A
Steam Community announcement reveals Valve's Family Sharing plan now uses
two-factor authorization to allow "lenders more control while reducing the risk
of VAC or other bans resulting from an unknown user accessing and abusing shared
games on an authorized machine" (thanks
Polygon). Here's the deal:
We’ve made a change to the way Family
Sharing works in the most recent Steam client beta, where lenders must now
identify the Steam users who may access and play their shared games on shared
computers. This allows lenders more control while reducing the risk of VAC or
other bans resulting from an unknown user accessing and abusing shared games on
an authorized machine.
Family Sharing is now a two-factor authorization process, where up to ten Steam
accounts on up to ten machines may be authorized to share your library at a
given time. Any of these ten users may log into any of your ten authorized
machines to access and play your shared games. Additionally, users may still
request access to your shared library by sending you a request from any machine
where you've installed games.
To authorize up to ten family members to share your games, visit Family Sharing
settings using the most recent Steam client beta update. Our
FAQ have also been updated to reflect these changes.
Plastic Piranha will release
Rekoil on
Steam on January 28th reports
Polygon, even though the
Steam listing
still notes a February release for this first-person shooter that was
Greenlit over the summer. The Windows
version can be preordered at a 30% discount, and they also reveal the Xbox LIVE
edition will be released on January 29th under the title
Rekoil: Liberator,
saying publisher 505 Games tells them this version "is different in that it does
not support mod tools and/or eSports the way the PC version does."
The December 2013 results for the
Steam Hardware & Software
Survey are online, showing the typical user's system on the service is a
dual-core Intel machine running 64-bit Windows 7 with eight GB of RAM. Thanks
Polygon, where they note that Windows 8.1 64-bit adoption is up 2.42%,
though this is partly covered by Windows 8 64-bit usage declining by nearly one
percent.
Valve offers the following list of bestselling games on
Steam for the past
week:
- DayZ
- Rust
- The Walking dead: Season Two
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Legendary Edition
- Starbound
- Total War: ROME II
- XCOM: Enemy Within
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Company of Heroes 2
- PAYDAY 2
Financial Post - What BioWare's Mass Effect team can learn from Assassin’s
Creed IV: Black Flag. Thanks Acleacius.
But as I explored the Caribbean Sea at the helm of this grand ship, my
mind kept returning to another famous video game transport: Mass Effect’s
Normandy, a spacecraft that became as important to the sci-fi soap opera’s
story and as beloved by its fans as many of the series’ main characters.
It’s likely that Bioware, over the course of three games, managed to make
its vessel a slightly more vital piece of the narrative puzzle than Ubisoft
did the Jackdaw. The Normandy not only has its own personality via an
agreeably jokey AI, it’s also home to many of the game’s key characters, and
the setting for several important interactions and conversations.
However, Ubisoft’s team did something that has always proven elusive in
Bioware’s games: It made the Jackdaw feel like an authentic, functioning
vehicle over which we had complete control.
Man, the football games were a real treat yesterday. 45-44? Just awesome stuff.
It hurts when your rooting interest is not participating in the post-season, but
games that sensational help ease the pain a bit. Excellent stuff.
Twitter 
