Valve has announced Steam Family Sharing. The program will allow Steam customers to designate up to 10 devices on which to share a library of games. Sharing will allow separate cloud saves and achievements, so you don’t have to worry about your little brother mucking up your 60th level Bosmer in Skyrim.
“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.”
Before you think you can just group up with buddies and share your Steam accounts to get free access to everyone’s games, there are restrictions. A shared library cannot be used by two people at the same time, even if they want to play different games. The account owner will always have priority. If the lender starts playing a game, the borrower will be given a few minutes to save and log off before Steam closes out.
Steam Family Sharing will go into beta next week.
Valve announced that they have approved 100 games for sale on Steam through their Greenlight program. This brings the total number of independent games greenlit on Steam to 260.
This latest milestone is both a celebration of the progress we’ve made behind the scenes and a stress test of our systems. Future batches are not likely to be as large, but if everything goes smoothly we should be able to continue increasing the throughput of games from Greenlight to the Steam store.
The full list of games can be found here. It includes Quarter to Three forum favorites Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, Dominions 3, and Warmachine: Tactics.
Don’t Starve has been updated with Steam Workshop integration. Klei Entertainment updated their survival crafting beard-growing game with mod support through the Steam Workshop, so you can easily find horrible new ways to run out of food and die while beset by spiders.
We’ve been nothing but amazed by the player creations that have popped up since we introduced modding to Don’t Starve. Now it’s easier than ever to create and install mods for Don’t Starve to change your game and share with the community.
What does that mean? Well, a lot of things. Add in custom characters, play with the world generation, create new creatures and items, or take your adventure in a whole new direction! Using our handy-dandy Mod Upload Machine you can put your mods directly onto Steam Workshop for everyone to download and enjoy.
The developers have also added new monsters to attack you, a new area to get lost in, and new craftable items to give you a false sense of hope. Most importantly, they’ve added a Morgue Screen that will keep track of all the wonderful ways you’ve died.
Tom wrote about the achievement system in Europa Universalis IV because the developers decided that you get nothing unless you play with Iron Man Mode enabled. No cheesing saves. Make your moves and deal with it. Play a marathon 20-hour game as Luxembourg against the world, but didn’t have Iron Man Mode on? Congratulations, but you’ll get no achievements to show off on your Steam profile. Hardcore!
To the Moon, an indie RPG by Freebird Games, is even more discriminating about handing out achievements. It’s about two doctors that can manipulate dying people’s memories to fulfill their lifelong dreams. It’s tearjerker subject matter and the game does everything it can to get you to turn on the waterworks. Imagine lots of observations about regret and love. Playing it is either an exhausting emotional journey or an annoying exercise depending on how you deal with a game asking you to get in touch with your feelings. No matter which is true, players will have to truly earn the only achievement they can get which the developer recently added to the game.
You have to finish the game. Hardcore!
Since Paradox no longer includes Quarter to Three in their first round of review copies — they’re one of the many folks unhappy with our ratings system and given how most other sites limit themselves to the usual 7-9 ratings, who can blame them? — I’m only just now getting started with Europa Universalis IV. Which means reading the manual, dinking around with the tutorials, booting up a game as Austria and admiring the map but chickening out and then booting up another game as Venice and then chickening out again and considering some more remote corner of the world like Poland. Wait, no. What was I thinking? The Aztecs. Still too many potentially dangerous neighbors. Maybe the Incas.
One of my favorite things I’ve read in the manual is this: “Iron man mode is the only time when Steam Achievements are active.” Iron man mode means that you can’t save the game, see how your war against Burgundy goes, and then reload the game to take a year to build a bigger army if it goes poorly. Iron man mode means you only get a single save when you exit the game, and it’s saved on the Steam cloud, so you can’t spirit away the file someplace safe and load it later to redo your disastrous attack on Burgundy. Iron man mode means only a monthly autosave, so if you want to kill the game from the task manager and pretend it crashed, you can never go back more than a couple of weeks. It simply means you can’t call do-overs or takebacks. It means your decisions matter in a way they don’t matter when you can freely save and reload.
Iron man mode uniquely fits Paradox’s strategy games, which aren’t about prevailing over everyone else, like most strategy games. A Paradox game is about surfing history, riding waves of data, cresting its peaks and sliding helplessly down into its valleys, taking it in stride when it sucks you underwater and spits you up on the beach sputtering and hobbled. History isn’t a linear progression up a power curve to the number one spot. It’s about ebbs and flows. And if you want to be an achievement whore — you do want to be an achievement whore, don’t you? — Europa Universalis IV expects you to ride those waves, come what may.
Jason Holtman, former head of Valve’s Steam service, has taken a position at Microsoft. According to GamesIndustry International, the position is one that could have a positive impact on Microsoft’s PC gaming efforts.
“Yes, I have joined Microsoft where I will be focusing on making Windows a great platform for gaming and interactive entertainment. I think there is a lot of opportunity for Microsoft to deliver the games and entertainment customers want and to work with developers to make that happen, so I’m excited to be here.”
Holtman was with Valve for eight years, during which time he was credited with growing Steam into the juggernaut it is today. He was the driving force behind the service courting first big publishers, then indies, and he provided leadership throughout his tenure. Holtman reportedly left Valve in February of his own volition during the company’s mysterious culling of employees.
