Valve Announces Major Update for Steam

[News Reader]

Valve Announces Major Update for Steam
Author: valve valve
Category: Valve news update Valve news update
Publish Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:27:42 -0800

Free Update Offers New Community Features for Connecting Gamers

June 20, 2007 -- This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing an advanced set of community features to more than 13 million gamers around the world.

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Free of charge, the new community features will be accessible via the Steam desktop client and via the web.

"Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam."

This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004. In its three year history, Steam has defined the next generation online gaming platform delivering hundreds of games to millions of users with services such as Guest Passes, Automatic Updates, Free Weekends, and allowing gamers to access their games from any PC.
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Source: Valve RSS News Feed
Description: All Valve news, all the time!

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Valve to update Steam, big-time! [News]
Valve announces that it will be bringing a major update to Steam, details inside.

Author: Joe Martin
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Source: bit-tech.net feed
Description: bit-tech.net

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Hmmmn. I'm not sure about this.

Sounds to me like they're going for an Xfire like thing, but only for steam games. Might be handy, could just suck.

However, yay! for steam getting a much needed overhaul. (unless they fuck it up)

[Gunslinger42]

Sounds to me like they're going for an Xfire like thing, but only for steam games. Might be handy, could just suck.

This, but hey, free features are free features

[bomberesque]

Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve

Translates to;

They yelled at us and told us to fix it so we are

[TheJockGit]

July 9th and no update yet... anyone have any dates?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

July 9th and no update yet... anyone have any dates?

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_time

[deject]

hahaha that's golden

[Dr. kitteny berk]

FACT:

When Team Fortress 2 ships | Coincident with the Rapture

[Grimmie]

I've heard it described as "What Windows Live should've been".
So, it might well be very good.

[HereComesPete]

Thing is, despite it being steam only, it collects more info about you and your steam games, so k/d ratio's, time with tmp in css etc, bit swankier than xfire, but a bit late if you've clocked up mad hours and aren't even bothered now.

Microsoft are bringing out a games for windows fista live thing, need another email addy on top of a hotmail account, does stuff, but doesnt do some of the stuff that the xbox version of live does, such as matchmaking, or letting you know when your friends are online, apparently, so it doesn't do what I'd regard as the two the most useful things, I kinda scanned this in a pc gamer article, so if you want more info than my half-remembered ramblings, Im sure berk will supply it.

[Lateralus]

hahaha that's golden

Haha, this.