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      No more refunds after 100 hours: Steam closes Early Access playtime loophole

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Yesterday - 17:38 · 1 minute

    Steam logo on a computer

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    " Early Access " was once a novel, quirky thing , giving a select set of Steam PC games a way to involve enthusiastic fans in pre-alpha-level play-testing and feedback. Now loads of games launch in various forms of Early Access, in a wide variety of readiness. It's been a boon for games like Baldur's Gate 3 , which came a long way across years of Early Access .

    Early Access, and the " Advanced Access " provided for complete games by major publishers for "Deluxe Editions" and the like, has also been a boon to freeloaders. Craven types could play a game for hours and hours, then demand a refund within the standard two hours of play, 14 days after the purchase window of the game's "official" release. Steam-maker Valve has noticed and, as of Tuesday night, updated its refund policy .

    "Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period," reads the update. In other words: Playtime is playtime now, so if you've played more than two hours of a game in any state, you don't get a refund. That closes at least one way that people could, with time-crunched effort, play and enjoy games for free in either Early or Advanced access.

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      Steam ne remboursera plus les joueurs qui font ça

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Yesterday - 07:16

    Steam Remboursement

    Steam impose une nouvelle règle concernant sa politique de remboursement parfois très laxiste.
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      Slay the Spire 2, Vampire Survivors meets Contra, and other “Triple-i” games

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 10 April - 23:12

    Bloody battle scene from the game Norland

    Enlarge / Norland is a game that communicates its intent well through screenshots. (credit: Hooded Horse)

    The Triple-i initiative is a gaming showcase that gets it, and is also in on the joke.

    The thing Triple-i gets is that most gaming "showcases" are full of corporate fluff, go on way too long, and are often anchored around a couple huge titles. Triple-i's first event on Wednesday delivered 30-plus game trailers and teases within 45 minutes, and there was a consistent intrigue to all of them. There were some big names with some bigger studios loosely attached, and the definition of what is "triple-i" is quite vague, maybe intentionally. But there were a lot of games worth noting, especially on PC.

    What kind of games? Triple-i's website notes the announcement "may contain traces of rogue-lites." At a breakpoint in the showcase, the omniscient text narrator notes there are "Only a few more rogue-lites (promise)." Triple-i was stuffed full of rogue-lites, roguelikes, survival, city-builders, deckbuilders, Hades -likes, 16-bit-esque platformers, Vampire Survivors and its progeny, turn-based tacticals, and then a car that sometimes has legs. There are strong trends in indie and indie-adjacent gaming, but also some real surprises.

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      Pourquoi Dragon’s Dogma 2 se fait déjà épingler sur Steam

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Friday, 22 March - 08:15

    Disponible depuis quelques heures seulement, Dragon's Dogma 2, l'un des plus gros jeux du mois de mars, reçoit énormément d'avis négatifs sur Steam. La faute, encore, à des microtransactions très critiquables.

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      Steam dévoile son nouveau partage familial qui va tout changer

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Tuesday, 19 March - 07:04

    Partage Familial Steam 2.0

    Valve espère révolutionner le partage des jeux entre proches avec la mise en place des nouvelles "familles Steam".
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      Steam Families opens up game libraries for sharing, with a few caveats

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 18 March - 22:10 · 1 minute

    Side-by-side view of Steam library and shared Family games

    Enlarge (credit: Valve)

    PC gaming is often regarded as a solitary pursuit, but the advent of PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck has made sharing favorite titles far easier—at least unofficially. Valve's Steam platform, which previously didn't have too much in the way of sharing, has embraced this hand-off reality with Steam Families .

    Steam Families, now in beta, replaces both the more limited Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. You invite up to five family members (for a six-person total family), share games with them (if developers allow it), and then family members can see their family library games in a subsection of their list. Anyone can play a shared game and keep their own save files and achievements.

    Steam Families is, on the surface, more permissive than Family Sharing. You can play a game from a family member's library even if they're already online and playing something else. Multiple members of a Steam Family can play the same game at the same time, although the total number of people playing must match the total number of purchased copies among household members. All games are automatically shared with all other family members, though parents can use parental controls to limit games, playtime, and tune other features.

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      Devs left with tough choices as Warner Bros. ends all Adult Swim Games downloads

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 8 March - 18:23 · 1 minute

    A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles.

    Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles. (credit: Adult Swim Games)

    Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

    Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions , a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was "retiring" his game within 60 days.

    In a comment on that Ars post , Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games' Fist Puncher , noted that they had received the same "retired" notice from WBD. "When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio's Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up " Transferring Applications " in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators," Kain wrote.

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      Steam est inarrêtable et établit un nouveau record de joueurs

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Monday, 4 March - 15:58

    La plateforme de Valve poursuit sa montée en puissance auprès des joueurs comme en témoignent ces nouvelles statistiques.