Valve is releasing the Source Filmmaker (SFM), the movie-making tool Valve uses to make movies inside the Source game engine. SFM has been used in quite a number of Valve trailers. SFM is currently available in beta. To apply, simply visit the official website with a computer that already has Steam installed on it. "Initially, we are limiting the number of beta users, but soon we will release the SFM to all users on Steam for free," Valve's FAQ explains. At launch, SFM will only work within Team Fortress 2, meaning fan-made Half-Life movies using SFM won't be possible for a while. However, Valve notes that "users familiar with modding with the Source engine will be able to mod the SFM build of TF2 to create new worlds."

If you're interested, here's what you'll need for Filmmaker:

-OS: Windows 7 / Vista (Windows 7 64 bit suggested)
-Processor: 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 (or higher) or AMD64X2 (or higher)
-Memory: 2GB (4 GB suggested)
-Hard Disk Space: At least 15 GB of Space
-Video: NVIDIA GeForce 200 series card or better, or AMD Radeon 3000 series or better (NVIDIA GeForce 400 series or AMD Radeon 5000 series preferred)
-Monitor: 1366 x 768 (1920 x 1080 suggested)
-Audio: DirectX 9.0c compatible
-USB headset with mic (suggested)

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today confirmed that Dota 2 will be free to play and announced the Dota Store in preparation for the game's release.

Upon its opening, the Dota Store will offer items created by Valve and members of the community that may be used immediately and carried over after the public launch of the game. Early Access to the game is not required to purchase items before launch. However, gamers may get into the game now by purchasing the Dota 2 Early Access Bundle of items.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the early findings of the Portal 2 Perpetual Testing Initiative.

Released just days ago, The "Perpetual Testing Initiative" has already resulted in the creation and publishing of over 35,000 user-created maps, collectively consumed via more than 1.3 million downloads.

To celebrate the launch, Steam is holding a Weekend Workshop Sale offering Portal 2 for 66% off, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for 33% off, and many of this year's Team Fortress 2 Workshop Items available for 50% off their regular price.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the arrival of the free Portal 2 update titled "Perpetual Testing Initiative."

Available now for PC and Mac, The "Perpetual Testing Initiative" allows players to easily create, share, and play Portal 2 puzzles. The Initiative comes with a simplified Puzzle Maker that allows that creation of mind-bending puzzles without ever leaving the game.

ZOTAC launched its GeForce GTX 690 graphics card. Like every other GTX 690 launched till now, ZOTAC's card sticks to NVIDIA reference board design. It is an indication that NVIDIA imposed restrictions on the AIC partners to modify its design, even placing AIC brand stickers seems to be disallowed, which is a good thing because NVIDIA's design is too good to be spoiled by gaudy stickers. It is likely that ZOTAC sticks to the NVIDIA-suggested price of US $999, but to sweeten the deal, it added a bundle called Assassin's Creed 3-Game Pack, which includes Steam coupons for games from the franchise.

Bid farewell to the misery of being at work when a highly anticipated game is launched, and you have to wait hours at home for the game to be pre-loaded. A new beta version of Steam allows you to manage and install your purchased games remotely, provided your gaming PC is running and has its Steam client connected. The feature allows you to remotely initiate downloads and manage them, via any PC or mobile computing device.

We are not new to AMD and NVIDIA bundling games and software in retail-channel graphics cards sold across all AIB partners. The most recent of these was DiRT 3 bundled by various AMD Radeon models. The latest such offer is dubbed "Three for Free", and is aimed at making getting a Radeon HD 7900 series graphics card a more juicy deal, on top of price cuts.

"Three for Free" is a bundle of three new PC game titles that are part of AMD Game ecosystem, which consists of DiRT Showdown, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Nexuiz. All new batches of Radeon HD 7900 series graphics cards sold by various partners, that's Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon HD 7970, will include a coupon with product keys for the three games, which can be redeemed on Steam as digital downloads. This offer is already active in the Europe, and will come soon to North America.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the free Portal 2 DLC titled "Perpetual Testing Initiative" will be available for the PC and Mac on May 8th.

The "Perpetual Testing Initiative" allows players to easily create, share, and play Portal 2 puzzles. The Initiative comes with a simplified puzzle maker that allows that creation of mind-bending puzzles without ever leaving the game.

In what could be a blow for gaming PC users with lower-capacity SSDs (such as 60 GB, 90 GB, etc.), the minimum system requirements list of Max Payne 3, published by Rockstar Games, asks for at least 35 GB of free space on the installation drive. The game will likely ship in four double-layer DVDs, if not more. It could also make for an extremely huge download (over Steam, Amazon.com Digital Download, and GameStop. Other system requirements, particularly the requirements that the game is capable of taking advantage of, are particularly steep. For example, the game can take advantage of 6-core Intel Core i7-3960X, 8-core AMD FX-8150, the fastest single-GPU graphics cards in the market, as well as 16 GB of RAM.

There is light in the end of the tunnel for proponents of a native-Linux version of Valve's Steam platform, as a Steam for Linux is just months away, according to a Phoronix report. Linux has been hiring developers with experience in Linux OpenGL applications for some time now, and the gearwheels at Valve have been able to drive out an early version of Left 4 Dead 2 that was seen running native on Linux (Ubuntu 11.10), without translation layers such as Wine, utilizing the OpenGL API, with the ICD provided by AMD Catalyst. Although first denied in 2010, Valve is back to the idea of Steam for Linux, thanks to its "flat" company structure that lacks a hierarchy. Following the footsteps of Steam for Mac, Valve could port some of its games to Linux, and give the client SteamPlay capability.

It's no news that Valve is working on its own gaming hardware platform so far referred to as Steambox, but its talk has been mostly based on rumors and anecdotal information. The Steambox theory, and the theory that Valve is working on hardware, got cemented by a new job vacancy posted by Valve, which calls for experienced electronics engineers. The posting reads "For years Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we're developing hardware to enhance those experiences."

The skillset asked for in the posting fills a lot of holes in the Steambox theory. It requires engineers to be proficient with prototyping, system-level design, embedded systems, high-speed serial interfaces, circuit simulation, etc., with a much more juicy "recommended" skillset requirement covering areas such as board layout, ARM/x86 system design, power/thermal management, RF and antennas, etc., basically everything a company out to design a game console would seek in its new engineers. Find the posting here, under "Electronics Engineer."

Futuremark Games Studio announced today that its cult hit, 1950s sci-fi inspired tower defense game Unstoppable Gorg will be Steam's Daily Deal on Thursday March 15 selling for just $4.99 for one day only.

Unstoppable Gorg is a revolutionary tower defense game that challenges you to defend the solar system from fearsome aliens by sending satellites into orbit. Unlike tower-based defense games, in Unstoppable Gorg you can move your satellites by rotating the orbits that surround planets, moons and space stations.

Video games developer, publisher, and distributor, Valve Corporation is valued at US $3 billion. A privately-held company, Valve doesn't disclose its finances to the public. Forbes estimated its worth by consulting video game industry insiders, equity analysts, investment bankers, and technology analysts. Valve's co-founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, who owns over 50% of the company, has a net worth of $1.5 billion, making him the newest billionaire from the video games industry. He ranks 854th out of 1,226 global billionaires in Forbes' list. Apart from having largely successful game franchises such as Half Life, Counter Strike, Left4Dead, and Portal, Valve has arguably the most popular video games digital distribution platform, Steam. Steam distributes more than 1,800 titles, from 50 different publishers.

More and more publishers seem to be seeing Steamworks as the best viable DRM on the market and 2K Games is no exception. All PC editions of Borderlands 2 will use Valve's Steamworks suite as their DRM. Steamworks supports snazzy features beyond simple copy protection, Gearbox's shooter-RPG will also use it for multiplayer matchmaking, Steam Cloud storage, achievements, auto-updating, downloadable content, "and more." How Steamworks... works is that if you buy a boxed edition of Borderlands 2, you'll need to register the game with a Steam account, and launch it through Steam. The box will still contain a disc to install the game from, but you'll have the option to download it directly through Steam whenever you please. Digital distributors other than Steam will simply sell you a product key to activate on Steam. Steamworks was to be expected, really, as 2K Games has used it for PC editions of games it's published since Mafia II in 2010. It briefly dabbled in Games for Windows Live before then but, thankfully, that was a short-lived experiment.

Borderlands 2 is coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on September 18. As ever, a selection of shiny things are on offer as pre-order bonuses.

In what is a tight slap in the face of those who even question the future of PC gaming, Alan Wake, which was launched for the PC platform years after its console launch, is reported to have earned back Remedy's development and marketing costs of the game's venture to the PC platform within the first 48 hours of sales on Steam. "We made it a priority to create the best PC version of the game we possibly could, as opposed to a sloppy port we ourselves would hate to play, and judging by the amount of encouragement and positive feedback that has been pouring in, that's really paid off!" said CEO Matias Myllyrinne in a thank you note to the game's fans. "Rest assured that we are still listening to your requests and will maintain efforts to make necessary updates to the build now that it's been released," he added. The game is also reported to be also available via Origin, soon.

In November 2011, Valve admitted that its Steam forums were hacked, and some user data including encrypted credit card information and hashed passwords were stolen, and that pending investigation, it asked users to change their Steam passwords. Valve noted that at that time, it had not seen any evidence of encrypted data being hacked. Today, Valve issued an update to all its Steam members via e-mail, where it notified them that investigation is still in progress, that Valve is taking help of external agencies to investigate, and that it still sees no evidence of encrypted credit card data being tampered with. As a note of caution, though, it asked users to keep an eye on their credit card activity and statements.

The transcript of Valve's email to Steam users follows.

The Steam application for iOS and Android devices, announced last week, is now available to all gamers around the world.

Launched last week in a closed beta, the Steam app allows gamers to chat with Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, view screenshots and user-generated content for their favorite games, read the latest gaming news, stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales, and more.

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the beta release of the Steam application for iOS and Android devices.

With the Steam app, gamers around the world may chat with Steam friends, browse community groups and user profiles, view screenshots and user-generated content for their favorite games, read the latest gaming news, stay up to date on unbeatable Steam sales, and more.

Origin is the fledgling online download account-based DRM service from Electronic Arts launched last June, that is home to Battlefield 3. To compete effectively against other similar services, the industry-leading Steam in particular, it must offer more content. To this end, Origin has added 11 publishers to its portfolio, reports CVG. These are Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd, N3V Games and CD Projekt RED. That last one is interesting, because CD Projekt RED owns and runs www.gog.com, the website dedicated to selling DRM-free games.

Today Shacknews is reporting a new beta patch available on Steam. This is what they had to say, "Covering its back and yours, Bethesda recommends that you only install the patch if you're affected by issues fixed in the patch, and that you backed up your saved games before installing the beta. If you're still ploughing ahead with it, here's what to do:

1. Log into Steam
2. Click on Steam in the upper menu
3. Select Settings
4. Under the Account tab, go to the Beta Participation section and select Change.
5. A drop down menu will appear. Select Skyrim Beta.
6. Select OK.

Steam will now restart. After Steam restarts, Skyrim will be updated to the Beta version currently available.

The beta patch adds an option for Skyrim's Steam Workshop, a portal which will allow mod makers to upload their creations directly to Steam, but the Workshop won't work it and the mod Creation Kit actually launch later this month."

A list of changes can be found here.

Remedy Games' critically-acclaimed title, Alan Wake, which was initially developed and demonstrated for both consoles and PCs, with the PC version being shelved, is coming to PC in February, 2012. It is announced that the game will use Valve Steamworks as its DRM and content-distribution platform, will be available through Steam store as digital-download, and its likely hard copies will also use Steamworks. Its minimum system requirements look like this:

• Dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.80 GHz
• 2 GB memory, 8 GB disk space
• DirectX 10-capable graphics card with 512 MB memory:
  o ATI/AMD Radeon 3650, 4450, 5550, 6450 or higher (per series)
  o NVIDIA: GeForce 8600GT, 9500GT, GT120, GT430, GT520 or higher (per series)
• Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7
• Mouse and keyboard, Xbox 360 controller supported

The launch trailer follows.

Last week we brought you news of Ubisoft's hard three machine activation limit on Anno 2070 and how it scuppered a review by Guru3D when they swapped out graphics cards. Guru3D's post then went viral on the web and it appears that this has put sufficient pressure or 'heat' on Ubisoft to relax the restrictions just a tiny bit, since they weren't going to use any more Ubisoft games for benchmarks. So what have they done? Allowed an unlimited number of graphics card swaps. That's it, everything else stays the same, so if other components such as the CPU, motherboard etc are changed, then one will still run into this frustrating brick wall and have to get in touch with customer support to reset the activations.

Anno 2070's Draconian DRM: Guru3D's Graphics Card Review Killed Off (UPDATED)

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game - and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.

Valve today announced the 2011 growth data for Steam, a leading platform for PC & Mac games and digital entertainment. During 2011 the platform grew to offer over 1,800 games to over 40 million accounts. Year-over-year unit sales increased by more than 100% for the seventh straight year, and during the 2011 Holiday Sale Steam's simultaneous user number eclipsed the 5 million player mark.

Meanwhile Steam doubled the amount of content delivered in 2011 vs. 2010, serving over 780 Petabytes of data to gamers around the world. To meet the increasing demand for games and services on the platform, the Steam infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.

Today Kotaku is reporting the top 5 games pirated for major platforms this year according to TorrentFreak. As usual the PC platform is the most guilty almost doubling in pirated copies then its competitors.

Some of the titles listed are not surprising but the lack of a certain title filled with dragon slaying is. Why Skyrim didn't make the top five is anyone's guess. Either Steam is in fact the most user friendly DRM or people just love Skyrim. Either way this is just a small glimpse into the world of pirated software.

Top Five Pirated PC Games

1. Crysis 2 (3,920,000) (March 2011)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (3,650,000) (November 2011)
3. Battlefield 3 (3,510,000) (October 2011)
4. FIFA 12 (3,390,000) (September 2011)
5. Portal 2 (3,240,000) (April 2011)