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Hi, and welcome to the ValveTime news.
Each week, we’ll bring you the biggest talking points regarding Valve and the community.
Now, the news:
This past week saw wallets and purses alike cry out in fear at the return of the Steam Autumn Sale.
This year’s sale, which is set to run from November 27th through December 3rd,
once again features massive price reductions across the entire Steam Store
while featuring the welcome return of 24-hour daily deals and the even more frequent flash sales,
which change three times per day on an 8-hour cycle.
Daily deals are introduced in packs of 9,
while flash sales cycle as individual groups of four randomly selected games.
While it might be tempting to pick up some of your favorite titles right away,
don’t forget the golden rule of Steam Sales:
If you’re planning to purchase anything, and we mean anything,
be sure to wait until you see the item or bundle hit the daily or flash deal cycles,
as you might just be able to save yourself a few extra dollars, pounds, euros, or whatever.
If the items in question haven’t appeared as a daily or flash deal by the final day of the sale,
go ahead and purchase them before the end of the sale.
This way, you’ll manage to snag the best deal possible while being able to avoid becoming frustrated
at larger discounts activating shortly after you’ve already purchased the game or bundle.
If, for some reason, you find yourself short of funds, fear not!
The Steam Winter Sale should begin in late December, which is less than a month away,
giving you plenty of time to ready your wallets for another round of value-for-money bombardment.
Good luck, and happy shopping!
After several weeks of submissions and voting,
Valve came forward on November 25th to announce the nominees for the categories
within the Third Annual Saxxy Awards.
A day later, on November 26th, the announcement pages were updated
to reveal the overall winners for each category, which are listed as follows.
Salade with “The Mann Co. Symphony” for Best Short.
Hypo and co. with “Chinatown Getaway” for Best Action.
Bobbin and Ugleh with “Disruption” for Best Comedy.
Lozeng3r with “Till Death Do Us Part Two” for Best Drama.
And finally, Harry101UK and co. with “Lil’ Guardian Pyro” for Best Overall.
Every listed contributor for the winning films were awarded with a “Saxxy” melee weapon for Team Fortress 2,
a special item equippable by all classes which turns enemies into pure Australium statues when killed.
Harry and the other creators of "Lil’ Guardian Pyro" all receive an additional prize however,
as the entire team is currently preparing to be flown to Valve for a tour of the facilities
and a meet-and-greet with the company’s expert filmmaking team.
Congratulations to both the winners and the nominees;
it’s clear everybody worked really hard to bring all of these brilliant short films to fruition,
and, while not everyone can win, we’re happy to see the caliber for quality of videos
produced with the Source Filmmaker continue to improve by leaps and bounds every few months.
Be sure to check out the awards page over on the SFM website
for a closer look at all these really excellent short films.
An update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive this week has swapped out all of the old weapon finishes
and replaced them with 90 all-new skins, available across six different collections.
The update was released a few days prior to the start of the Dreamhack Winter 2013 CS:GO tournament,
which began on Thursday, November the 28th before concluding on Saturday, November the 30th.
In the end, Fnatic were victorious over Ninjas In Pyjamas 2-to-1 in the grand final,
taking home the $100,000 grand prize.
More information regarding both the tournament and the new update is available on the Counter-Strike website.
The growing beast that is Steam continued to expand this past week with the introduction of Steam Reviews,
a new feature which replaced the now-defunct Steam Recommendations system on November 25th 2013.
Users can now create reviews with a positive or negative rating after owning the game for any period of time,
including temporary ownership via Free Weekend of Family Sharing.
Other users can then rate published reviews positively or negatively,
which are available alongside a ‘report’ feature designed to limit abusive or spam posts.
The implementation of this new feature will not replace the Metacritic rating listing,
as both will be available on the Steam Store pages to provide additional information to consumers.
The announcement page lists the Steam Review feature as currently being an open beta,
but the service as a whole seems pretty solid to us.
If you’re looking for more information regarding Steam Reviews,
be sure to check out the official announcement page,
which features a brief overview and a helpful FAQ on the subject.
Speaking of Steam, the first third-party Steam Machine device was revealed earlier this week by retailer iBuyPower
following the announcement of Valve’s own prototype model several weeks ago.
The device, which currently lacks an official name,
appears as a pair of similar prototypes contained in all-white cases
split horizontally down the middle by a customizable, colored light.
The two prototypes, named “Gordon” and “Freeman”, appear almost identical,
with both featuring AMD processors and a separate, discrete graphics cards.
Unfortunately, few other technical details are available about the device,
but the machine will be apparently be able to play “all games” at 60 frames per second and 1080p.
We’re just not entirely sure what is meant by “all games”.
We are also hearing the device will most likely go on sale sometime next year for around $499,
something iBuyPower say is enough to be ‘competitive’ with the recently released Xbox One
and Playstation 4 next generation gaming consoles.
One can hope.
For this week’s discussion, leave a comment below to let us know
what you think of this third-party Steam Machine!
Does it sound more interesting to you than Valve’s official prototype?
Or are you not really interested in what you’ve heard from Steam Machines so far?
Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about the first publicly announced third-party Steam Machine,
be sure to head on over to our full write-up on ValveTime.net,
which is available in the video description alongside links for everything else we’ve talked about this week,
including blog posts, announcements, videos, and much more.
And that brings us to the end of a relatively light week of Valve news.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and to check out our Dota 2 Announcer Pack
over on the Steam Workshop to rate our pack positively,
both of which give us a warm, fuzzy feeling inside!
As always, thanks for watching and bye for now.