Valve Announces Major Update for Steam

Free Update Offers New Community Features for Connecting Gamers

June 20, 2007 -- This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing an advanced set of community features to more than 13 million gamers around the world.

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Free of charge, the new community features will be accessible via the Steam desktop client and via the web.

"Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam."

This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004. In its three year history, Steam has defined the next generation online gaming platform delivering hundreds of games to millions of users with services such as Guest Passes, Automatic Updates, Free Weekends, and allowing gamers to access their games from any PC.

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Source Engine Update Released

Updates to the Source Engine have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Source Engine

Fixed a client crash

Fixed sv_allow_wait_commands restricting the server using wait

Fixed a crash in "soundlist" command

Reallowed fps_max value of 0, which means unrestricted fps

Fixed a crash playing back demo files recorded with the previously-released engine

Client forwards server commands it doesn't understand back to the server

sv_pure 1 now allows custom spray decals by default

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Steam Surpasses 13 Million Accounts

Becomes a Leading Destination for Millions of Gamers Worldwide

MAY 23, 2007 - Valve® today announced that Steam, the Bellevue, WA based company's pioneering PC platform for digital content, has surpassed 13 million active accounts. With over 150 games in a broad selection of genres and dozens of other PC applications, movies, and demos available, Steam has become a leading destination for millions of gamers around the world.

The activity of online gameplay via Steam averages over 7 billion player minutes per month. And, staying true to its roots of offering automatic updates for PC games and applications, Steam has served its growing audience a total of over 2,500 updates since its first release.

What began just a few years ago as a solution for auto-updating Valve's multiplayer games has evolved into a platform used by many of today's leading publishers and developers. This summer, more major publishers will announce that they are bringing their games to Valve's platform, using it for electronic distribution and including it in their retail product releases in order to take advantage of features such as anti-piracy, server browsing, marketing promotions and more.

"We've approached the development of Steam the same way we treat our online games; we release something we've tested, we internalize the feedback, and then we release new features and functionality based upon the feedback received," says Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "In Steam's case, we have millions of customers who are gamers and dozens of customers who are developers and publishers. In the past year, we've added over 100 new titles from third parties, grown to over 13 million active accounts, and introduced new features such as Guest Passes and Free Weekends. This growth has taught us a lot and inspired many additional features and services that we'll be releasing later this year."

About Valve Valve is an entertainment software and technology company founded in 1996 and based in Bellevue, Washington. The company's portfolio of entertainment properties includes Half-Life®, Counter-Strike®, Day of Defeat®, Team Fortress® and Portal™. Valve's catalog of products accounts for over 20 million retail units sold worldwide, and over 80% of PC online action gameplay. In addition, Valve is a developer of leading-edge technologies, such as the Source® game engine and Steam®, a broadband platform for the delivery and management of digital content. For more information, please visit www.valvesoftware.com

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Source Multiplayer Update Released

Updates to the Source Multiplayer games have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Source Multiplayer

Improved multiplayer voice communication, now using a much clearer codec

First release of a completely reworked in game text chat to which now includes a chat history and a filter to only see important chat messages

Fixed not being able to use sounds, decals or models if they were downloaded from the server

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Source Engine Update Released

Updates to the Source Engine have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Source Engine

Replaced cl_interp with cl_interp_ratio. Server can limit it with sv_client_min_interp_ratio and sv_client_max_interp_ratio

Added sv_rcon_log to allow rcon logging to be disabled

Cheat protected many more cvars

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