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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:
You might remember last week when we told you how Gabe Newell, Valve's co-founder and managing director,
would receive a BAFTA Academy Fellowship at the BAFTA Game awards.
The award ceremony happened as planned earlier this week,
which saw Gabe receive his Academy Fellowship award from presenter Jonathan Ross.
While Gabe didn't reveal anything new during his acceptance speech,
he did speak with a BBC representative prior to the awards.
During the short 4-minute interview, Gabe revealed that Valve is prepared to ship Steambox prototypes
to customers within 3-4 months.
He mentioned how the device was mostly being held up by their controller department,
as they have designed a series of prototype controllers which are vastly different
in terms of core functionality, with some examples focusing on using biometric
such as heartbeat for gameplay feedback.
Valve hope to use the upcoming prototype Steamboxes to effectively experiment with their controller designs
in order to finalize a design for the finished product.
Although a little off-topic, Gabe also mentioned that he would like to potentially "dust-off"
some other game series which Valve haven't touched for a number of years,
including Ricochet or Day of Defeat in order to "give them a new spin" given the changing gaming climate.
We'll keep you up to date with any further developments regarding future Valve titles
and the Steambox project should we learn more.
While the interviewer did try to squeeze some information out of Gabe about Half-Life 3,
Gabe didn't budge as usual.
A link to the full BBC interview will be provided in the video description.
Steam for Linux continued to make the headlines this week
as Valve announced that the 2004 follow-up to Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero,
received beta Linux support.
The game joins Counter-Strike and Half-Life as a GoldSrc engine game with Linux support,
further padding Valve's involvement in the Linux gaming scene.
An additional announcement was also made alongside the news post,
revealing that Steam now features a total of 80 game titles with Linux support.
The February Steam hardware and software survey results were also released earlier this week,
demonstrating that the amount of Linux users on Steam has risen to 2.02%,
which is up from January's 1.12% figure.
This is most likely due to the amount of new adoptees who participated in the Steam for Linux celebration sale
which occurred for a full week back in mid-February.
We also imagine that the Tux penguin cosmetic item for Team Fortress 2 also may have had something to do with it.
In other Steam news, Valve announced an update to the Game Hubs community section earlier this week.
The update introduced a new Artwork section which allows users and developers to upload their own pieces of artwork
directly to a specific game hub for the world to see.
Valve developers helped to get the ball rolling earlier this week
by uploading their own pieces of concept art to the hubs,
some of which have rarely been seen prior to this update.
Additionally, the Steam Workshop also received an update which introduced detailed statistics and analytics
for content creators to track how many people have viewed, rated, favorited, and subscribed to their uploaded files.
The Workshop update also introduced two new tabs to the top of each page,
namely "Discussions" and "Change Notes," which explain themselves pretty well.
It was revealed by Garry Newman in a mailbag post earlier this week that Garry's Mod,
Half-Life 2's most commercially successful mod, has grossed over $22 million since its launch back in 2006.
While this may sound pretty astonishing, Garry was quick to inform people on what Facepunch studios,
Garry's own game development studio, actually receive.
"Over 7 years GMod has made about 22 million dollars."
"We get less than half of that though. Then the tax man gets a bunch of that."
"Then when we take money out of the company the tax man gets a bunch of that too."
Garry also mentions how he hopes to get a Linux version of Gmod up and running
before the game is converted to the new file format via the SteamPipe system we told you about a few weeks ago.
Congratulations to Garry and the team at Facepunch on their successes.
Every penny received from the game is well deserved
for developing one of the world's most interesting and creative mods.
While Dota 2's weekly update did not include new hero Skywrath Mage like the community thought it would,
it did introduce a number of other features such as new cosmetic item sets for
Leshrac, Windrunner, Bounty Hunter, and Rubick.
Lina also received an extremely interesting new cosmetic item piece with the update
which modifies her appearance to look similar to the original artwork of her release
back at the reveal of Dota 2 in 2010.
Her new fiery appearance is accompanied by unique sounds, skill icons, and a hero portrait,
showing off her new look to the rest of the players in the game.
Minor bug fixes and UI tweaks were also prominent with the update.
A noticeable UI change involves allowing players to highlight 10 featured items
below their featured hero on their profile page.
More importantly, however, was the inclusion of a large amount of texture and particle effect assets
for unreleased heroes Skywrath Mage, Abaddon, Legion Commander, Bristlebog, and Elder Titan.
This large amount of new content hints at the potential arrival of a multiple hero update coming sometime soon,
so stay tuned for future reveals.
Robin Walker, Mike Morasky, Erik Johnson, and several other Valve staff
appeared in a Gamespot "Lost Between Levels" special, in which Gamespot staff interview Valve employees
and discuss a multitude of business models, game design techniques, and strategies.
The video is around 23 minutes long and provides an extremely interesting in-depth look behind the scenes,
so be sure to check it out via an annotation link at the end of this video.
In merchandise news, it was revealed this week that NECA's recently-released Chell action figure
is now available from the Valve Store.
That's really all there is to say on the matter and...have fun.
Last week, during ValveTime NewsTime TriviaTime, we posed the question
Well, let's get started.
Gman, of course, appears all throughout the game as he does in Half-Life 2.
Eli Vance appears alongside a supposed Isaac Kleiner in a server room
before the Test Chamber at the beginning of Half-Life.
While it isn't confirmed that the individual with Eli is in fact Kleiner, we'll run with it for this episode.
Alternatively, Kleiner is still mentioned several times in Half-Life: Decay and the Half-Life manuals,
making his appearance canon in those older games.
Barney appears banging at a door during Gordon's initial tram ride commute
before becoming officially playable during the events of Half-Life: Blue Shift.
While Wallace Breen does not directly appear during any of the original games,
he is referenced to as Black Mesa's Administrator multiple times during the series.
And, of course, let's not forget Gordon Freeman, who acts as the protagonist during Half-Life and Half-Life 2.
While Arne Magnusson is canonically present in Black Mesa at the time of the incident,
he is in fact not the scientist sitting opposite his microwave casserole as Gordon manages to destroy it.
We won't single any one answer out as multiple people were correct with different answers,
so congratulations if you got it right.
Go give yourself a pat on the back.
Anyway, time for this week's question:
We'll reveal the answer on next week's episode.
And that brings another ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up to a close.
Thanks for watching.
Don't forget to check out the latest episode of ValveTime Top 5,
in which we look at Valve's most unforgettable narrative sequences.
Stay tuned for more ValveTime videos, news and reviews coming soon.
Bye for now.