That’s a huge number, and a huge chunk of their 35 million strong userbase (based on active users). A lot of this is helped along by the sales which boosted sales numbers and helped generate a lot of game-time for people who otherwise may have gotten bored playing TF2 (which is, of course, free). However a large chunk of this concurrent usage is down to Skyrim players.

The strange thing is that I imagine this number would have been bigger had EA stuck with Valve and put Battlefield3 on the platform as well.

One huge boost for this kind of news is that it proves that PC gaming (regardless of your platform-of-choice) is defiantly hitting back at consoles with an iron fist!

[source]

With that in mind, I just noticed something rather odd about Steam on Mac. With the current sales I’ve been buying quite a bit of content. My Mac has two hard drives in it, one that boots up into Windows and my main one being OS X.

Somehow, when buying content exclusive to the Windows platform, despite not being able to play them Steam has been downloading the content. For example all of the Oddworld games were downloaded but not launchable by the computer. It’s not so bad because I can just drag that content into the SteamApps folder on Windows and when I boot into that I can play away… but it’s still rather irritating that it would download these games in the first place. Steam even says “this game is unavailable for your platform”! Oddworld is probably not even a good example because the games aren’t that big… but it was trying to download Mass Effect 2, which is a huge game file!

It’s not on a par with world hunger or anything, but that’s a bit of a let down from my perspective looking at Valve as the all-conquering games distributor.

The new Steam sale is on, and after only one day it’s amazing already. Mass Effect 2 for €4.99? Yes please! Also, the Oddworld legacy is a mere €3.79… including Abes Odyssey!

There’s more to come as today’s offer ends in a few hours, but once more arrives we’ll update with any important or most excellent deals.

Initially the breach appeared to only affect the Steam user forums, but it appears now the scenario is much worse for Valve. The Steam database itself has been breached too, potentially allowing access to credit card and other sensitive data to the hackers.

“We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums,” he wrote in a user-wide IM.

“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,” the note pointed out. “Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely. 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.”

The forums are due to come back online soon but as Newell said above, it’s worth changing your Steam password just to be safe.

“I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologise for the inconvenience,” Newell concluded.

Us filthy Europeans will have to wait an extra day over our American counterparts for the PSN release, which will be on July 20th.

Check out the decidedly terrifying trailer below…

Alongside the typical retail release of the game, EA are also going to release digital copies of the game. The interesting fight here is that EA have been crabby at Valve about Steam, a digital distribution service by the makers of Half Life.

EA used to have their own such service for their own creations on PC which ultimately fell flat for being too buggy, not useful and too difficult to use. Now EA have a new service which is a better better as a client but also doesn’t necessarily act as a launcher for games, i.e. it can be closed when you play games.

EA then went ahead and released the names of retailers, both digital and bricks-and-mortar, for Battlefield 3. Steam isn’t there.

As said elsewhere, it’s nice that EA are taking the PC platform seriously by dedicating so much to it with this digital release platform and the fact that BF3 is set to shine primarily on PC rather then consoles. However, is it really beneficial on the whole to cut out Steam, giving it’s such a dominant platform?

This feels a lot like if Sony said DVD’s can’t be played on the PS3, because they have blu-rays. It just hurts them. Sure, those who want it will still go for it, but with enough conjecture and blog-o-sphere mud slinging, it could end up being a lot of negative press that just ends up taking away from EA’s sales. Having said that, EA might expect that and eventually come back to Steam – but anything they sold via Origin will just have made their wallets fatter anyway, because they take home 100% of the sales.

Get over to steampowered.com to grab the deals. Some of them will make you pee a little at the glorious cheapness.

This years deals run as a calendar, and you can see the deals into the future, culminating in a Mac sale on the 31st, featuring 125 titles. Civ IV will be €5, portal €3.50, and the megapacks are back! Go, grab your credit card, and go on a spree!

Videos like below were inspired by, and created by the mod…

Of course there was once a time when Garry offered his code for free – but given the success of it, a nominal fee for playing was added (€10). Still well worth the price of admission. Now consider Mac users have access to Steam – so the next logical step was to give them (us) dirty heathens access to the code. But not only that, in Mac tradition, the game is going cheap – half price, actually. So pick up Garry’s mod for a fiver, and tell us what you’ve done with it!

Check out the videos below…