Valves

For Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we put together a package of stories about the most pivotal pieces of technology from the past two decades, and mine was on Steam. It’s difficult to overstate how influential Steam is to PC gaming, or how rich the storefront has made Valve. As a private company with infinite piles of Steam cash, Valve has the freedom to ignore market pressure from consumers, creators and competitors. It famously has a flat hierarchy with no strict management structure, and developers are encouraged to…

Follow the space industry long enough and you’ll notice that an outsized number of catastrophic failures of satellites or launch vehicles can be traced to a physically small but ubiquitous part: valves. Valves play a critical role in the spacecraft’s architecture, regulating the flow of pressurents, like helium, and propellants. They can also be found on launch vehicles, and by number they are one of the most common subcomponents in these systems. This reality came into sharp focus this week, when Astrobotic…

Valve has introduced new rules to abide by that will allow the company to add more games with AI content to its Steam gaming platform. To start with, it's updating its content survey form for developers so that they can give the company a description of how they use artificial intelligence in their games. If they used AI tools to generate art, code, sound or any other kind of content for their title, developers must ensure that they do not include anything illegal or anything that infringes on someone else's copyright.…

MSI is the latest PC manufacturer to attempt to take on Valve’s Steam Deck with the Claw, a new Windows-based gaming handheld it’s announcing at CES. The Claw is powered by Intel’s new Meteor Lake Core Ultra processor announced last month and can be specced with “up to” an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, according to MSI’s press release. At CES 2024, MSI tells us it plans to ship three models ranging from $699 to $799 when it arrives in the first half of the year — with the base tier shipping with an Core Ultra 5 and 512GB of…

For the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, Valve not only released a documentary about the iconic FPS, but also sent out a pretty significant update to celebrate. While the Half-Life patch brought with it some bug fixes, there was one that it didn’t manage to iron out. Until now, that is. In a short clip uploaded to Twitter/X by user @VinciusMedeiro6, another update that rolled out recently has fixed an issue with the Blast Pit chapter of the game. Anyone who’s familiar with Half-Life will be familiar with this section, and…

Valve's Gabe Newell certainly knows a thing or two about making some of the most beloved games of all time, and offered up some free advice as part of a 25th anniversary documentary about the making of the original Half-Life.Half-Life was originally slated to be released in November of 1997. But it became clear to the development team the game wasn't ready, with one developer comparing the work-in-progress title to "a quick knockoff" and a "cash-grab." The game simply hadn't come together into a more…

If you’re having trouble ordering Valve’s new Steam Deck OLED, you’re not alone. Orders opened at 1PM ET on Thursday, and many people are already running into issues actually completing a purchase. Some Verge staffers who tried to purchase a Steam Deck OLED have been able to put the device in their cart but haven’t actually been able to check out.Valve acknowledged that there are problems and says it’s trying to address them. “We’re working on the Steam Store checkout issues,” Valve wrote on X (formerly Twitter).…

Valve Valve just announced the Steam Deck OLED, which is an updated model of the original Steam Deck featuring a new OLED screen. Unlike the previous model, Valve is only selling two versions of the Steam Deck OLED, one with 512GB of storage and another with 1TB of storage for $550 and $650, respectively. Although the OLED screen is the star of the show, Valve is making some upgrades elsewhere, too. The new design is now based on a 6nm APU, as opposed to the 7nm APU in the previous model, and it supports Wi-Fi 6E.…

I keep hearing that the Ayaneo 2 is effectively a Steam Deck Pro. The suggestion seems to be: if only it didn’t cost twice as much, it might be the better pick. On paper, the Ayaneo 2 does seem better! It’s smaller yet houses a more powerful processor, a bigger battery, and a higher-resolution 1920 x 1200 screen. It comes with Hall Effect joysticks and triggers that aren’t liable to drift, RGB lighting, a fingerprint reader, and a larger, bigger capacity, easier-to-replace SSD. It has not one, not two, but three USB-C…

Jason Cipriani/ZDNETI grew up playing video games on various gaming systems. I got my first console for Christmas when I was in first grade. It was the original Nintendo Entertainment System that came with Super Mario Bros. My brother and I shared it, along with the frustration that came with fighting Bowser and trying to rescue the Princess. After that, the timeline gets a little fuzzy, but eventually we also shared Game Boy, a Nintendo 64, a Sega Genesis, and probably a few more consoles along the way. We'd rent…