Steam News & Updates

[Medicine Man]

Valve have added a Play Next feature to Steam labs...

https://store.steampowered.com/labs/playnext

It picks out games you already own and are similar to what you've already played, but haven't tried out yet.

[Medicine Man]

GTA IV will be re-released as GTA IV Complete Edition on March 19th with all the GFW Live gubbins stripped out of it...

IMPORTANT UPDATES TO GRAND THEFT AUTO IV AND EPISODES FROM LIBERTY CITY
We are making a number of changes to make sure players who own Grand Theft Auto IV and GTA: Episodes from Liberty City can continue to enjoy these games.

New Players
Starting 03/19/2020, Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition will replace both Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City wherever it is currently digitally available. Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition will as also be available via the Rockstar Games Launcher.
Current game save files will be compatible with Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition.

As a result of this update the following services will no longer be available in Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition:
Games for Windows Live
Multiplayer mode
Leaderboards

The following Radio Stations will be temporarily unavailable in Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition
RamJam FM, Self-Actualization FM, and Vice City FM (previously available in Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City)

Note: Because Japanese is a supported language for Grand Theft Auto IV, but is not supported for Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, players will continue to be able to play Grand Theft Auto IV with Japanese sub-titles but will need to select another language in order to play Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City.
Current Players
Players who have previously installed and played Grand Theft Auto IV or Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City will be able to update their copy to Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition through the following means:
Steam Users
Depending on the game, players on Steam will need to install or update their current game:
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City will be removed and replaced with GTAIV: Complete Edition in the launcher library. Update file size is expected to be approximately 22GB
Grand Theft Auto IV owners will download content from Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City and their game will update to GTAIV: Complete Edition. Update file size is expected to be approximately 6GB 
Physical Media
Games not previously activated using Games for Windows Live will be able to use the Key on the back of the game manual to activate and update to Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition
Games for Windows Live Digital Store Purchases
Games previously activated using Games for Windows Live will require players to create and/or link their Social Club accounts in replacement of Games for Windows Live to update to Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition

Note: New activations from players trying to install current copies of Grand Theft Auto IV may be disrupted until Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition is available. All users will need to be connected to the internet and authenticate their copy of the game.

Hopefully that will fix some of the problems I had when trying to replay it recently.

[Medicine Man]

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/Ste ... val-Spring

[Medicine Man]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110 ... 2378712841

https://store.steampowered.com/recommender

[Medicine Man]

Valve make changes to reduce Steam bandwidth use...

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110 ... 5515541376

[Medicine Man]

Steam Summer Sale dates...

[Medicine Man]

https://www.ea.com/news/ea-games-come-to-steam

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/electronicarts

EA Access coming later in the Summer apparently.

From what I can gather you wont be getting any Steam related perks with this lot, no achievements and all that. You'll still require Origin and an EA account, so basically you're just buying a Steam shortcut to Origin games.

I suppose you could say that about most games from big publishers with their own launchers on Steam though, but still hardly seems worth the fanfare they are giving it.

[Mantis]

Amusing given that EA made quite a big deal out of taking all their games off Steam a few years ago because they had so much faith in their own client.

The prices aren't particularly convincing at the moment, why pay almost the same price for the inconvenience of having to launch your game through two clients at once?

[Maturin]

Am I right in assuming it's just older EA games they're releasing through Steam? They probably figure it's worth taking the 30% Steam cut on those modest extra sales.

I would imagine all new AAA releases will still be restricted to their own platform so they can get all the revenue from the initial sales.

[Mantis]

The banner at the bottom says that Origin Access is also coming soon. That will include a lot of their AAA releases whenever it goes live.

[Achtung Englander]

Can someone explain that to me.

You can access to Origin Access via Steam that will boot up Origin. Wut ?

[DjchunKfunK]

It opens it up to a much bigger market, there are loads of people who will never go near Origin or who have never even heard of EA Access but they will boot up Steam every day. Makes sense for EA to get this on the Steam platform. Also this isn't unusual, Ubisoft have been doing something similar for ages.

[Drarok]

Yeah, I bought Rainbow Six: Siege on Steam, but it still has to boot up UPlay if it's not running before letting me play. Mildly inconvenient when it takes ages to load, then tells you there's an update!

[Mantis]

If you buy an Ubisoft game on Steam does it not handle all of the updates itself? I would be annoyed booting up a game thinking it was ready only to find that uPlay requires a 20Gb download or whatever.

As soon as I got my first game which forced this kind of practice (it was an Ubisoft one funnily enough) I stopped buying games that forced two clients on me. It's led to me buying a lot less EA and Ubisoft games than I used to because their sales usually aren't as good as the Steam ones.

[Drarok]

Oh no, Steam manages the game updates just fine, but if UPlay itself is out-of-date then you can't play.