Valve Software’s Gabe Newell sent out a message to all Steam users around an hour ago warning about a hack into the database and the possible theft of personal information. Here’s the entire message:
Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.
We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.
We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.
We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.
I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
With The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched yesterday, the game is slated to be the biggest edition yet… so big that it will offer an infinite number of quests. That’s right: when Elder Scrolls XX is fresh and new and current/future hardware is incapable of supporting “retro” Skyrim gameplay, the fifth instalment will still offer something new each and every day.
Monday in a phone interview with Wired, game director Todd Howard said that the game’s Radiant quest system will keep new quests coming long after the main storyline is complete. In fact, the quests will be endless. “The vibe of the game is that it’s something that you can play forever,” Howard said. “The world is probably the one thing that sets [Skyrim] apart from other games. It feels really real for what it is … It’s just fun to explore.”
According to Howard, the Radiant quest system randomly generates new minor tasks based on the player’s progress. It will also toss out extra work for each of the game’s factions like the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild. Once the scripted quest lines for each group are completed, players can go to their respective hubs and pick up randomly generated missions like stealing gems or assassinating shopkeepers.
Of course, not everyone will want to endlessly steal jewels or collect herbs. However, Howard said that Radiant quests play into the game’s overall environmental storytelling: it opens up avenues to discover the world’s little secrets and bits of narrative. It may not be a massively multiplayer title, but the Radiant quest engine and the massive, virtual open world combined should make it feel like a persistent environment.
Howard said that Bethesda got its first taste of environmental storytelling with Fallout 3. After all, exploring a barren, post-nuclear wasteland isn’t exactly like strolling through a field of green grass and daisies. “With Fallout, it’s not as beautiful a world to everybody,” he said. “We had to find ways to make exploration of [a destroyed wasteland] interesting.”
The team cranked up the environmental tricks for Skyrim even though the landscape is more palatable. According to Howard, completing quests won’t be the most enjoyable aspect to the Radiant system: it will be discovering the little things along the way like a terrifying lighthouse or a bandit-infested fortress.
Activision Blizzard on Tuesday announced better-than-expected Q3 2011 net revenues and earnings, reporting that the company delivered GAAP net revenues of $754 million, as compared with $745 million for the third quarter of 2010. This gain was achieved via digital channels, accounting for more than 57-percent of the company’s total net revenues.
However in a conference call following the Q3 2011 results announcement, Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime admitted that World of Warcraft’s subscription count continues to fall, dropping from 11.1 million subscribers in June to 10.3 million in September — a 7 percent drop. The long-standing fantasy MMORPG saw a 300,000 drop in subscriptions in the six months prior, meaning that Blizzard has lost over a million customers in the first 9 months of 2011.
If you like to live on the bleeding edge of Nvidia driver freshness, then you will be happy to know that the GeForce R285 beta driver is now available with even more optimizations for Battlefield 3. Nvidia also promises that it adds SLI and 3D Vision profiles for Skyrim and other new titles.
Here’s the full list of new features in version 285.79
Includes several bug fixes and performance improvements for Battlefield 3:
Fixes cases of irregular performance (stuttering) primarily seen on DirectX 10 GPUs. The fix improves the performance of both DX10 and DX11 GPUs.
Fixes shadow map corruption seen with DirectX 10 GPUs.
Fixes cases of black corruption lines/triangles with DirectX 10 GPUs.
Fixes black screen during playback using Windows Media Center.
Added or updated SLI profiles for the following games:
Aion v3.0
Anno 2070
Assassins Creed: Revelations
Bastion
Need for Speed: The Run
Payday: The Heist
The Adventures of Tintin
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Added or updated the following 3D Vision game profiles:
Airline Tycoon 2 – Rated Fair
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations – Rated Good
Batman: Arkham City – Updated Rating To 3D Vision Ready
Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Rated Excellent
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Rated Excellent
FIFA 12 – Rated Good
Hard Reset – Updated Rating To 3D Vision Ready
inMomentum – Rated Fair
The Lord of the Rings: War In The North – Rated Good
Scientists said that research that included 491 12-year old boys and girls found the frequency of video game playing directly impacted their ability to draw pictures and write stories. However, the general use of cell phones, the Internet and computers was unrelated to creativity.
The result showed that boys played more games than girls – and boys preferred “games of violence and sports: while girls liked games “involving interaction with others”. The type of game did not have an impact on the level of gained creativity.
It was not clear what exactly triggered greater creativity in games, however, and researchers said that game designers should “identify the aspects of video game activity” that nurtures creativity.
“Once they do that, video games can be designed to optimize the development of creativity while retaining their entertainment values such that a new generation of video games will blur the distinction between education and entertainment,” said Linda Jackson, professor of psychology and lead researcher on the project.
MSU said that they used the Torrance Test of Creativity-Figural to assess the creativity of kids. The suite includes tasks such as drawing a picture from a curved shape, giving the picture a title and then writing a story about it.
The original Grand Theft Auto video game debuted for the Playstation in 1997, but it wasn’t until the power of the Playstation 2 arrived that we were introduced to the sandbox-style of gameplay that has made the GTA series so iconic. Part of what has made that sandbox style so appealing is the ability to jack any vehicle in the game and go joyriding across its ever expanding locales.
The last full-fledged GTA was the fourth installment that came out in 2008. It’s been a long time coming, but next year the game’s developers at Rockstar North will debut Grand Theft Auto V, which sets itself in a fictional and stylized version of the Los Angeles and Hollywood areas of California. The story is set around a father who moves to the area to start a new life, but as usual, his old one catches up with him.
Rockstar North debut the game’s first trailer today, and as usual, the selection of vehicles to steal, drive and use as tools for vehicular manslaughter are featured front and center. Check it out for yourself after the jump.
A new post on the Dota 2 blog announces that Valve are getting ready to start sending out mass beta invites. “We’ve just finished our first significant expansion of Dota 2 server capacity around the world,” says the post, “that means it’s time to kick this thing up a notch. Starting this week, we’ll be handing out Dota 2 in increasing volumes.”
If you’re interested in getting into Dota 2 early, Valve ask that you take a survey. Pasting steam://takesurvey/1/ into Firefox should get you there. If that doesn’t work, Valve recommends restarting Steam, too, if you haven’t in the last few days. The survey will take your machine’s specs and then ask you to fill in a questionnaire about your experience with the original DotA, including favourite heroes and average kills and gold earned per match.
To celebrate the expansion of the beta, Valve have also launched the Dota 2 comic, featuring an awesome giant rhino and the rotund salesman featured in the first Dota 2 trailer. He runs the gift shop selling magical items in the middle of the Dota 2 map. It’s a harder job than it looks.
This isn’t the first time EA’s Origin service has raised eyebrows (and ire) for its unflinchingly iron-fisted EULA. Now, though, the service is under fire in exciting new locales – primarily from German paper the Spiegel (via Eurogamer) – for allegedly granting EA the ability to access other EA programs without notifying users and giving “partners” free rein to collect information on “IP addresses, usage data, software, equipment, software usage and existing hardware peripherals” for marketing purposes. According to the Spiegel, these things may even violate German privacy laws.
EA, however, isn’t hurriedly thrusting any red hands behind its back. This, claims the publisher, absolutely isn’t what it looks like.
“We have updated the End User License Agreement of Origin, in the interests of our players to create more clarity,” EA Germany said in a statement. “Origin is not spyware. Neither do we use nor install spyware on the PCs of users.”
“We do not have access to information such as pictures, documents or personal data, which have nothing to do with the execution of the Origin program on the system of the player, neither will they be collected by us. EA takes the privacy of its users very seriously. We have taken every precaution to protect the personal and anonymous user data collected.”
To conclude, EA noted that its EULA sticks to the “industry standard” where privacy is concerned – but added that it’s certainly open to addressing any concerns the German government might have.
Even so, it always bears repeating: Actually read the EULA before clicking the “Why yes, you may harvest my healthy internal organs in the event of a global pandemic” button. It’s time-consuming, sure, but – much as I wish more elements of kindergarten carried over into the real world – there aren’t any takesies-backsies here.
During an interview with Eurogamer, Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime admitted that the free-to-play model infiltrating competitor MMORPGs like Age of Conan and Star Trek Online still isn’t a right fit for Blizzard’s own subscription-based revenue monster, World of Warcraft.
To some degree, the studio has already caved in by offering an unlimited “demo” with a level cap of 20 and other limitations. Yet there’s no sign that Blizzard will succumb to pressure from other games in the genre switching teams by offering a F2P option alonside its current subscription service.
“For us, and even for EA with the Star Wars game, I think that the value that you get for the $15 a month is just unmatched,” he told Eurogamer. “I don’t think you can get that amount of entertainment value anywhere. I’d put the $15 up against anything.”
He added that there’s currently an underlying, fundamental assumption in the industry that publishers and developers make more money by charging less… an assumption he claims isn’t true. “It doesn’t necessarily make for a better game,” he said. “I mean, everybody likes free… I think that definitely, players have seen a lot of really great quality free-to-play experiences, but I’m not sure it’s the best model for us right now.”
Sony Online Entertainment boss John Smedley said that he understands why some developers might choose the F2P model from the start, as gamers are more forgiving about the experience because they’ve paid absolutely nothing. Still, he believes that Star Wars: The Old Republic may be the last large-scale subscription-funded MMOG to enter the market.
“I think it is a very difficult market to compete in, I think it’s very expensive to make these games, especially if you’re expecting people to pay a monthly fee just to play the game,” he told Eurogamer.
“And so there are very few companies that can compete at that high level with those types of budgets. If you’re not charging anybody, they’re going to be a lot more forgiving about the experience they have.”
Valve Software’s Gabe Newell sent out a message to all Steam users around an hour ago warning about a hack into the database and the possible theft of personal information. Here’s the entire message:
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