Somewhere deep inside Valve’s labyrinthine compound of Steam-sustaining tubes, wires, and pipes, somebody is thanking their lucky stars for Artem Moskowsky. The self-described “bug hunter” came across a glitch that allowed him to generate thousands of free keys for any game on Steam. A lesser person might have kept…

Following a series of offensive remarks made by professional Dota 2 players recently, the game’s creator Valve has published a blog post condemning the behavior. In keeping with the company’s traditional approach of remaining mostly hands-off, however, it leaves the responsibility for sanctioning players strictly with…

Nikhil ‘forsaken’ Kumawat is a professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player who was caught cheating at a tournament last weekend. In a video that went viral, he was seen trying to close an aim-assist program open on his computer mid-match Now banned for five years from any Esports Integrity…

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is, to hear people (including Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo) tell it, pretty good, despite some questionable narrative decisions. Last week, however, it committed a crime that some Steam users decided couldn’t be forgiven: a 34 percent off sale. Cue the review bombs.

Valve’s latest update for Dota 2 changes how the free-to-play MOBA’s loot boxes work. It now discloses the odds for the rare items that have a chance of dropping in each box, following in the footsteps of other companies amid growing public concerns over loot boxes’ similarity to gambling.

Does an overtly low-budget game in which a controversial politician smacks down black and gay people count as “straight up trolling” by Valve’s new anything-goes standards? Is it an effort to “incite and sow discord”—which Valve also recently said can be disqualifying? These are the questions surrounding Bolsomito 2K18…

It’s a new era for Steam—or so Valve says. So long as it’s not “illegal, or straight-up trolling,” Valve will allow any game on the service. It’s implemented new filtering tools to drive the point home and also ensure that there’s not heaping piles of porn lying around everywhere. However, in the past few weeks,…

Valve’s card game Artifact is coming out in November. Recently, the Artifact Twitter account has been tweeting out designs for some of the cards alongside explanations of how they work. On September 26, that included a card called “Crack The Whip,” the text of which begins “Modify a black hero...” Today the name of…

Nearly 200,000 Steam users play PC games with SNES controllers. That’s the most surprising factoid from Valve’s data about controllers. Xbox 360 controllers are most used (27.2 million), while Xbox One and PS4 are nearly neck-and-neck (11.5 million and 12.2 million). The Steam controller, at 1.5 million, remains…

Beginning on September 25, a moderation team at Valve “will start reviewing reported discussion posts in all game hubs on Steam.”

If you were hoping to spend your weekend not with Spider-Man or Lara Croft, but instead with the outerwear-despising anime girls of the long-awaited “100 percent uncensored” Steam visual novel Negligee: Love Stories, I’m not gonna judge. But I am gonna tell you that even though it’s now out on Steam, you still might…

Things were looking dicey for a little while, but it seems like Valve is set to start allowing uncensored adult games onto Steam. Well, some of them, anyway—starting with Dharker Studio’s lingerie-centric visual novel, Negligee: Love Stories.

Steam has some issues. Valve says it’s working on fixing them, and as part of a progress update today, it finally took aim at the biggest one of all: Naz—I mean, constant age gates that never stop popping up no matter how many times you assure Steam you’re not two years old.

There are two things in this world that Valve evidently loves more than anything: hands-off approaches and the invisible hand of the market. And wouldn’t you know it: DOTA 2 card game Artifact is gonna have plenty of both.

Tournament underdogs OG won this year’s Dota 2 International after a tense five game series against higher ranked rivals LGD. Victory must have felt especially sweet for the team’s skipper, Johan “N0tail” Sundstein, the only player who has been on the team since its original formation three years ago.

The “Mobility Mod” for Half-Life 2 gives Gordon Freeman access to a range of new powers, the coolest being the ability to jump on an enemy’s head to kill them and to get up there with some very fancy wall-running.

The International 2018 ends tomorrow. By day’s end, over $25 million will be divided up among 18 teams from around the world with the lion’s share, $11.1 million, going to first place. Whoever that turns out to be at this point, though, will be a team almost nobody saw coming. The tournament for Valve’s action…

James Cox was finally feeling optimistic about his game’s chances on Steam. Last year, his horror-inspired exploration of what it’s like to look at porn for the first time, You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter, got booted from Valve’s walled garden, but then, earlier this year, Valve said it was getting rid of all the…

At Valve, everything happens in Valve Time—even fans learning to appreciate new games, apparently.