We're saying goodbye to the Bethesda.net Launcher this year. We would like to thank you for your support and assure you that all of your games are safe. If you're not playing PC games through the Bethesda.net launcher then your work is done here. Thanks for reading! If you do have games through the Bethesda.net launcher, don't worry. Starting in early April you'll be able to migrate your games and Wallet to your Steam account. For more details on what this process will look like, read on.

You have plenty of time to plan and begin migrating your Bethesda.net library to your Steam account. The migration to Steam will include your game library and Wallet - meaning you will not lose anything from your Bethesda.net account. Many games will also have their saves migrated, with a few requiring some manual transfers. For games that require it, you will still use your Bethesda.net login to sign in to play. Your Bethesda.net account will not be lost and will still be accessible on our website and in-game, and we will continue supporting all Bethesda.net accounts with our future titles.

The latest Steam Hardware survey from January 2022 shows significant growth for VR headsets with the number of connected units reaching 3.4 million or 2.14% of Steam users. This is up from 2.95 million in December 2021 with the Meta Quest 2 responsible for the majority of this growth now accounting for 46.02% of the VR headsets used on Steam despite being able to operate without a connected computer. Meta now controls 67.3% of the PC VR market with Valve coming in second at 14.4%, HTC third at 11.2%, and Microsoft fourth with just 5% market share. The total number of monthly-connected VR headsets has risen 29.5% since this time last year but it remains to be seen if this growth will continue past the holiday season.

Valve's highly anticipated handheld gaming console, Steam Deck, officially arrives on February 25th. According to the newest information from Valve, the company plans to start sending our Steam Deck units to customers who first pre-ordered their units on February 25th, and the arrival time should be three days. That means that on February 28th, customers will have Steam Deck in their hands. Regarding press units for reviewers, the company has already started shipping review units to select media partners. The review embargo for Steam Deck is also set to February 25th, so that marks the date when we can see the full potential of AMD's custom Van Gogh SoC.

As a general reminder, the Van Gogh SoC features four Zen 2 cores with eight threads, running at a 3.5 GHz frequency. The graphics side is powered by eight RDNA2 CUs clocked at 1.6 GHz, meaning that the chip can support some decent handheld gaming. The base model starts at $399, while the top-end configuration costs up to $649, carrying more extensive memory/storage options.

Just three weeks after having an all-time high number of 28 million concurrent players, Steam has managed to break another record and provide its services to 29.2 million gamers across the globe. According to the data from SteamDB, there were 29,201,174 concurrent gamers were utilizing Valve's Steam platform and playing their favorite game without realizing that they were breaking a world record. And of course, the highest contributor to this record are online multiplayer games such as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which achieved 900K and 787K active players in the last 24 hours. This shows an excellent trend for Valve's Steam platform, and we are just a shy away from seeing 30 million concurrent gamers playing "side by side."

This might not come as a real surprise, but in the latest Steam hardware survey, we're seeing clear declines of quad core CPUs, the category that some people have been claiming for the longest of times, is all you need for a gaming PC. Among the Windows systems, the decline is over a percent, with six core CPU gaining well over a percent, although the numbers vary quite a bit over the past five months, which is all the history Valve provides. The decline is also clear on OSX, although it's not quite as big percentage wise, but here the biggest growth is in the eight and 10 core segments, most likely due to Apple's introduction of its own M1 variants of CPUs. Only in the Linux segment are the dual and quad core CPU segments increasing, which suggest that some of these systems might be repurposed Windows machines.

The six core and higher CPU segment now holds over 50 percent share in the Steam survey and eight core CPUs are also up somewhat for Windows machines. Of these CPUs, Intel is holding a 69.27 percent share, up 0.82 percent compared to November, although still down over 3.5 percent since August versus AMD. Intel also gained 0.33 percent of Linux users and is back over 60 percent for the first time since August. On the OSX side of things, Apple seems to have gained a 27.97 percent share of Steam users surveyed, up from 6.05 percent just a month earlier. There has also been a 1.2 percent increase in Steam users surveyed that have 16 GB of RAM, suggesting that the low RAM prices in 2021 has made people upgrade their systems. Over 47 percent of all Steam users that were surveyed appear to have at least 16 GB of RAM in their systems.

With just a handful of days left until The New Year, we're excited to look back at some of 2021's top sellers, most-played games, new releases, and more! As with previous years, we've organized several Best Of lists that each showcase how great 2021 was for players, developers, and all of the games in between. Before we see what 2022 has in store, let's look back at the Best of Steam - 2021.

As you've probably noticed by now, the Steam Winter Sale is in full swing, with 1000s of discounts across the store. So if you're looking for a sale on the best games of the year, we recommend browsing some of these lists! For anyone jumping straight into the lists, we recommend reading the notes at the bottom of this page, which explain some of the technical criteria for how the lists are generated.

With Steam Labs Experiment 10 last December, we introduced dozens of new genres, categories, and tags to our store's navigation. Today we're launching Experiment 13, where we've revamped these destinations, or store hubs, with powerful new tools for browsing, filtering, and exploring deeper into each category.

When you join the experiment from the Steam Labs page, you will find that every category and tag page on the store has been updated, introducing these new layouts and features to hundreds of niche destinations throughout. You'll encounter these pages by exploring the "Categories" drop-down in the store menu, or by clicking on tags from a game's store page.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announces the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 Gaming Platform, a purpose-built platform that allows gamers the best place to play their favorite games. The platform delivers cutting-edge performance to run all Android games, play content from cloud gaming libraries, stream games from your home console or PC, and enjoy entertainment from your favorite Android apps. Amassing the entire arsenal of Snapdragon Elite Gaming technologies together to create a premium category of dedicated consumer gaming products, the platform is designed to power incredible experiences for gamers on-the-go.

To showcase the platform, Qualcomm Technologies partnered with Razer to build the first Snapdragon G3x Handheld Gaming Developer Kit, which is available exclusively for developers starting today. Razer is a global leader in gaming hardware and has already constructed one of the world's largest gamer-focused ecosystems of hardware, software, and services.

Steam has recently set a new concurrent user record with 27,385,025 gamers logging in over the Thanksgiving period surpassing the previous peak of 26.9 million from April. This new record coincided with the Steam Autumn sale which saw discounts across several popular titles on the platform. The store has also seen several new popular launches in recent months such as Naraka: Bladepoint, New World, and MIR4. The most popular titles over the weekend included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 800,000 players, Dota 2 at 650,000, and PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS with 320,000. Steam appears set to continue growing even with the increased competition from Epic and Microsoft if these recent records are anything to go by.

As Valve is preparing to launch its handheld gaming console called Steam Deck, the company is investing a lot of resources into the software side of things. Powering the console is the company's custom SteamOS distribution, a modification of Arch Linux in today's form. In previous releases, Valve has been pushing its SteamOS as a modification of Debian Linux. However, that version didn't get updated in over two years, and the last release happened with version 2.195. When the Steam Deck console lands in the consumer's hands, we are supposed to see a new version of SteamOS, called SteamOS 3.0, become available for the public to download as any standalone Linux distribution.

With the release of 3.0, the company is switching to a rolling release OS embedded with bells and whistles to make gaming on Linux a viable option. All that is needed to fire up Steam and start gaming is already pre-installed, and you can get the same Steam Deck experience on your PC or any device that can run Linux. The moment this becomes available to the public, we will update you with more information.

Valve's highly-anticipated handheld gaming console, Steam Deck, is facing a two-month delay. According to the latest news from the company, the console will not be in time for holidays and will get delayed by two months to February. Suppose you are wondering what the reason behind it is. In that case, Valve says that "we did our best to work around the global supply chain issues, but due to material shortages, components aren't reaching our manufacturing facilities in time for us to meet our initial launch dates." These consequences are understandable, given the issues many companies face with the global supply chain and the overall scarcity of components still ruling the market.

If you have pre-ordered a Steam Deck device, rest assured that your reservation will get shipped accordingly, just with a two-month delay. Valve states that "Based on our updated build estimates, Steam Deck will start shipping to customers February 2022. This will be the new start date of the reservation queue—all reservation holders keep their place in line but dates will shift back accordingly. Reservation date estimates will be updated shortly after this announcement." For more information, please head over to the Steam Deck website.

Santa Monica Studio, a video game developer, seated in Los Angeles and owned by PlayStation Studios, is the creator of the highly successful game God of War. Today, the company announced that they would be releasing a God of War port for PC owners, entering a whole new market. The PC port of the game will allow thousands of players to enjoy the story of Kratos and his adventures with a considerable boost to graphics. According to a company announcement, the PC port will allow fine-tuning of graphics settings, including a range of new technologies to back it.

Some essential upgrades over the console port include native 4K rendering and an unlimited frame rate. The company stated that the ambient occlusion pipeline had been upgraded with GTAO and SSDO tech, creating unique visuals. In addition to that, the game will feature support for NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Reflex low-latency technology. For controllers, the game will feature support for Sony's DualSense and DualShock4 controllers. And last but not least, ultrawide gamers are in luck as well, as the game will support a 21:9 aspect ratio. The game is going to be available on January 14, 2022, on the Steam storefront.

For some PC visuals, check out the images and the video below.

Valve has recently announced a new program aimed at verifying game compatibility on the Steam Deck with a simple four-category classification system. Valve is reviewing the entire Steam library to see how each title performs in four key areas on the Steam Deck including input, display, seamlessness, and system support. Games need to feature full controller support and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard to fulfill the input requirement along with supporting the Steam Decks native resolution of 1280x800 or 1280x720. They will also need to work correctly with Proton including anti-cheat if no native Linux version is available along without displaying any warning messages.

Valve will mark games that fail some sections of these checks as playable meaning that the user may need to manually select a community-created controller configuration or use the touchscreen to navigate the launcher. Games that cannot run will be marked as unsupported while all other games will be classified as unknown meaning that Valve has yet to test the title on the Steam Deck. These new compatibility labels will be featured prominently throughout the Steam store on Steam Deck with detailed information about individual checks available. Valve will continuously update these ratings as developers launch updates for their games and they hope to have the feature live before deliveries of the Steam Deck begin.

Valve today put out frequently asked questions (FAQs) that shed light on many aspects of Steam Deck, the elusive new portable game console. Steam Deck is one of the first mass-market handheld consoles based on the PC architecture (if you don't count the various smartphones based on Intel Atom chips), or x86-based tablets. It turns out that Valve engaged in some segmentation between the storage-based variants. All three capacity variants feature optically-bonded glass IPS LCD touchscreens with 10-point multi-touch, but the 512 GB variant has an additional anti-glare treatment.

Steam Deck combines Linux-based custom operating system, along with the Steam UI and DRM platform, although it is possible to play non-Steam games through the Proton translation layer software. You can add games to your library just like on Steam on desktop. The Steam software itself has a custom UI optimized for the console, which replaces the Big Picture mode of conventional Steam desktop. Just like on regular Steam, the Steam Deck console lets you launch and play a game without an Internet connection, unless the game requires it.

When Valve made a debut of Proton for Steam on Linux, the company committed to enabling Linux gamers from across the globe to play all of the latest games available for the Windows platform, on their Linux distributions. Since the announcement, the market share of people who game on Linux has been rather stagnating for a while. When Proton was announced, the Linux gaming market share jumped to 2%, according to a Valve survey. However, later on, it dropped and remained at the stagnating 0.8~0.9% mark. Today, according to the latest data obtained from Steam Hardware Survey, we see that the Linux gaming market share has reached 1.0% in July, making for a +0.14% increase. What drove the spike in usage is unknown, however, it is interesting to see the new trend. You can check out the Steam Hardware Survey data here.

If you're on the fence about whether or not Halo Infinite will be worth your time, you might just get your chance to find it out for yourself as early as this weekend. 343 Industries has announced the first of a series of technical flightings for the next chapter in the Halo universe, with users being called in an invite-basis to participate in and provide feedback on the multiplayer element of Halo infinite (which will be free to play when the game launches later this year). The gameplay focus is on team fights against bots (a first in the Halo universe) in big arena maps, plus a tutorial system called The Academy, which will feature missions for players to get into the groove of Halo's combat rhythms.

Tempered expectations are best when coming into any games' beta, and 343 Industries has informed players that the current build of the game being deployed for this flighting is some two to three months old compared to the games' current development stage - so there is some leeway to pardon their dust. If you want to get a taste of Halo's famed arena combat, you'll have to sign-up to the Halo Insider initiative, where you can choose the platform of choice for participation in the flighting program. If you choose PC as your platform, there are some other hoops to jump through; you'll have to send Microsoft a diagnostic of your system's DxDiag report, as well as connect your Steam account via the Halo Insider program. Meet you there, Spartan.

Valve's Steam Deck announcement took the gaming world by storm last week, as the announcement of a Valve-designed portable gaming console packing an AMD Zen 2 CPU with RDNA2 cores set collective imaginations on fire. However, as is the case for any recent gaming hardware launches, expect the Steam Deck to be hard to come by - demand for a mainstream portable, Switch-like console that promises to enable AAA-gaming on the go is apparently sky-high, despite the fact that some portable devices exploring the same concept have been available for a while now, such as the AYA Neo (which even packs two extra Zen 2 cores) and the Intel-based One XPlayer.

As is the case for any recent hardware launch that garners enough mainstream attention (looking at you, current-gen GPUs and consoles), a lopsided demand-supply ratio is a playground for unscrupulous types looking to make a profit at the expense of other people's impatience. And it sure is happening already - eBay listings for "pre-order confirmed" Steam Deck variants are already being set at €4,324 (roughly $4,989) - though we'd say they're tentatively set at that ludicrous pricing. It seems that the current median asking price sits around the $900 mark for the 512 GB SSD-equipped variant. Tentative or not, this just goes to show that the new normal is for launched products to be actively gauged for scalping practices - more now than ever before.

The upcoming Steam Deck device has recently been confirmed to feature a M.2 NVMe 2230 slot on all three models. This confirmation comes after Valve CEO Gabe Newell confirmed in various emails the presence of the slot and this information has since been updated on the Steam Deck website. The official device specifications now list all models as featuring socketed 2230 M.2 modules with a notice that they are not intended for end-user replacement. The base Steam Deck model features just 64 GB of eMMC flash so the availability of this upgrade option will be appealing to many users. The M.2 2230 form-factor is the smallest currently available measuring just 22 mm x 30 mm which does come with the disadvantage of less available products and higher prices compared to full size M.2 drives.

The cracked PC version of Resident Evil 8 Village is just out, and it performs faster than the version people are paying for. The crack removes the Denuvo DRM component, and the game's need for Steam. Digital Foundry tested the performance of the cracked version, comparing it with the original. It found that not only were the frame-rates higher, but also during encounters with enemies, the split-second stutter as an enemy lunges onto you, is gone, as the frame-times have significantly reduced. The Denuvo DRM solution can be implemented by game developers in one of many ways, with varying performance impact, as we detailed in our Denuvo article. It looks like RE8: Village is one of those titles where paying customers have lost the lottery of a fair Denuvo implementation.

We are thrilled to announce The International 10 - Dota 2 Championships will be held this October in Bucharest, Romania, and the epic battle for the Aegis of Champions will fittingly unfold inside the country's largest stadium—Arena Nationala. Group Stage will run October 7 - 10, with Main Stage play kicking off on October 12. Then on October 17, the two finest Dota 2 teams in the world will face off for the Aegis and their shares of the $40,018,195 prize pool that awaits. Additional information on ticket sales will come shortly.

We are grateful for the partnership we have formed with Romania and the city of Bucharest, and very much look forward to gathering with the global Dota 2 community, both in-person and virtually, to celebrate the elite players and amazing fandom at The International. Prepare yourselves. At long last, the battle begins.

Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey results for the month of June, and as always, it is a pretty good indication of the gaming market and market trends, showing us just how well the companies providing hardware are doing. On the CPU front, there are two companies constantly fighting for market domination: Intel and AMD. A bit over a month ago, we reported that AMD made serious progress in taking the market share away from Intel, using its latest Ryzen 5000 series of processors. However, this time, the effect seems to be reversed by its competitor, Intel.

All the gains AMD has made in the past few months have been sort of "erased" by Intel, as team blue managed to get back to a point where AMD now holds 28.41% of the CPU market, while Intel is back to over 70% share, more specifically 71.58%. What this means is that there are some fluctuations happening right now, and we are eager to see more reports to analyze in what direction is the market moving and how the two competing companies are performing. AMD seems to be held back by their ability to produce enough CPUs, while Intel is happily filling that void, fueled by a more aggressive pricing strategy.

Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform, will be making an appearance at this year's E3 gaming event. The E3 is taking a form of a virtual trade event this year, which is standard for all of the previous events we had in the past, like Computex 2021. The special appearance this year will come from Valve. According to PC Gamer, Valve will have something to share, more specifically a "message regarding Steam". Usually, Valve doesn't make a lot of appearances at E3 and is not considered a regular there, so this year's E3 show will have the honor to host the company at the PC Gaming Show. This means that we are getting a possibly big announcement from Valve.

The current rumors are suggesting that the company wants to present the SteamPal, a Switch-like portable gaming console that aims to bring gaming on the go, powered by Valve. The exact details of what is to be presented will be unveiled on Sunday, June 13 at 2:30 PM PST / 5:30 PM EST and we will be sure to report about the happenings at E3, so stay tuned for more details.

Today, Valve has updated its Steam Hardware Survey with the latest information about the market share of different processors. Steam Hardware Survey is a very good indicator of market movements, as it surveys users that are spread across millions of gaming systems that use Valve's Steam gaming platform. As Valve processes information, it reports it back to the public in a form of market share of different processors. Today, in the Steam Hardware Survey for May 2021, we got some interesting data to look at. Most notably, AMD has gained 0.65% CPU market share, increasing it from the previous 29.48% to 30.13%. This represents a major move for the company, which didn't own more than 30% market share with its CPUs on Steam Survey in years.

As the Steam Survey tracks even the market share of graphics cards, we got to see a slight change there as well. As far as GPUs go, AMD now holds 16.2% of the market share, which is a decrease from the previous 16.3%. For more details about Steam Hardware Survey for May 2021, please check out Steam's website here.

We have recently seen an influx of rumors about an upcoming "SteamPal" portable gaming computer under development by Valve. The first indication that this new device is real was a recently uncovered "SteamPal" device name referenced under the unreleased "Neptune" controller in the latest Steam Client Beta. This SteamPal device name reportedly refers to an upcoming portable gaming computer with a similar controller design to the Nintendo Switch albeit unremovable featuring a standard set of gamepad buttons and triggers, dual joysticks, at least one thumb-sized touchpad, and a 7"-8" touchscreen display. The SteamPal is still in the prototype stage so final hardware configurations are not confirmed and are subject to change.

There is good reason to believe these rumors are true after a recent cryptic comment from Gabe Newell about bringing Valve games to consoles with him stating that we will have a "better idea by the end of this year" which is in line with rumors stating that Valve is targeting a Q4 2021 announcement for the SteamPal. The device will reportedly feature a quad-core Van Gogh APU from AMD with 8 RDNA2 compute units which would allow gamers to run their entire Steam library on the portable device. Valve is reportedly targeting a 399 USD price for the device however as with all these rumors take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Valve's head, Gabe Newell, has on Monday talked to the students at Auckland, New Zealand's Sancta Maria College. While Mr. Newell spoke to students, one of them has asked Mr. Newell about the company's plans for consoles and has recorded the response. The student then proceeded to upload the recording to Reddit, but, it was later deleted. However, we are in luck as Ars Technica reported on this and we have managed to get a bit of new information about what's coming from Valve and what we can expect. During the talk, a student asked Mr. Newell: "Will Steam be porting any games on consoles, or will it just stay on PC?"

To that, Mr. Newell responded by saying: "You will get a better idea of that by the end of this year... and it won't be the answer you expect. You'll say, 'Ah-ha! Now I get what he was talking about.'" This is a rather vague answer to a question and it doesn't give us much information, other than the fact that we can expect something towards the end of 2021. This could mean anything, so we are not sure yet. However, we will keep an eye on it and make sure to report every new information as it appears.