suitcase nuke full of recalled Mann Co. Australium to American monkeynaut Poopy Joe's rocket, so he can blast off and hunt down Soviet space chimp Vladimir Bananas."

Both teams will attempt to haul fuel up a slow-moving elevator and dump it into a rocket, which blasts off upon succeeding. Players can also earn 11 new "Astro-chievements," the names of which can be viewed on theday one event page. We haven't found descriptions for them yet, but TF2's Wiki will likely be updated with information about how to earn the achievements soon enough. Valve has only said it will announce a "bunch of new stuff this week," so it remains to be seen what the second and third days will bring. New weapons and vanity items including hats are a safe bet.

The developer plans to premier its Pyro video on Wednesday, concluding its "Meet the Team" series. The Pyro's animated short has been expected for some time, with hints of a release in a recent Portal 2 video (1:12) and aPyro-themed alternate reality game (ARG) launched last Tuesday. News surfaced this weekend that Valve has partnered with Adult Swim, but it's unclear if that's related to this week's event.

Source : http://techspot.com

Valve considering Steam for iOS, Android

A user on the Steam Powered forums who calls himself Political Gamer recently had a chance to check out Valve's headquarters as part of an interview. He took notes; here are his main points (although we'd like to point out that the whole story is definitely worth reading):

• They use very high end computers when a game is in development (i7, 6GB DDR3 Ram, 128GB SSD, Nvidia 580) but they still test on lower end comps
• Steam will get video recording "soon"
• Steam might come to iOS/Android
• Source Film Maker will be made public "soon"
• Meet the Medic is badass
• Portal 2: GOTY hands down

Here's a quote from the most interesting part of the story:

After waiting in the lobby for a few minutes it turned out Gabe was in the office and wanted to say hi. To my great delight he was playing DOTA 2 when we walked in and from what I can see the game already looks very promising. After a little "sneak peek" we sat down to talk about Steam and other goings on in Valve. During this chat he confirmed that Steam will get a video recorder very soon, also he said they were looking into the iOS/Android platform for possible expansions with Steam. He also said that the Source film maker is in the pipeline for a public release. After the chat was over he happily signed my copy of the Orange box and sent me on my way to Robin Walker.

We're particularly excited about the fourth point. Valve is the only company that appears to understand what gamers want, and the next frontier for the gaming industry is undoubtedly mobile.

Android looks much more likely than iOS, mainly because of Apple's many App Store restrictions. Regardless of what mobile platform Steam arrives on though, one dedicated app for all our mobile games would simply be awesome.