24/7 Player

Remember November’s Gaming Angels Highlight, Alexandria Neonakis? Looks like her love of all things Valve (plus talent) has landed her a sweet gig — designing Valve’s holiday cards.

For only $15.95, you have your choice of a 10-pack of either Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, or Team Fortress. If you enjoyed her adorable zombie-themed Valentines, these are even better. It’s ideal for the lazy gamer who wants to tell everyone they love to have a happy holiday season. I’ll be picking up a set or two…

Head on over to the Valve Store and support creativity!

Posted on December 4th, 2009 at 4:53pm by RachelZoe
Filed Under: Gifts, News, Shopping, Stationery, Team Fortress, Valve Corporation, left-4-dead, left-4-dead-2, team-fortress-2

There’s some good news for the PC players of Left 4 Dead 2. You no longer have to worry about whether Valve will be bringing the original Left 4 Dead campaigns into the sequel. You see, crafty modders over at l4dmods.com have already implemented the original maps into Left 4 Dead 2. Valve hasn’t actually released an SDK for Left 4 Dead 2 yet, so making this mod work will require users to change some files in the original game (and yes, you do have to own both games to make it work). There are some known issues and bugs and, needless to say, it’s not the most user-friendly mod out there, but it’s probably a small price to pay for the dedicated users.

So, if you want to see a Spitter on the roof of Mercy Hospital (and we know you do), you can. Watch a video of the mod in action after the break.

[Via Kotaku]

Continue reading Modders pump L4D1 maps into L4D2

Modders pump L4D1 maps into L4D2 originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 10:30pm by Richard Mitchell
Filed Under: hacks, left-4-dead, left-4-dead-2, mods, valve

Zombie obliterators who’ve managed to survive Left 4 Dead 2’s “Dark Carnival” campaign are probably familiar with the Southern rock outfit known as the Midnight Riders. While they’re not exactly an enormous focus in the game’s overarching story, a teaser page featuring the heavily bearded band (and a cryptic “Coming Soon”) is leading some folks to believe that the Riders will soon play a much larger role in the game’s proceedings.

Given the number of facial hair-sporting members of the band (see: four), we’re really hoping to get some form of DLC that turns them into playable characters. Perhaps even a new campaign, in which they cure the global zombie infection using nothing but the power of their rock music. How about it, Valve?

Left 4 Dead 2’s Midnight Riders get a gloriously bearded teaser page originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted on November 19th, 2009 at 7:30pm by Griffin McElroy
Filed Under: left-4-dead, left-4-dead-2, midnight-riders, rock, teaser, valve

In case you may not have noticed, games have slowly been moving towards being services rather than stand alone products. New releases, from the biggest blockbuster to the lowliest PSN of Xbox Live Arcade game, are now frowned upon if they don’t include some sort of internet-based shenanigans either through online multiplayer, or even just simple leaderboards to compare your scores with your mates.

World of Warcraft and Runescape are the most obvious examples of games that are services. In fact everything from Modern Warfare 2 to Shadox Complex has some sort of online service incorporated into them.

“Service is becoming everything,” underlined Valve’s Jason Holtman during his Montreal International Game Summit keynote. “It’s going to impact every line of business and every line as you think about your game.”

Of course Steam is the perfect example of games delivered as services. They boast 20 million users worldwide and a catalogue of 950 games, all of which are automatically updated when Steam is running on your PC.

These include titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, both of which have been constantly updated since they launched. Team Fortress 2 alone has seen 97 updates that include new content as well as patches and fixes, and all provided for free.

“The direct customer relationship means now that you shouldn’t think of your product as ‘finished’ — a single piece that goes out monolithically. You should think of your product or the game you’re making as an ongoing service to your customer,” Holtman adds.

Of course, the services that Steam provides to its customers are also provided in a lesser fashion across the major consoles with updates downloaded automatically when they are available.

LittleBigPlanet is another fine example of how a game has grown into a service, with the community now topping 1.3 million user-generated levels. Over the year since its release, Media Molecule has been just as busy keeping the game up-to-date and running smoothly as they were developing it having now patched it 25 times. Paul Holden, lead architect behind the game, believes in the the importance of good community support.

“We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at MIGS. “It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community.”

Community maintenance is key to LittleBigPlanet’s continued success. Holden continues, “By releasing regular content we keep people interested. Once we release a big pack we can see a big uptake in the number of people playing. If you look at companies like Blizzard with StarCraft, or Bungie and Valve, they look after their communities by releasing regular content and updates, and in turn the community responds well to that kind of attention.”

He adds, “The next patch to go out is 1.21 which should have a whole bunch of new features that have been in the pipeline for some time. And then there’s more planned for well into next year. Sony’s been very keen for us to support the game ourselves. A lot of publishers are keen to move on once a game has been released and patched but Sony has been very keen to give us the resources we need to support the game in this way.”

In an industry still dominated by monolithic blockbuster titles and analysts claiming that marketing sells games more than quality does it is refreshing to see that there are some big names ready to stick their necks out and say that it’s the players and communities that games build that are important and that quality really does matter.

Amen to that.

Thanks to Gamasutra and GamesIndustry.biz.

Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 7:05pm by [email protected] (The Games Are Evil Family)
Filed Under: James Holtman, MIGS 2009, Montreal International Games Summit 2009, News, Paul-holden, features, left-4-dead, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, opinion, sony, steam, team-fortress-2, valve

Speaking to GI.biz, Valve’s head of Steam, Jason Holtman, had some interesting things to say about the company’s frequent deals and their effect on long-term game sales. According to Holtman, Steam’s quick game sales — offering Team Fortress 2 for $2.49 for only a few hours last month, for example — don’t have a negative impact on a game’s long-term performance. Holtman notes that once a brick-and-mortar retailer reduces a game’s price, people are reticent to ever pay a higher price again, but downloadable games are different. “You can have sales that are dramatically low and bring the price back up and people don’t care,” said Holtman, “They don’t care at all.”

Regarding the $2.49 Team Fortress 2 sale last month, Holtman said that sales actually increased the following weekend — after it went back to full price. He also mentioned Steam’s previous half-off sale of Left 4 Dead, noting that it didn’t hurt retail sales at all (readers will recall that Valve claimed that it actually boosted retail sales). Holtman stated that it’s possible to run several promotions without “sacrificing” either downloadable or retail sales, and added, “You don’t have to hurt somebody to win.”

Valve: Short-term Steam deals don’t hurt long-term performance originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 6:15am by Richard Mitchell
Filed Under: business, digital-distribution, downloadable, left-4-dead, steam, team-fortress-2, valve