Steam’s item trading system is convoluted to protect you

Steam’s community market may have started as a system for buying and selling silly hats in Team Fortress 2, but it’s evolved over the years. These days, its an active economy and item trading system with heavy account security and complicated transaction restrictions. It has to be, Valve says. When it comes to hacking, “all Steam accounts are now targets.”

It’s the burden of a thriving community economy, the company explained in a recent statement. Steam items and trading cards can be sold for real cash, and these rewards (which are doled out for participating in events or buying and playing games on the service) have become so prolific, that virtually every account is a target worth hijacking. “What used to be a handful of hackers is now a highly effective, organized network in the business of stealing and selling items,” the company said. “We see around 77,000 accounts hijacked and pillaged each month.”

This threat has forced Valve to invest in two-factor and mobile authentication for Steam accounts and, for users without these security features enabled, frustrating restrictions on trades and market transactions. New item purchases can’t be traded for up to 7 days, for instance, and users without authentication have to wait an additional three days before traded items are delivered. Users with Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator can avoid some of these restrictions, but ultimately the entire processes is slowed down in an effort to make account hijacking more difficult for hackers.

Valve published a lengthy statement on its website explaining that while it’s just as frustrated as the community, the extra secuirty measures are necessary. “Any time we put security steps in between user actions and their desired results, we’re making it more difficult to use our products,” the statement reads. “Unfortunately, this is one of those times where we feel like we’re forced to insert a step or shut it all down.” Check out the full post for yourself at the source link below

Source: Valve

EA launches an eSports division led by Peter Moore

Electronic Arts, the studio responsible for Star Wars: Battlefront, SimCity and the Battlefield franchise, has launched a new Competitive Gaming Division led by former COO and EA Sports President Peter Moore. The goal of the new business is to cultivate eSports opportunities within EA’s library, most notably in the Battlefield, Madden NFL and FIFA franchises. EA’s CGD will develop live events and broadcasting featuring eSports, plus create new, officially branded competitive experiences, CEO Andrew Wilson says in a blog post.

Former EA Senior Vice President of Product Marketing Todd Sitrin also gets a new job, heading up strategy and operations as SVP and General Manger of the new division.

Professional gaming, otherwise known as “competitive gaming” or “eSports,” is big business, bringing in an estimated $612 million in revenue and 134 million global viewers in 2015 alone. Even independent studios are getting in on the action, thanks in large part to livestreaming sites like Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

Source: EA

Playdate: Going to war in ‘Dragon Quest Heroes’

There are lots of ways to enjoy the button-mashing guilty pleasure of a Dynasty Warriors game: the trappings of the original series in ancient China, the robot-smashing action of Gundam Reborn and even a foray into the Legend of Zelda universe. Not enough? Okay fine. Here’s one more: ‘Dragon Quest Heroes.’ Join Sean and Tim at 6PM ET / 3PM Pacific on Twitch as a venture into a mash-up created from games neither of them have played. Check us out here on this very post, the Engadget Gaming homepage, or, if you want to join us in chat, Twitch.tv/Joystiq.
http://player.twitch.tv/?channel=joystiq[We’re streaming Dragon Quest Heroes on PC through OBS at 720p, so rest assured your hostage rescues will look dramatically better on your home setup.]

Twitch plays modern art

Whether or not the art world wants a robotic painter, it’s going to get one. Chris Chen, founder of Instapainting, a web service that converts your photographs into paintings, has built a machine that’s creating an artwork live on Twitch. Users can punch in commands on the gaming platform for the paint brush wielding machine to follow.

Inspired by Twitch Plays Pokemon, a popular stream that allowed people to play the game collectively through the chat, Chen decided to hook up his robot to a stream for a similar collaborative experience. “I wanted [people] to take control of the robot to paint,” he gushes. “The idea is to integrate technology into the creation process [of art] so people can watch it being painted in real time.”

Painting isn’t a new artistic endeavor for robots. From AARON, the first autonomous painting machine, to eDavid and bitPaintr more recently, inventors have been toying with the idea of robotic artists. But unlike AARON, created by Harold Cohen in the ’70s, Chen’s robot isn’t painting with imagination or intent. It’s being fed a set of instructions for every stroke and color. It can either follow the lead of an artist who shows it how it’s done or it takes its cues from users on the Internet.

The robot, which cost about $200 to build, made its first mechanical reproduction of an artwork a couple of months ago. When Jean Liang, a digital artist, drew on a Wacom tablet, the robot responded in real-time and followed the motions of the pen. But it also recorded the artist’s movements to create a replica of the painting autonomously soon after.

Whether or not a robot can be creative is a heated, inconclusive debate. But experiments like Chen’s do fall neatly into the category of human-machine collaborations. When he first made the robot available on Twitch, programmers in the viewer-crowd took control and managed to write scripts in real-time to make the robot paint circles and mash up colors. But Chen wanted to make the collaborative process of robot painting more accessible. “I’m redoing it to make it a valid experiment of collaborative art so regular people wouldn’t be inhibited to try and take control,” he says. “It’s a basic control GUI, so all you have to do is click and it’ll move.” When a user types a command in the chat, “up 400 right 300 brush 40” for instance, the robot averages all three dimensions — X, Y and Z coordinates — to follow the precise command for a stroke on the canvas.

Chen’s entire business model for Instapainting is based on the similar sentiment of making art accessible. But he’s quick to clarify: “You shouldn’t necessarily see it as art, unless your photo is a piece of art. I’d prefer not to add creative input. Not because people can’t do that, but because that’s not good business.” The way he sees it, adding an artist’s creative interpretation to a painting will lead to a lot of dissatisfied or fickle customers. So he sticks to replicas of photos exactly as the customers want them. “It’s not perfect artwork,” he says. “It’s perfect painting.”

When Instapainting launched in 2014, backed by YCombinator, there was a small but instant demand. There were people who wanted their favorite pet pictures converted into oil paintings and a quick Google search threw up Instapainting as an option. At the time, when the service was slowly gaining traction on Reddit, it seemed feasible for them to have the paintings made in the country. But soon, when art studios in China reached out to Chen with their price lists, he couldn’t turn them down. “They offered really good quality,” he says. “They were cheaper, too.” Soon, the paintings were outsourced to Chinese art studios.

For now, the robotic painter exhibits the possibilities of man-machine collaboration. But eventually, when the AI-version of this robot, which is expected to follow as per the company’s blog, becomes capable of churning out replicas of photographs, it could rival Chen’s Chinese studio suppliers. “If you get a painting right now [that’s] different from the [photo], it’s not because the artist added a creative input, it’s because they made a mistake,” he says. “We want to offer a service that’s close to a printer. Except, right now it’s cheaper to have an actual human artist do it rather than robot.”

[Image credit: Instapainting. Gif: Prosthetic Knowledge]

This is how Oculus will sell VR to the masses

By Nathan Ingraham and Aaron Souppouris

A big question has followed Oculus around since its Rift unveil back in June: How will it persuade the public that virtual reality is ready for primetime? Today we have the answer: Oculus VR has announced that Eve: Valkyrie, CCP’s multiplayer dogfighting shooter, will be a pack-in with every pre-order of its upcoming VR headset when it launches in early 2016.

Aaron Souppouris, Senior Editor

“We want to be the Halo or Mario for the [PlayStation VR] and Oculus.” That’s what Valkyrie executive producer Owen O’Brien told me back when I previewed the game in April. Today’s news made his wish come true. While more recent platforms have launched without them, traditionally pack-in games were common. And they’ve been especially important for establishing new concepts or accessories, with many going on to become iconic titles. Nintendo used this trick often: think Game Boy and Tetris, SNES and Super Mario World, or the Wii and Wii Sports. Oculus clearly believes Valkyrie is the right title to imbue the qualities of VR to the masses.

CCP, the game’s developer, made its fortune from the Eve:Online space MMO, but in recent years subscriber numbers haven’t been moving in the right direction, and it’s laid off a lot of staff. As well as trying to spark interest in its MMO through frequent updates, it’s poured money into virtual reality development, hoping to get into the field early to make the money it needs to survive. We probably should’ve seen the pack-in coming — Oculus is publishing Valkyrie, after all — but the fact that everyone with a Rift on launch day will get the game is still huge news for CCP.

The jury’s still out on whether Valkyrie is the best game to showcase VR for first-timers.

While CCP’s gamble has been vindicated, the jury’s still out on whether Valkyrie is the best game to showcase VR for first-timers. Here’s the problem: I’m not the best person to judge its success. I’ve played a healthy amount of VR over the past three years, during which I’ve played Valkyrie in its alpha and beta stages. My thoughts on the game are not going to be a great analog for a “first timer.” My colleague Nathan Ingraham, however, approached the game with fresh eyes.

Nathan Ingraham, Senior Editor

As Aaron hinted, I’m a newbie to Valkyrie and VR gaming in general. Until last week, most of my VR experience came in the early days of the Oculus Rift’s development; I’ve played around with a few VR headsets at various events, but I haven’t had an experience that has felt like anything more than a tech demo or proof of concept.

Valkyrie feels like a polished, relatively complete experience. Even something as simple as the menu screen felt familiar. Like the kind of thing I might find playing a regular game. We don’t play games for their menus, though. This preview threw me right into a five-on-five space dogfighting deathmatch, and the game uses VR well right off the bat. The feeling of your ship taking off and blasting out of the launch tube into the vast expanse of space is a pretty wonderful intro, and then you have a few blissful seconds to look around the level before you run into your competitors and must start fighting to stay alive.

The biggest challenge was getting used to the fact that I actually could use my head to look around the world. I’m so used to using the right stick to move the “camera” that I kept hitting it to look around before remembering that I could just, well, look. Head-tracking is used in other ways beyond the obvious — one class of spaceship requires you to stare at an enemy ship to lock on before deploying targeted missiles, a convention that felt pretty natural. Another ship had a different head-tracked weapon that felt less precise. Moving your head in that instance only affected the aiming reticle for your machine gun, with no lock on. That was a bit trickier — enemy ships can move so fast and erratically that using head-tracked aiming felt very imprecise. This could definitely become more natural with more time and practice, but as a first-timer it wasn’t very intuitive.

In Valkyrie, there are three classes of ships — a well-balanced fighter, a heavy “tank” option and a ship focused on healing — and you can use the experience points you gain to upgrade both their capabilities and visual appearance. For example, you can add healing capabilities to the standard fighter, or add more tank-like armor to balance out the different classes. Beyond the standard deathmatch, there are a few different objective-based matches you can play. I tried a capture the flag-style match — there were three points to control and defend from attack. The developers say there will be more game modes, a good sign that Valkyrie will try to offer players more depth.

As someone who’s interested in VR gaming but doesn’t have much time to game, a multiplayer-only launch title isn’t exactly ideal.

Those alternate gameplay modes are going to be doubly important as there aren’t many single-player experiences to be found here. There are some standalone missions that serve as training exercises while fleshing out the story behind the world, and you can also check out levels in a combat-free exploration mode, but the majority of the game’s appeal is in multiplayer. For most people buying an Oculus Rift at launch, that probably won’t be a problem. If you’re investing in one of the first consumer-ready VR products, you’re likely a pretty serious gamer.

As someone who’s interested in VR gaming but doesn’t have as much time to game as he’d like, though, a multiplayer-only launch title isn’t exactly ideal. I was, to put it bluntly, not good at EVE: Valkyrie, and I got the feeling there’s a reasonably steep learning curve. While I’d certainly improve with time, I could easily see a situation in which I was nearly always outclassed by other players who simply have more time to master the game’s nuances. But that’s why I don’t play a lot of multiplayer games in general, and Valkyrie is no different.

Aaron Souppouris, Senior Editor

Nathan’s experience mirrors mine — there’s a definite learning curve to using your head to aim — but after 20 minutes or so the game felt so much richer because of it. I’ve been sold on Valkyrie for a long time now. It’s definitely not going to enthrall everyone, but it’s still a great showcase for the Rift. Why? Because it’s so familiar.

Some of the most compelling experiences are those that can track the motion of your full body, which only Valve and HTC can offer (for now) with the Vive. But as impressive as these demos are, the vast majority of gamers aren’t going to throw down hundreds of dollars for unproven concepts. They want games. And although it looks more like a space sim, Valkyrie really takes all the hooks that make huge game series like Call of Duty so popular and transposes them to VR.

As it’s a multiplayer title, Valkyrie has the potential to stick around for months and months, provided the community takes to it. And although you can play for hours, a typical Valkyrie match is over in minutes. That gives players plenty of opportunity to put their Rifts down — I still find more than half an hour in a headset overwhelming.

I’ve been sold on Valkyrie for a long time now. It’s definitely not going to enthrall everyone, but it’s still a great showcase for the Rift.

Talking about today’s announcement, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said Valkyrie “perfectly captures to the promise of immersive gaming,” adding that “multiplayer space dogfights is the ultimate VR thrill.” That’s mildly hyperbolic, but the game is definitely pretty, and it’s a lot of fun.

A single game isn’t enough, though. Oculus needs a broad range of equally high quality titles if it wants to persuade millions to buy Rifts. It’ll also need to cater to more diverse tastes. Case in point: My favorite VR game so far has been Ustwo’s Land’s End, a gentle puzzle game that’s available on Samsung’s Gear VR.

Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey modeling the consumer Rift.

To that end, Oculus was quick to assert that there will be “many titles” that launch alongside the Rift — Valkyrie is just the one that comes with the headset. Although Oculus says “the Eve: Valkyrie bundle is coming exclusively to Rift in Q1,” Valkyrie itself is not an exclusive. It’s coming to PlayStation VR, and CCP confirms it’s a launch title for Sony’s headset, which is scheduled to arrive at some point next year.

We don’t know how much the Rift will cost. We don’t know exactly when it’ll launch. We don’t know if every early VR adopter will take to Valkyrie. But we do know that, come day one, it’ll be their first entry point into the next phase of gaming.

Image credits: CCP (Eve:Valkyrie screenshots); Bloomberg / Getty (Palmer Luckey portrait)

Take a trip through the minds behind ‘Psychonauts’

Cult classic Psychonauts getting a crowd-funded sequel was perhaps the biggest news out of this past weekend’s second annual PlayStation Experience. But what about the game that came before it? The one that’s celebrating its 10th birthday this year? That’s where “The Color of the Sky in Your World” comes in. It features a who’s who of Double Fine employees past and present as they talk about the process of making the game, including creative director Tim Schafer and producer Greg Rice.

The Psychonauts we know started as an idea for Full Throttle where the protagonist from that game would take peyote, go into the desert and have a sort of vision quest inside his own mind. LucasArts, being a family company even before Disney closed it down, wasn’t about to let that happen, so Schafer shelved the idea.

Psychonauts 2 backer missions are live! And y’all already unlocked ep 1 of this awesome Psychonauts retrospective: https://t.co/n2NoJ9w2Im

— Greg Rice (@GregRicey) December 9, 2015

A programmer later misremembered that and brought it back up to Double Fine’s creative director asking whatever happened to the game idea Schafer had about going into other people’s heads. “Wait, that’s much better,” he recalls in the video embedded below. Another scene finds Schafer going through an old notebook full of rough, hand-written notes and sketches born of him sitting in his apartment in a bathrobe after leaving Lucasarts. It’s incredibly cool stuff.

The documentary’s actually a kind of mini stretch goal, and this first episode was unlocked for backers reaching a certain set of milestones, or “Psi Missions” in the funding campaign’s parlance — it’s similar to the tasks Bloodstained gave its backers to incentivize additional in-game features.

The doc’s being produced by the same company that chronicled the making of Double Fine’s last crowdfunded game, Broken Age, and it’s absolutely chock full of insight into how the game was made. The first episode clicks in at just over 18 minutes long, so viewing via Apple TV or Chromecast might be your best bet.

Source: Double Fine Productions (YouTube)