Valve Announces Major Update for Steam
June 20, 2007, 10:27 am - Eric Twelker

Free Update Offers New Community Features for Connecting Gamers

June 20, 2007 -- This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing an advanced set of community features to more than 13 million gamers around the world.

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they've played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Free of charge, the new community features will be accessible via the Steam desktop client and via the web.

"Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we've wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We've got a long list of items that we're working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam."

This upgrade marks the largest extension to the Steam platform since its first commercial release in March 2004. In its three year history, Steam has defined the next generation online gaming platform delivering hundreds of games to millions of users with services such as Guest Passes, Automatic Updates, Free Weekends, and allowing gamers to access their games from any PC.

they have been working on this a while already - basically if you have ever used xbox live.. you'll know how it can match you up to players etc.. etc...

as valve are moving towards the xbox (and at somepoint will allow xbox live customers to play on normal css servers) they seam to be recreating all the needed features for this on steam.

as far as i can see - thats what it boils down to

The poor xbox users, unless they have that auto aim feature or a keyboard and mouse they are gonna get creamed by pc users

[KM-P]MasterBeef wrote:
The poor xbox users, unless they have that auto aim feature or a keyboard and mouse they are gonna get creamed by pc users

Heh you'd be surprised.. I used to play with a guy who used a controler in one hand and a mouse in the other.

if you practice long enough you soon become pretty proficient.

I'v been playing Halo for more than a year before I discovered CSS. U don't have an idea how accurate xbox players can be...I wish I could aim that good at PC, as they were on Xbox...

sv_autoaim 0

It's because Windows are bringing out WindowsLive, which is basically xboxlive in oyur PC, and you still have to pay for it. this is gonna be the wise man's platform for such activities.

wonder if they will post an API with it, could use it on site.