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Hi, and welcome to the ValveTime news.
Each week, we'll bring you the biggest talking points regarding Valve Software and the community.
Now, the news:
Gabe Newell was front and center this week after he appeared at the University of Texas
to give a talk regarding Valve and their products.
The majority of the talk is spent discussing Valve's flat management structure and the future of Steam.
One memorable quote from the talk is
"Whether we want to or not, we're becoming a bottleneck,"
in which Gabe talks about how he hopes that Steam will eventually become an extremely open platform
allowing independent content creators to set up their own storefronts
and sell their products without direct involvement from Valve.
Gabe also discusses his thoughts towards potential business threats relating to their upcoming Steam Box,
primarily of which is apparently Apple.
At just over an hour long, the talk contains a lot of new information,
so we highly recommend that you take a look at the full video,
which you can find by clicking the annotation link currently on screen.
Several other videos have also surfaced, so we'll link anything we find interesting in the video description.
Oh yeah, and Gabe wore a horse mask.
It was also revealed earlier this week that Gabe would appear alongside legendary film director and producer J.J. Abrams
during the opening keynote discussion at this year's upcoming DICE Summit.
The talk, currently schedule for February the 6th, 2013,
will involve Gabe and Abrams discussing "Storytelling Across Platforms,"
primarily focusing on who benefits the most, the "Audience or the Player?"
On February the 7th, Gabe will then give a keynote presentation entitled "A View On Next Steps,"
which will focus on the future of the games industry and Valve's place within it.
To top it all off, Gabe will also be officially honored at the DICE Awards
as the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences 2013 Hall of Fame inductee.
We're interested to see where these discussions may lead and what we'll learn from them.
While the past week has been busy for Gabe personally, it was also a crucial week for Valve
after the VZBZ, also known as the Germany Consumer Agency, gave the company a "January 31st Ultimatum"
regarding demanding changes to the Steam user license agreement.
The legal dispute, which has cropped up once again after a variety of warnings late last year,
has since seen the VZBZ threaten to sue Valve after their ultimatum was ignored.
VZBZ are once again demanding that modifications are made to Steam
in order to allow European citizens to resell their online games,
as stated as a right in European legislation.
This particular event harkens back to a previous legal case in 2010,
in which the German Federal Court of Justice dismissed similar claims made by the VZBZ,
a case which the agency now wants rejudged.
We'll let you know when we learn more on this particular subject.
In update news, Dota 2 received its weekly patch several days ago which introduced a variety of new cosmetic items,
including a new Chicken courier and item sets for Anti-Mage, Chen, Enchantress, and Windrunner.
As usual, the update also shipped with a significant amount of changes to behind-the-scenes files,
including the addition of a mysterious texture file which has appeared in the heroes folder under the name "Elder Titan."
While nobody is quite sure about the new file,
current predictions are that the Elder Titan is simply a renamed version of Dota 1's Tauren Warchief,
which is a copyrighted name owned by Blizzard.
We'll have to wait and see to find out.
The game's file system was also restructured to provide better optimization and loading times,
which is always good news.
A significant amount of content was updated for the upcoming hero Tusk,
including new high quality textures and particle effects,
all of which point towards the hero's potential inclusion in the game within next week's update.
Stay tuned and we'll keep you posted.
Alternatively, you can keep up-to-date at Cyborgmatt's blog,
a link to which will be provided in the video description.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive also received a small update earlier this week,
introducing several weapon changes and updates to GO TV, CS:GO's own game spectating system.
Players can now spectate their friends' live games by using a new option on the 'Play with Friends' menu,
a system which functions similarly to the spectator feature which has been included in Dota 2 for some time now.
A link to the changelog and update post will be included in the video description.
A new video in the CS:GO Pro Tips series was also released on Friday of this week,
this time focusing on Get Right, a member of team NiP.
The video follows Get Right as he explains the role of a back-up player
in competitive matches and the impact this role can have on the classic de_inferno map.
A link to the video will be provided on-screen now and at the end of the episode.
And yes, Nick probably included that stupid text flash again,
so you might want to go back and pause the video about a hundred times
just to find out what stupid thing he said.
Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Steam Greenlight also received an update this week
in the form of a new 'Skip' button and new developer statistics.
The new "Ask me later" button allows users to skip over a game
if they are currently undecided on whether or not they like the concept,
or if they genuinely don't care.
Detailed statistics are also now available directly to developers,
allowing them to see how many people are viewing or voting on their titles along with time-specific analytics,
providing for more in-depth analysis and management than was ever available in the past.
During last week's ValveTime NewsTime TriviaTime segment,
we asked you for the name of Cave Johnson's cut assistant which was planned to appear in Portal 2.
As many of you correctly pointed out, the original assistant was to be known as "Greg,"
before eventually being replaced by Caroline, who acted as Cave's secretary in the final version of the game.
He did, however, appear as a background character
alongside an alternate universe version of Cave Johnson during the Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC
which was released last year.
This week's question is a little bit harder, but I'm sure you can all manage.
What was the date which saw the condemnation and closure of Aperture Science's Test Shaft 09, "Zulu Bunsen," according to Portal 2?
We'll reveal the answer on next week's episode.
That brings us to the end of another week of Valve news.
While it's been pretty quiet recently, we imagine news will pick up soon.
In the meantime, be sure to head on over to the second episode of ValveTime TalkTime
to listen to our discussion about what impact we think Steam Workshop has had on Valve,
their business practices, and their game development techniques.
Unfortunately, we won't be releasing an episode of TalkTime this week as Glenn and Nick have decided to be
extra lazy due to both of their birthdays occurring back to back this weekend,
but we'll try and get an episode out the following week.
Good news for all of our Spanish viewers out there:
all of our videos will now feature Spanish subtitles thanks to Carlos Faz, our new translator,
who is in charge of translating all of our new video subtitles over to Spanish.
Thanks also go out to Dietrich Ginocchio, our original English subtitle creator,
who has been helpfully developing subtitles for us since November of last year.
That's all I've got for this week, so have a great day and bye for now.
[people shouting] 3!