Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Team Fortress 2 Update Released

For the past few months we’ve been busy working on significant improvements and additions to the Steam Curator system. There’s still some work to be done before we can roll these out, but we wanted to share a bit about why we see Steam Curators as a crucial component to exploring Steam, and what changes we’re making.

Why Steam Curators?

We’ve heard from many of you that you want to have a more curated experience when shopping Steam; where the titles that are surfaced and recommended and highlighted are picked by humans that you know and trust. But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it’s unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can’t be the only form of curation in Steam – we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.

So, we’re focusing on how to support the streamers, journalists, critics, content creators, writers, enthusiasts, and friends that you already know and trust to be able to help you find your next favorite game. By following a few Curators on Steam, you’ll not only start to see their recommendations appear prominently when browsing the Steam Store, but you can also explore each of their customized spaces within Steam and see all the titles they have reviewed.

Using the Steam Curator features on Steam is an opt-in thing. If you’re not interested in the opinions of human beings helping you find games that are worth your attention, then we also have some powerful features coming just for you. We’re hard at work on significant improvements to the core recommendation engine which algorithmically suggests games for all Steam users. We’re anxious to talk in depth about that technology too, and will do so in a future blog post.

What changes are coming?

Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives. We’ve heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it’s trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers.

Players

This system really only works if players find value from following some Curators. So we’re adding to the kinds of content that Curators are able to create, and increasing the places within Steam where that content can be seen.

  • Recommendations provided by Steam Curators can already appear in the main featured spot on your Steam Home page as well as in a dedicated space on your home page. We’re building on this so that recommendations by Curators you follow will also show up at the top of tag and genre pages. This means as you explore, say the Free To Play page, you’ll see recommendations from your Curators for Free to Play games. If you are browsing RPG games, you’ll see RPG games featured from Curators you follow. And so forth.
  • Many Curators create videos to accompany their reviews, so we’ll now start embedding those videos in a few places alongside the curation. This means that when you click through a recommendation, or when you browse a Curator’s page on Steam, you’ll be able to watch their videos in-line.
  • We also know that some Curators will review games within certain themes, genres, or franchises. So, we’re adding a new feature for Curators to create lists of games they’ve reviewed that go together. These can be used to create lists such as “best couch co-op games”, “games with amazing Workshop support”, “games by my favorite designer”, “10 games to play while waiting for Witcher 4”, or any other set of interesting ways to organize groups of games.
  • And if you are looking to find new new Curators that share your tastes, or offer unique information about particular kinds of games, you can explore the ‘Recommended Curators’ or ‘Top Curators’ lists. We’re fine-tuning the ‘Recommended Curators’ section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you’ve been playing.

Curators

One of the pieces of feedback we received from Curators was that they felt it needed to be more rewarding and meaningful for a Curator to spend the time it takes to build and maintain their curation. So there are a few new things we’re building to tackle this.

  • As we mentioned above, Curators that produce videos as part of their reviews will be see those videos embedded right next to their review in Steam. If you’re a Curator who’s already doing work to create content elsewhere, we want you to be able to use that work in your Steam curation. This means a few of the most popular video formats such as YouTube, nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com will appear right in Steam where players can easily watch them.
  • Curators will be able to customize and brand their home on Steam by selecting games, lists, and tags to feature and by uploading a personalized background.
  • We all know that graphs solve everything, so yes, we’re adding more of them. In particular, Curators will be able to see how their reviews impacted their follower’s behavior in the Steam store.
  • We are helping connect developers with Curators that are most likely to have relevant audience of followers for the developers’ game. More on this below.

Game Developers

We’ve heard from many developers that they need a way of getting their game in front of Curators that have the right audience for that game, and to be able to do it in a way that is easy and secure. We’ve also heard from Curators that it can be a challenge to reach out to developers, who are often swamped with requests that they can’t easily filter through. So we’ve built a whole new system that we are calling Curator Connect.

With Curator Connect, developers can search for appropriate Curators, and then send a copy of their game directly through Steam. We’ve added a number of tools for finding relevant Curators and for identifying the forms of social impact that Curator may have. To start with, developers will be able to search the listings of Steam Curators, narrowing results by name, OS, language, or tags that the Curator indicates they focus on. In the results, developers will be able to see a snapshot of each Curator, including follower counts and any linked social media accounts such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, which can help verify that the Curator is truly who they claim to be. The developer can then build a list of the Curators they wish to send their game to, include a message describing their game, and hit ‘send’.

Curators can then browse a list of games that have been sent to them and can choose to accept or decline as they wish. Accepted games are added to that Curators Steam library to play and review. No need to mess with keys or e-mail.

Next Steps

Today we’re starting a closed beta with a few dozen Steam Curators of different sizes, niches, and languages. This gives us an opportunity to gather feedback and suggestions from Curators and gives those Curators an opportunity to use the new tools to prepare and personalize their store pages ahead of full release. The Steam Curators that are invited to participate in the beta are free to share their thoughts publicly, so you may see some screenshots or write-ups from these Curators as they explore the new features and discuss them with the community.

We’re aiming to run the beta for at least a couple weeks with just the Curators before releasing the update to everyone. Hopefully this blog post helps you understand what we’re trying to do, and why, which we believe will help everyone to have a fruitful conversation.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.

-The Steam Team

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Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp coming to mobile devices in late November

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp coming to mobile devices in late November

The next time you go camping, make sure to bring all the essentials: a tent, a sleeping bag, s’mores and, of course, the Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp game. One of Nintendo’s most enduring franchises, Animal Crossing allows players to live a whimsical life as they interact with a wide range of other animal characters brimming with personality, decorate and expand their home, and learn more about the community they are part of. In the first Animal Crossing game for mobile devices, you can interact with animal friends, craft furniture items and gather resources while managing a campsite. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp launches on iOS- and Android-compatible mobile devices in late November.

“As our past mobile games have proved, we love taking established and well-loved franchises and transforming them for the ways players use their devices,” said Doug Bowser, Nintendo of America’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is great for newcomers to the series as well as longtime fans, and ideal for people playing on a mobile device.”

A recent video presentation highlighted many of the game-play features in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. To view the presentation in its entirety, visit https://www.nintendo.com/nintendo-direct/10-24-2017/.

Some of the highlights in the video include the following:

  • Manage Your Manager: When you start a new game in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, you will be asked to create your personalized campsite manager avatar – your character in the game. You can choose to be a girl or a boy, and customize things like skin color, hair color and eye color. Whatever suits you!
  • Arts & Crafts: By gathering resources like fruit and wood, you can craft items for your campsite. These include furniture and decorative items, like couches and benches, as well as baskets and plants. To craft items, just speak to classic Animal Crossing villager Cyrus to put in an order. After the item is finished, you can place it around your campsite or decorate the interior of your camper.
  • Leaf Tickets: Leaf Tickets can be earned through regular gameplay or purchased using real-world money, and can be used in a variety of ways in the game. For example, they can be used to shorten the time needed to craft items, more easily acquire materials or acquire unique camper exterior designs.
  • Friendship Level: In Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, you can chat with your animal friends or fulfill their requests to raise your friendship level. If you level up your friendship or decorate your campsite with an animal’s favorite items, she or he might pay you a visit.
  • BHFF (Best Human Friends Forever): Not all of your friends in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will have fur or feathers. You can send your in-game Player ID to real-life friends who also own the game to have them visit your campsite. Random player avatars will also visit the campsite from time to time. Once someone visits, you can exchange your Bells for items saved in the Market Box.
  • Tick Tock: Similar to past Animal Crossing games, time passes in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp just like in real life! As morning, day, evening and night pass, the scenery in the game will change and different animal friends might show up.
  • Area Map: Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is full of places to visit and explore. In addition to your campsite, you can travel in your camper to a beach, a forest, a river and an island.
  • Market Place: The go-to spot for shopaholics, Market Place is full of stores run by familiar Animal Crossing characters like Timmy, Tommy and the Able Sisters. The various shops in Market Place offer things like furniture and clothing items. The selection at each shop rotates, so don’t be a stranger!
  • OK Motors: Remember that camper that was mentioned a few bullets back? It’s not used to just travel between locations in the game. By visiting the OK Motors store, you can acquire things to customize your camper, including furniture to fill the interior and paint to decorate the exterior. It’s like those tiny homes that are all the rage … but with wheels!
  • Expanding Camp Life: In addition to all the fun things you can do in the game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will eventually offer seasonal events to keep the experience fresh and surprising, as well as limited-time furniture and outfit options through game updates. These events and updates will begin rolling out after launch.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will launch for free on iOS and Android mobile devices in late November. For more information about the game, visit https://ac-pocketcamp.com.

Game Rated:

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Daily Deal – Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, 80% Off

For the past few months we’ve been busy working on significant improvements and additions to the Steam Curator system. There’s still some work to be done before we can roll these out, but we wanted to share a bit about why we see Steam Curators as a crucial component to exploring Steam, and what changes we’re making.

Why Steam Curators?

We’ve heard from many of you that you want to have a more curated experience when shopping Steam; where the titles that are surfaced and recommended and highlighted are picked by humans that you know and trust. But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it’s unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can’t be the only form of curation in Steam – we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.

So, we’re focusing on how to support the streamers, journalists, critics, content creators, writers, enthusiasts, and friends that you already know and trust to be able to help you find your next favorite game. By following a few Curators on Steam, you’ll not only start to see their recommendations appear prominently when browsing the Steam Store, but you can also explore each of their customized spaces within Steam and see all the titles they have reviewed.

Using the Steam Curator features on Steam is an opt-in thing. If you’re not interested in the opinions of human beings helping you find games that are worth your attention, then we also have some powerful features coming just for you. We’re hard at work on significant improvements to the core recommendation engine which algorithmically suggests games for all Steam users. We’re anxious to talk in depth about that technology too, and will do so in a future blog post.

What changes are coming?

Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives. We’ve heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it’s trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers.

Players

This system really only works if players find value from following some Curators. So we’re adding to the kinds of content that Curators are able to create, and increasing the places within Steam where that content can be seen.

  • Recommendations provided by Steam Curators can already appear in the main featured spot on your Steam Home page as well as in a dedicated space on your home page. We’re building on this so that recommendations by Curators you follow will also show up at the top of tag and genre pages. This means as you explore, say the Free To Play page, you’ll see recommendations from your Curators for Free to Play games. If you are browsing RPG games, you’ll see RPG games featured from Curators you follow. And so forth.
  • Many Curators create videos to accompany their reviews, so we’ll now start embedding those videos in a few places alongside the curation. This means that when you click through a recommendation, or when you browse a Curator’s page on Steam, you’ll be able to watch their videos in-line.
  • We also know that some Curators will review games within certain themes, genres, or franchises. So, we’re adding a new feature for Curators to create lists of games they’ve reviewed that go together. These can be used to create lists such as “best couch co-op games”, “games with amazing Workshop support”, “games by my favorite designer”, “10 games to play while waiting for Witcher 4”, or any other set of interesting ways to organize groups of games.
  • And if you are looking to find new new Curators that share your tastes, or offer unique information about particular kinds of games, you can explore the ‘Recommended Curators’ or ‘Top Curators’ lists. We’re fine-tuning the ‘Recommended Curators’ section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you’ve been playing.

Curators

One of the pieces of feedback we received from Curators was that they felt it needed to be more rewarding and meaningful for a Curator to spend the time it takes to build and maintain their curation. So there are a few new things we’re building to tackle this.

  • As we mentioned above, Curators that produce videos as part of their reviews will be see those videos embedded right next to their review in Steam. If you’re a Curator who’s already doing work to create content elsewhere, we want you to be able to use that work in your Steam curation. This means a few of the most popular video formats such as YouTube, nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com will appear right in Steam where players can easily watch them.
  • Curators will be able to customize and brand their home on Steam by selecting games, lists, and tags to feature and by uploading a personalized background.
  • We all know that graphs solve everything, so yes, we’re adding more of them. In particular, Curators will be able to see how their reviews impacted their follower’s behavior in the Steam store.
  • We are helping connect developers with Curators that are most likely to have relevant audience of followers for the developers’ game. More on this below.

Game Developers

We’ve heard from many developers that they need a way of getting their game in front of Curators that have the right audience for that game, and to be able to do it in a way that is easy and secure. We’ve also heard from Curators that it can be a challenge to reach out to developers, who are often swamped with requests that they can’t easily filter through. So we’ve built a whole new system that we are calling Curator Connect.

With Curator Connect, developers can search for appropriate Curators, and then send a copy of their game directly through Steam. We’ve added a number of tools for finding relevant Curators and for identifying the forms of social impact that Curator may have. To start with, developers will be able to search the listings of Steam Curators, narrowing results by name, OS, language, or tags that the Curator indicates they focus on. In the results, developers will be able to see a snapshot of each Curator, including follower counts and any linked social media accounts such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, which can help verify that the Curator is truly who they claim to be. The developer can then build a list of the Curators they wish to send their game to, include a message describing their game, and hit ‘send’.

Curators can then browse a list of games that have been sent to them and can choose to accept or decline as they wish. Accepted games are added to that Curators Steam library to play and review. No need to mess with keys or e-mail.

Next Steps

Today we’re starting a closed beta with a few dozen Steam Curators of different sizes, niches, and languages. This gives us an opportunity to gather feedback and suggestions from Curators and gives those Curators an opportunity to use the new tools to prepare and personalize their store pages ahead of full release. The Steam Curators that are invited to participate in the beta are free to share their thoughts publicly, so you may see some screenshots or write-ups from these Curators as they explore the new features and discuss them with the community.

We’re aiming to run the beta for at least a couple weeks with just the Curators before releasing the update to everyone. Hopefully this blog post helps you understand what we’re trying to do, and why, which we believe will help everyone to have a fruitful conversation.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.

-The Steam Team

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Nintendo’s the name – scary is our game!

Nintendo’s the name – scary is our game!

Keep an eye out for monsters and mayhem this Halloween on Nintendo.com. Here’s a p(eek!) at some of the creepy fun you can find.

Want to create an army of Minions to spook trick-or-treaters? Visit Play.Nintendo.com to download a special stencil that can turn a jack-o’-lantern into a Goomb-a-lantern! Plus, there’s a terrifying trivia quiz about creepy creatures, and polls about which Yo-kai you’d want to trick-or-treat with, and which video game villain is the scariest.

Are you brave enough to explore the spooky new rewards from My Nintendo? Check out our Halloween top picks, including deals like redeeming My Nintendo points for 40% savings on The Legend of Zelda™: Majora’s Mask 3D for the Nintendo 3DS™ family of systems.

You can also show off your love for all things Halloween with seasonally fun My Nintendo Nintendo 3DS HOME Menu themes. You can redeem your My Nintendo points for these seasonal and spooky Halloween themes to decorate your HOME Menu:

  • Mario’s Halloween – This theme features pumpkin folders and costumed Mario and enemies. You’ll hear Boo’s laugh when exiting Sleep Mode.
  • NES™ Halloween Link – Creepy foes, folders with a key design, and spooky music await. Scroll the Touch Screen to see 8-bit Link walk in the graveyard.
  • Animal Crossing™: New Leaf Autumn Leaves – This fall-inspired theme features Isabelle and friends raking up fallen leaves. Keep an eye out for Mr. Resetti and his brother, Don Resetti!

As for scary fun with spooky games…we’ve got you covered there, too. Get ready for frights on the Nintendo Game Store with a curated list of creepy titles like YO-KAI WATCH™ 2: Psychic Specters and Luigi’s Manion™: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, and Mario + Rabbids® Kingdom Battle for the Nintendo Switch system. You can catch these games and more on Nintendo eShop, where the spooky music of the month is the Twisted Mansion song from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. From all of us at Nintendo to you…have a happy Halloween!

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Now Available on Steam Early Access – Opus Magnum, 10% off!

Opus Magnum is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 10% off!*

Opus Magnum is the latest open-ended puzzle game from Zachtronics, the creators of SpaceChem, Infinifactory, and SHENZHEN I/O. Design and build machines that assemble potions, poisons, and more using the alchemical engineer’s most advanced tool: the transmutation engine!

*Offer ends October 26 at 10AM Pacific Time