The Steam Review

You’re probably all aware of Valve’s recent “Steam and the PC platform in general” press conference. Steamcloud is the headline announcement of course, but our old friend John Cook also listed a few other upcoming developments.

The Valve Hardware Survey, and an “Installed Packages” result has been added to its report. Firefox is one of the packages detected - are there any others?

It seems like this gets at least one mention every month. It’s a bit of relief to see that it still exists!

Counter-Strike’s in-game adverts are the pilot for a Steam-wide system Valve intend to offer to independent developers rather than use themselves. How does their new offer fit into the indie culture?

Strings for two new system requirements were added to steamui_english.txt in Monday’s platform update. One warns that unspecified games will “within the next few months” no longer be able to run on CPUs without SSE, and the other regards Steam itself.

Computerandvideogames.com have posted a well-rounded Steam interview with Valve’s PR chief, Doug Lombardi, which looks ahead to 2007.