Rockstar reveals new GTA Online details prior to next week's roll out

Ahead of next week's GTA Online launch, developer Rockstar Games took to its blog to outline what to expect come October 1st. The post goes to great lengths to establish that the entire experience is free -- unless you want to buy in-game currency with real money -- and incredibly you-centric. Feedback you provide by emailing or posting on the official forums will help shape the game. Where you spend your time and what you end up doing (Sports! Heists! Chaos!) in San Andreas will affect the direction the developers take with future content and how they tune the overall experience. However, while the entry answers a few questions it also creates some new ones. Specifically, we're curious about the company's use of "roll out" to describe GTA:O's release. An incremental approach is probably best considering the game's current server strains, but we're sure that's not what its some 16.5 million players will want to hear.

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Source: News in Hindi 

Valve unveils Steam Machines, a hardware beta for its living room game console

Valve announced Steam Machines today, a living room game console that launches at some point in 2014. The company also announced a hardware beta for its own version of the console; the beta starts this year. Today's news is the second of three planned announcements this week meant to expand the company's digital game distribution service, Steam. The company's issuing just 300 hardware prototypes in 2013 -- "free of charge, for testing" -- and you can enter to become one of those lucky 300 through your existing Steam account (an "eligibility quest" was added to Steam's quest page that will guide you through the process).

Valve says that a variety of "Steam Machines" -- the new name for the company's "Steambox," a living room gaming console for playing PC games -- will become available next year "made by different manufacturers," including Valve itself. The hardware beta, which we first told you about many moons ago, only includes Valve's version of the Steam Machine. All the machines will run SteamOS, the operating system that'll power Valve's big living room push (it was announced earlier this week). There aren't any specs given for the various devices. Valve says that, since there will be a few different options, there'll be "an array of specifications, price, and performance" when we learn more "soon." It sounds like the 300 beta testers can share their experience with the rest of us, though, as Valve's asking for loud, public feedback.

Apparently the beta will include "the nearly 3,000 games" that are available on Steam including the "hundreds already running natively on SteamOS." Everything else is streamable, says Valve. In terms of using a mouse-and-keyboard setup in your living room, Valve says that's an option, but "we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input."

Today's announcement is the second that further elucidates Valve's "Steambox" initiative; a program that's attempting to bring PC games to the living room, squarely aimed at competing with the big three entrenched game console manufacturers (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). Both Microsoft and Sony have new game consoles launching this year in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, respectively.

A new countdown for the Valve's third Steam announcement kicked off just as today's expired, leaving another 48 hours before the final piece of news. Sounds like a controller of some form is in the works for Friday, which we'll have here for you as soon as it goes live. 

Source: News in Hindi

Valve announces SteamOS, a new platform for playing PC games on TVs

PC game service operator and game development studio Valve announced SteamOS this afternoon, finally formalizing a PC gaming hardware project known as "Steambox" we've heard dribs and drabs about over the past few years. The OS will function on "any living room machine," and it also streams games from your Mac and PC, as well as offering media playback functionality. The OS seems to be multifunctional in this aspect, both acting as an operating system for living room-based machines directly connected to televisions, and offering streaming capability from computers outside the living room. "Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV," the announcement page says. The OS is free and built on Linux; it will be available "soon."

Valve says it's "achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level," with regards to streaming capability. "Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases." No specific developers are named, but a job posting from Crytek points at one suspect.

The project is intended to compete with traditional game consoles, and it seemingly evolves Steam's "Big Picture Mode" to that end (which isn't to say that service is going away). Valve specifically lists four new features as the pillars of SteamOS: in-home streaming, family sharing, music / TV / movies, and family options. Let's dive into those after the break. 

Source: News in Hindi

PlayStation 3 firmware update coming June 27th, promises to fix bricked systems

Are you one of the "small number" of folks with a PlayStation 3 that was bricked in this week's 4.45 firmware update? Though Sony's been aware of the issue since the update launched, apparently a fix isn't coming until June 27th -- that's nine days after 4.45 launched to an unsuspecting populace. The PlayStation Europe Twitter account announced as much this morning in a tweet. "We have identified the issue related to PS3 software update (4.45) that impacted a small number of PS3 systems earlier this week," the feed reads.

"A new system software update is planned to be released on June 27 that resolves that issue," it adds. There's also a bit of an apology, but that won't do much for the folks who are without their PlayStation 3 for the next six days. PlayStation's US arm also confirmed that the update will arrive in North America on the same date.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony

Via: The Verge
Source: Sony, @PlayStationEU