The Steam Review

Disregard the last post: I’ve heard directly from Valve that only thirteen of their staff work on Steam.

“The amazing thing is that the guys churning out regular additions to these four games are half of Valve. The other half are working on Steam, constantly.”

Valve have begun to use region restriction as a front-line selling point for Steam when promoting it to publishers.

You may by now have heard that “Steam” was broken into a week and a half ago and “consumer” credit card details stolen. As the quote marks suggest the breach has been played up by those behind it, whose exaggerations have been somewhat naively passed on by a number of big sites today.

The purchase of Ritual Entertainment by casual games developer MumboJumbo, and the subsequent shelving of the SiN Episodes series, comes amid increasingly noticeable industry whispers that Valve’s episodic efforts are returning only lukewarm sales figures. The episodic debate has been very much re-opened as a result, widened further by yet another Half-Life 2: Episode Two delay. What’s gone – and going – wrong?

Another pair of revealing job placements have been added to Valve’s Jobs page: a smack-talking DRM/Security opening, and an intriguing Web Applications position.