Tag: Steam

Ukrainian game developers are facing payment difficulties on Steam

The “current environment” within Ukraine is disrupting payments on Valve’s storefront.

Steam is having issues processing payments for Ukrainian game developers amid Russia’s invasion.

On Thursday, developers based in Ukraine had their banking information on Steam deactivated. Valve, the company that owns Steam, sent out emails claiming it couldn’t “send bank payment to Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine” due to the conflict. The statement was confusing for many Ukrainian game developers, including Ternox Games.

“Hey [Valve], are you okay,” Ternox Games said on Twitter. “My country was attacked by Russia, and because of this, you decided to deprive me of a source of income?”

Valve then replied to Ternox Games on Friday, clarifying the situation somewhat.

“This past week, our bank notified us that they will begin requiring that we provide intermediary bank information for all wire payments in Russia and Ukraine,” Valve’s statement reads. “We are working to understand all the new requirements, create a path to collect this information from you, and send it to the bank.”

You can read Valve’s complete response below.

Later in the statement, Valve claims Ukrainian developers can either change payment instructions or wait until the company figures out how to get past these banking issues.

Many companies within the games industry have taken a firm stance on Russia in light of its invasion of Ukraine. GSC Game World, CD Projekt Red, Microsoft, and Sony are no longer selling software or products in Russia and Belarus, while Itch.io, Square Enix, and The Pokémon Company have made charitable donations towards humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Half of bitcoin transactions on Steam were fraudulent, according to Valve boss

Gabe Newell claims there were far too many dodgy bitcoin purchases.

Valve president Gabe Newell says that half of Bitcoin purchases on Steam were fraudulent. 

Back in April 2016, Valve began allowing Bitcoin as a purchase option on Steam. Though support did not last long, as in December of 2017, the company announced it was dropping Bitcoin support.

During a new interview with PC Gamer, Valve president Gabe Newell revealed that fraud played a considerable part in Steam ditching Bitcoin, and it sounds like he’s not a fan of cryptocurrency in general.

“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers,” Newell said. “We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50 percent of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”

These comments from Newell coincide with Valve’s Steam Deck launch, which he’s hand-delivering to some early adopters.

All of this partly explains Valve’s banning of all NFT and cryptocurrency games from Steam last year. Newell did claim the technology is not without merits, though he didn’t mince words about certain people’s intentions with NFTs.

“There’s a lot of really interesting technology in blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger, [but] I think that people haven’t figured out why you actually need a distributed ledger,” Newell continues. “There’s a difference between what it should be and what it really is currently in the real world. And that’s sort of where we were at with the blockchain-based NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off.”

Newell has similar reservations about the Metaverse.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Steam servers struggle with Lost Ark’s monstrously successful launch

Valve’s platform is buckling a bit under Amazon’s successful MMORPG.

Lost Ark  is already a runaway hit, as it’s bringing Steam server download speeds to a crawl. 

Early Access for Lost Ark  began on Tuesday, and Steam is struggling to keep up due to the  ridiculous number of players  trying to pre-load the  free-to-play  phenomenon at once. Amazon Games  is in talks with  Valve over potential solutions. 

“Steam is aware of it and is actively looking into the issue and we will update players as soon as we have additional information,” Amazon Games said on Twitter. “The current download issues on Steam are impacting all players, including content creators as well. We’ll keep players in the loop as Steam continues to resolve this.”

The Lost Ark  team claims things are getting better and that they will continue to monitor the situation.

MMORPGs having rough launches is nothing new. In December, Final Fantasy 14  had server queue waits so bad that it would make any Disneyland ride lineup seem short. Square Enix even  stopped selling the game  for a while. So Lost Ark  is by no means an outlier here; heck, it’s holding up well if the  positive  reception on Steam is any indication.

Lost Ark leaves early access on Feb. 11, when it’ll go completely free for everyone.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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The Steam Deck launches on February 25

Valve’s handheld gaming PC is nearly here.

After an unfortunate delay late last year, we finally have a release date for the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck launches on Feb. 25, 2022. In classic Valve fashion, there was no build-up or hints for this Wednesday announcement. Though when you own something as monstrously huge as Steam, there’s no marching to the beat of everyone else’s drum. 

Valve says it’ll reach out to everyone that made a Steam Deck reservation on Feb. 25, at which point they’ll give customers three days (72 hours) to complete the order. Failing to do so will result in Valve passing the offer onto the next person in the queue. So act fast if you want one!

[developing story]

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Resident Evil Village wins Steam’s 2021 game of the year award

Once again entering the world of survival horror.

The votes are in, and it looks like Resident Evil Village is Steam’s overall game of the year for 2021.

The Steam Awards are Valve’s community-driven shindig that celebrates games that made it on Steam each year. Sort of like  The Game Awards, but they hope you buy stuff by the end of it. In 2021, it looks like everyone was particularly fond of tall vampire ladies and werewolves, which is to say Resident Evil Village  got more community votes than anything else on Steam.

Last fall, Capcom’s president Takashi Mochizuki said  the company hopes to make PC its primary platform going forward. Any doubt that the Japanese publisher would have difficulty finding an audience outside of consoles sure seem like a distant memory by now.

Other winners at the Steam Awards include:

Some somewhat unconventional categories there. 

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Steam breaks its all-time concurrent user record

People still like Valve’s storefront, it seems.

Just shy of 28 million Steam users were logged in concurrently on Sunday, breaking the PC gaming platform’s previous record.

User Turbostrider27 on Reddit pointed out that  according to SteamDB, Valve Software’s storefront reached 27,942,036 peak concurrent users. That’s a new record for Steam, which previously peaked  back in November at 27,384,959 users. It’s only about 500,000 more people, but more than half of Canada’s population logging in to play video games is still quite a feat.

Steam’s  annual holiday sale  likely had an impact on this new milestone, especially as the past weekend was most people’s last break before the new year rolled in. 

Steam reached a peak record of almost 28 million concurrent users today from pcgaming

The SteamDB statistics also show that 8,219,950 players were in-game at the time, with titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA2, Grand Theft Auto V, Apex Legends, and PUBG: Battlegrounds. The usual stable of titles that always round out these lists, more or less. Though New World, which came out last fall, remains in the top 10 most played titles on Steam.

Despite reports of  China allegedly banning Steam, the platform continues to trudge ever-onward. Valve has yet to comment on whether or not there is any validity to those stories as of Monday.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Here are Steam’s most popular games of 2021

The numbers don’t lie.

Another year, another massive year for Steam. Despite some  distribution issues in certain regions, Valve’s PC gaming platform  set multiple records in 2021 — with no signs of slowing down, if the numbers are any indication.

On Monday, Valve released its annual  Best Of  statistics for Steam, highlighting some of the biggest winners in 2021. The list contains several games you would expect to be there, along with some that are a smidge surprising.

The most popular games on Steam in 2021 were:

Valve doesn’t specify the actual order of these titles, only stating that each broke over 200,000 concurrent players. Many of which made it onto the list of the best-selling titles as well.

The top-selling games on Steam in 2021 were:

Again, Valve doesn’t establish many rules on its categories, as these are the top-selling games by copies sold and the ones that made the most through microtransactions.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Steam’s alleged ban in China might just be a DNS attack

Valve has yet to comment.

Steam, the  global PC gaming platform by Valve Software, was allegedly banned in China on Friday. Though new evidence suggests, the outage might be due to a DNS attack.

As first reported by TheGamer, many players in China were claiming that the global version of Steam, which includes all community features and more than 110,000 games, was inaccessible in the country. Many believe this to be an alleged ban of Steam in the country, and for a good reason. We tried to verify this ourselves using Comparitech, which tests whether a website is unavailable in China or not (thanks, TheVerge). Sure enough, the tool states that “store.steampowered.com” is blocked across all of China.

SteamDB also verified that the global version of the platform is inaccessible in China. However, the Chinese version of Steam, which came out in February 2021, is still working.

There are conflicting reports as to what’s causing the global version of Steam to be suddenly absent in China, though. Well-known dataminer PlayerIGN claims that a “DNS poisoning” attack is allegedly the reason for Steam’s outage in China. DNS poisoning is a deceptive technique hackers use to redirect a website or domain to malicious third-party websites.

It’s still unclear whether or not the global version of  Steam is banned  in China or if the outage is a result of DNS poisoning. Valve Software  has yet to offer any official statement on the matter, and we likely won’t know for sure until the company clarifies things.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Steam’s Winter Sale is now live

Now’s the time to save.

Steam’s annual Winter Sale is here, just in time for everyone to blow what’s left of their hard-earned cash before the new year rolls around.

Thousands of titles on the platform are seeing massive discounts from Wednesday until Jan. 5, 2022. So prep that credit card in advance because you’ll likely give into temptation and pick some of these up over the next couple of weeks. 

Special discounts include:

  • New World  for $29.99 (25% off)
  • Deathloop  for $29.99 (50% off)
  • Resident Evil Village  for $51.99 (35% off)
  • Halo: The Master Chief Collection  for $19.99 (50% off)
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt  for $7.99 (80% off)
  • Dark Souls III  for $14.99 (75% off)
  • Mass Effect Legendary Edition  for $29.99 (50% off)
  • Watch_Dogs 2  for $9.99 (80% off)
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare  for $9.99 (50% off)
  • Red Dead Redemption 2  for $29.99 (50% off)
  • Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order  for $14.79 (63% off)
  • Days Gone  for $29.99 (40% off)
  • Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy  for $38.99 (35% off)
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice  for $29.99 (50% off)
  • Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition  for $24.99 (50% off)
  • Cyberpunk 2077  for $29.99 (50% off)
  • It takes Two  for $19.99 (50% off)
  • Back 4 Blood  for $35.99 (40% off)
  • Disco Elysium: The Final Cut  for $17.99 (55% off)
  • Divinity: Original Sin 2  for $17.99 (60% off)

Steam sales are always a curious thing as they often lead to games getting a reassessment, which happened to Cyberpunk 2077 last month.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Steam surpasses more than 27 million concurrent users

Black Friday helped the platform reach new heights.

Steam set a new concurrent user record at 27 million on Saturday. 

As first spotted by GamesRadar, Steam’s peak concurrent record is 27,384,959 users, according to  SteamDB. Of all those accounts, more than 7,835,449 were in-game. The latter statistic did not break the platform’s previous record, though, that’s still held by April 2020 at 8,171,592 in-game concurrently.

There’s no doubt that Steam’s annual  Black Friday Autumn Sale had a significant impact on these figures. Many games got a second wind during sales, including  CD Project Red’s open-world RPG  Cyberpunk 2077. Plus, a little free-to-play shooter called Halo Infinite  is a big hit, even as  developers acknowledge its battle pass issues.

Valve Software, the company that owns and operates Steam, is likely pretty happy that the platform continues to gain popularity. Due to supply problems, the company recently  delayed its highly-anticipated handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck. A problem that  Nintendo is all too familiar with currently, as is Sony. 

Valve’s games played a part in this new concurrent record, of course. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive  and  DOTA 2 were the first and second most played games over the weekend, respectively. Either title is rarely dethroned from those spots, however.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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