A group of modders from Russia is working on recreating Half-Life: Blue Shift, the second add-on to Valve’s iconic shooter. It’s based on the Black Mesa game, and now its first chapter is available for free download.

Theorycraft Games is a new studio formed by former developers of League of Legends, Halo, Dota 2, and Overwatch. They raised $37.5 million to make PvP titles.

Valve will have to unveil some of its private Steam information requested by Apple in a lawsuit against Epic Games.

Steam has just launched in China with the help from Perfect World. The store has now only 40+ games, including Valve’s own hits like CS:GO and Dota 2.

Five gamers filed an antitrust class action, accusing Valve of forcing developers to list the same prices for their games as on other stores. The suit alleges that it destroys the competition.

The European Commission has fined Valve and five publishers €7.8 million for breaching EU antitrust rules.

Valve might be gearing up for the merger of the Chinese and global versions of Steam. If it happens, many developers will no longer be able to sell games in China without the approval of the local government (currently only dozens of foreign titles are licensed a year).

Valve CEO says that because of remote work, the company’s productivity is only 50-75% of what it could have been.

Last week, Valve’s Index VR shot to No.1 on Steam best-selling list. The VR tech has reclaimed the top spot for the first time since it was sold out back in March around the release of Half-Life: Alyx.

A number of indie developers are removing their games from Steam citing Valve’s failure to address the Black Lives Matter movement. By no longer profiting from the store, these devs refuse to remain “complicit with their silence on hate” in favour of “white angry male gamers.”

Steam China has stealthily graduated to an alpha stage, according to WIN.gg.

Valve has rolled out a new experiment that will point players towards the next game they might want to play from their library.

The Half-Life: Alyx development team was the largest Valve had ever put together for a single game project.

Valve has rolled out a News Hub for Steam as the latest of its Steam Labs experiment.

Steam will now use machine learning to suggest games from your backlog. The same algorithm that is used by Interactive Recommender will look at your playtime across various titles and based on that will point you towards similar games.

Half-Life: Alyx launches in about two months for a number of PC VR devices. That the beloved IP would sell lots of Valve Index headsets was pretty clear from the get go.

Valve posted a bunch of its 2019 top games lists.

Valve’s store published the list of November’s highest-grossing new releases. There are 20 items on the list, including indie and AAA titles.