The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, the developers behind the Wii/GameCube emulator Dolphin said they were indefinitely postponing a planned Steam release, after Steam-maker Valve received a request from Nintendo to take down the emulator's "coming soon" page. This week, after consulting with a lawyer, the team says it has decided to abandon its Steam distribution plans altogether. "Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it," the team wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "In the end, Valve is the one running the Steam storefront, and they have the right to allow or disallow anything they want on said storefront for any reason."

The Dolphin team also takes pains to note that this decision was not the result of an official DMCA notice sent by Nintendo. Instead, Valve reached out to Nintendo to ask about the planned Dolphin release, at which point a Nintendo lawyer cited the DMCA in asking Valve to take down the page. At that point, the Dolphin team says, Valve "told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam... But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that." "As for Nintendo, this incident just continues their existing stance towards emulation," the post continues. "We don't think that this incident should change anyone's view of either company."

Despite the disappointing result for the Steam release, the Dolphin team is adamant that "we do not believe that Dolphin is in any legal danger." That's despite the emulator's inclusion of the Wii Common Key, which could run afoul of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The Dolphin Team notes that the Wii Common Key has been freely shared across the Internet since its initial discovery and publication in 2008. And while that key has been in the Dolphin code base since 2009, "no one has really cared," the team writes. [...] With what they believe is a firm legal footing, the team writes that Dolphin development will continue away from Steam, but including a number of UI and quality of life features originally designed for the Steam release. Meanwhile, emulators like RetroArch and the innovative 3dSen continue to be available on Steam, with no immediate sign of a further crackdown from Valve or Nintendo.

Blizzard Entertainment is bringing its PC games to Steam, starting with the release of Overwatch 2 on Valve's digital storefront on Aug. 10, Blizzard announced Wednesday. Polygon reports: The Windows PC version of Overwatch 2, like many of Blizzard's PC games, is currently only available through Battle.net. But with Microsoft's impending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and declining player engagement in the game, the maker of Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch appears to be changing its strategy. Blizzard says it will bring "a selection" of its games to Steam, but did not specify which titles beyond Overwatch 2 will make the jump from Battle.net. (A few classic Blizzard games, including the original Diablo and the first two Warcraft games, are available through GOG.com.)

The acceptance of Steam as a platform for Blizzard's games is part of the studio's evolution, the company said in a blog post. "[O]ne of the ideas pushing us forward is meeting players around the world where they are, and making our games as easy as possible to access and play," the company said. "We want to give everyone a chance to experience our universes with old friends while making new ones, no matter how they choose to play." In its announcement, Blizzard said it's not moving away from Battle.net. But, it explained, "as we've evolved, the industry has evolved too -- gaming is no longer just for specific communities as it was when Battle.net launched over two decades ago, gaming is for everyone -- and though we remain committed to continually investing in and supporting Battle.net, we want to break down the barriers to make it easier for players everywhere to find and enjoy our games."

Blizzard says that players on Steam will still need a Battle.net account connected to Overwatch 2 to play the game. The Steam version will support Steam achievements and friends lists, but Blizzard did not announce Steam Deck support. Overwatch 2 can now be wishlisted through Steam. As for Blizzard's future plans for other game releases on Steam, the company said it will be "sharing more about potential other games coming to the platform when the time is right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Valve has issued a rare statement after claims it was rejecting games with AI-generated assets from its Steam games store. The notoriously close-lipped developer of the Half-Life series and de facto gatekeeper of PC gaming distribution said its policy was evolving and not a stand against AI. Steam has a review and approval process much like any app platform, and its rules on content aren't always clear until developers test them with edge cases. So it was with one indie dev who posted in a subreddit for like-minded game developers using AI, saying Valve "is no longer willing to publish games with AI generated content."

The game they had submitted had "a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated," and Valve appeared to take issue with this. "As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game," their first warning letter stated. Then, a week later: "we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. Again, while we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."

Considering most AI tools can't really claim to have legal rights to all their training data (and even if they do, it may still not be an ethical use of that data), this policy as stated basically amounts to a blanket ban on AI-generated assets in games. [...] If the creators can't realistically claim copyright over their own work, Valve has deemed the risk of publishing that work too high. As such, Valve responded to Eurogamer to say that, basically, their policy is more "what's legally required" than any particular stance on AI. "We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies," Valve said. "Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

Valve has reportedly started banning Steam games featuring AI-created art assets, unless developers can prove they have rights to the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create them. From a report: In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build. In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights.

"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game."

Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove all content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it. The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected. "We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights," Valve said. "At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."

An anonymous reader shares a report: PC gamers could easily make a joke that three things in life never change: death, taxes, and the classic look of Steam. One of those things just changed, though; Valve just released the most substantial overhaul to Steam in years, including a visual makeover and several new features. Further, the company has brought the Mac and Linux versions of Steam closer to parity with the historically superior Windows version. Valve says "the most impactful changes" are actually under the hood. The company's developers put effort into achieving greater consistency between how things work in Steam for desktop, the TV-oriented Big Picture mode, and Steam Deck. This codebase overhaul means that new features that come to the desktop version of Steam can simultaneously ship on Steam Deck with minimal effort.

As for stuff that's visible to users, though, the entire application's look has been overhauled and modernized. In most cases, things are more or less where they used to be in the interface -- they just look a little different, with new fonts, colors, sizes, and so on. That said, the in-game overlay has received a more significant overhaul, as did notifications. Steam users have access to more customizations about how and when notifications are displayed, and the notifications panel displays only new notifications, with a "view all" button for digging into older ones. In general, the overlay has more information about the game you're playing, from achievement progress to playing time and beyond. Valve has made big changes to the controller configurator from the Steam Deck, which is now part of the overlay whenever a game is connected.

If you're hoping to see more Windows games on Mac then those dreams might finally come true soon. From a report: Apple has dropped some big news for game developers at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week, making it far easier and quicker to port Windows games to Mac thanks to a Proton-like environment that can translate and run the latest DirectX 12 Windows games on macOS. Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that's similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck.

It's powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple's tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game. Mac gaming has been a long running meme among the PC gaming community, despite Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky ports being some rare recent exceptions to macOS gaming being largely ignored.

"The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac," explains Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple, in a WWDC session earlier this week.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I'm disappointed. I've been waiting for AMD and Nvidia to offer up more affordable options for this generation of GPUs that could really push 1440p into the mainstream, but what I've been reviewing over the past week hasn't lived up to my expectations. Nvidia and AMD are both releasing new GPUs this week that are aimed at the budget PC gaming market. After seven years of 1080p dominating the mainstream, I was hopeful this generation would deliver 1440p value cards. Instead, Nvidia has started shipping a $399 RTX 4060 Ti today that the company is positioning as a 1080p card and not the 1440p sweet spot it really should be at this price point.

AMD is aggressively pricing its new Radeon RX 7600 at just $269, and it's definitely more suited to the 1080p resolution at that price point and performance. I just wish there were an option between the $300 to $400 marks that offered enough performance to push us firmly into the 1440p era. More than 60 percent of PC gamers are playing at 1080p, according to Valve's latest Steam data. That means GPU makers like AMD and Nvidia don't have to target 1440p with cards that sell in high volume because demand seems to be low. Part of that low demand could be because a monitor upgrade isn't a common purchase for PC gamers, or they'd have to pay more for a graphics card to even support 1440p. That's probably why both of these cards also still ship with just 8GB of VRAM because why ship it with more if you're only targeting 1080p? A lower resolution doesn't need as much VRAM for texture quality. I've been testing both cards at 1080p and 1440p to get a good idea of where they sit in the GPU market right now. It's fair to say that the RTX 4060 Ti essentially offers the same 1440p performance as an RTX 3070 at 1440p for $399. That's $100 less than the RTX 3070's $499 price point, which, in October 2020, I said offered a 1440p sweet spot for games during that period of time. It's now nearly three years on, and I'd certainly expect more performance here at 1440p. Why is yesterday's 1440p card suddenly a 1080p one for Nvidia?

After leading CodeWeavers for 27 years, Jeremy White has decided to leave the company, prompting the transition to an employee ownership trust. CodeWeavers is known for its CrossOver software and contributions to the Wine project. Phoronix reports: CodeWeavers' President James Ramey is now taking on the CEO role while Director of Development Ulrich Czekalla in turn is stepping up to fill the President role. Jeremy White does continue to serve as Chairman of the Board at CodeWeavers. In addition to selling the CrossOver software, CodeWeavers' PortJump effort aides organizations in porting apps/games to macOS, Linux, or ChromeOS. CodeWeavers also engages in technical consulting services for organizations. Among CodeWeavers' clients is Valve in assisting them with their Steam Play / Proton effort. You can read more about the changes via the CodeWeavers blog.

Valve now offers Steam game trials, starting with 2023's Dead Space remake. GameSpot reports: Previously, players could buy a game on the platform and then return it within a two-hour window, but this new trial feature makes things a bit easier for consumers. It seems only Dead Space has a trial available on Steam right now, but the feature may come to other games later on. With Dead Space, you don't need to purchase the game to play during the 90-minute trial period. The Dead Space trial isn't restricted to a certain point in the game, allowing players to explore as much as they want within the 90-minute period. Valve and other publishers are likely watching this new feature closely to see if it's worth implementing across other games.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A Finnish newspaper is circumventing Russian media restrictions by hiding news reports about the war in Ukraine in an online game popular among Russian gamers. "While Helsingin Sanomat and other foreign independent media are blocked in Russia, online games have not been banned so far," said Antero Mukka, the editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat. The newspaper was bypassing Russia's censorship through the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike, where gamers battle against each other as terrorists and counter-terrorists in timed matches. While the majority of matches are played on about a dozen official levels or maps released by the publisher Valve, players can also create custom maps that anyone can download and use. The newspaper's initiative was unveiled on World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday. "To underline press freedom, [in the game] we have now built a Slavic city, called Voyna, meaning war in Russian," Mukka said.

In the basement of one of the apartment buildings that make up the Soviet-inspired cityscape, Helsingin Sanomat hid a room where players can find Russian-language reporting by the newspaper's war correspondents in Ukraine. "In the room, you will find our documentation of what the reality of the war in Ukraine is," Mukka said. The walls of the digital room, lit up by red lights, are plastered with news articles and pictures reporting on events such as the massacres in the Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin. On one of the walls, players can find a map of Ukraine that details reported attacks on the civilian population, while a Russian-language recording reading Helsingin Sanomat articles aloud plays in the background. This was "information that is not available from Russian state propaganda sources", Mukka said. The map has been downloaded more than 2,000 times since its release on Monday. According to Mukka, an estimated 4 million Russians have played Counter-Strike.

New submitter jth1234567 reports: In late January, a Steam user posted a negative review for the game Warlander, warning potential buyers about the shady anti-cheat system the game was using, the apparent problems being intrusive data collection and difficult removal after the game itself had been uninstalled (the review text is no longer available). This review stayed on top as the most helpful review for nearly three months, which must have been a big thorn in the side for the developer and the publisher.

Until yesterday, when they managed to get a Steam moderator to remove the negative review. In a perfect, consumer-friendly world it should have been another way around, and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there.

Apparently the Steam moderator categorized the negative review as "attempting to scam users or other violations of Steam's Rules & Guidelines", which meant that all those 2439 people (plus people who have it 437 awards) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all.

Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.

The Steam review system was never perfect, but the impact of this kind of behavior from Valve will render the whole system completely pointless, as negative reviews can be culled by the developers/publishers at any time, and people will just stop marking any negative review as useful to avoid these kinds of repercussions.

Valve announced today that Steam will require Windows 10 or later on January 1, 2024. The reason? Google Chrome. PC Gamer reports: "The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows," Valve's typically curt announcement reads. "In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above." January 1, 2024 is the day of doom for Steam on the old Windows versions. "After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows."

In a Substack post, Norm Sohl describes how he built a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia. An anonymous reader shares a summary from Ars Technica: Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino, a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill, a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

Sohl ended up creating a loose guide to making your own highly configurable machine out of common espresso machine parts and the Gaggiuino software. From his own machine, he salvaged a pump with a pressure sensor, a boiler with a temperature sensor, an overpressure valve, and brew head. Sohl made a chassis for his new machine out of extrusion rails and stiffening plates. The high-voltage boards and components were assembled breadboard style onto acrylic panels, held up by poster-tack adhesive. A 120-volt power connector was salvaged from a PC power supply, then mounted with a 3D-printed bracket. The low-voltage wires and parts were also tacked onto acrylic, individually crimped, and heat shrink-wrapped. And the control panel was 3D-printed, allowing for toggle switches and a touch-panel screen.

There's more work to be done on Sohl's unit; the exposed boiler and 120-volt wiring need to be hidden, and a drip tray would be nice. But it works. The first shot was fast and under-extracted, suggesting a finer grind and settings changes. Then again, that describes almost every first-time home espresso setup. Sohl writes that he hopes future versions of his project will make use of the Gaggiuino project's own circuit board design and that he'll have his 3D project files posted for sharing.

Epic Games' next big plan for the metaverse is to unify all of its disparate asset marketplaces under one brand, Fab. The Verge reports: The new store will include assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel Bridge, Artstation Marketplace, and Sketchfab, and Epic will give creators 88 percent of earnings on the store, like it does for the Epic Games Store. On Fab, you'll be able to get a vast amount of digital assets, including "3D models, materials, sound, VFX, digital humans, and more," Epic says. And the company is positioning it as an open marketplace that will support "all engines, all metaverse-inspired games which support imported content, and the most popular digital content creation packages." In theory, that means you won't need to be an Unreal Engine developer to get value from the store.

Fab is set to launch later this year, though it's available in alpha as a plugin for the new Unreal Editor for Fortnite tools.

Valve just announced that Counter-Strike 2, made in Source Engine 2, will be released in Summer 2023. From a report: Accompanying the announcement, Valve also released three videos teasing what to expect in the Counter-Strike's massive and transformative update. Leveling up the World shows off the upgraded maps and overhauls, Moving Beyond Tick Rate announces that tick rate will no longer matter (moving and shooting will be "equally responsive"), and Responsive Smokes details the new "dynamic volumetric" nature of smoke grenades.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward.

First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics....

These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance.

James Temple reports via MIT Technology Review: In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen. Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it resurfaces at a well head, where it's hot enough to convert refrigerants or other fluids into vapor that cranks a turbine, generating electricity. But Houston-based Fervo Energy is testing out a new spin on the standard approach -- and on that day, its engineers and executives were simply interested in generating data.

The readings from gauges planted throughout the company's twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours. The results from the initial experiments -- which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively -- suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.

There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today's grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems. "We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid," says Tim Latimer, chief executive and cofounder of Fervo. "But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned in the last few weeks after they were caught red-handed using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post published on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had recently patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit. According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing information used internally by the Dota client that shouldn't be visible during gameplay. After investigating how it worked, the developer then decided to identify and remove the "bad actors" from the active Dota playerbase.

"We released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using," Valve said. "This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits." Valve claims that all 40,000 of the now-banned accounts had accessed this hidden section of data, and that it had "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved." Valve highlighted that the number of accounts banned was especially significant due to how prevalent this particular family of cheating clients is, and that the action taken is just one step in an ongoing campaign to tackle those abusing the popular MOBA game. "While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota," warned Valve.

MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients' specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. MIT News reports: The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient's heart. They can then control the replica's action to mimic that patient's blood-pumping ability. The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient's heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient's own heart. The team can also use this approach to print a patient's aorta -- the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.

To mimic the heart's pumping action, the team has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. The underside of each sleeve resembles precisely patterned bubble wrap. When the sleeve is connected to a pneumatic system, researchers can tune the outflowing air to rhythmically inflate the sleeve's bubbles and contract the heart, mimicking its pumping action. The researchers can also inflate a separate sleeve surrounding a printed aorta to constrict the vessel. This constriction, they say, can be tuned to mimic aortic stenosis -- a condition in which the aortic valve narrows, causing the heart to work harder to force blood through the body.

Doctors commonly treat aortic stenosis by surgically implanting a synthetic valve designed to widen the aorta's natural valve. In the future, the team says that doctors could potentially use their new procedure to first print a patient's heart and aorta, then implant a variety of valves into the printed model to see which design results in the best function and fit for that particular patient. The heart replicas could also be used by research labs and the medical device industry as realistic platforms for testing therapies for various types of heart disease. The report has been published in the journal Science Robotics.