steam-achievements posts

The Steam PC/Mac game download service has now surpassed the 30 million active user mark, according to a new press release from its owner Valve today. While Valve is notorious for keeping specifics about the numbers of games sold on Steam to itself, today it revealed that it has seen sales growth of over 200 percent in the last 12 months via Steam.

Valve also revealed that it has recorded a 178 percent growth in Steam user accounts over the past 12 months. Over six million users access Steam each day, according to Valve, with peak simultaneous users going over the three million mark. In order to meet the increased demand, Valve has improved Steam's infrastructure to run at 400 Gps. Steam now has over 1,200 games in its library. Over 200 of them use Valve's Steamworks game development tools (Steam achievements, matchmaking, Steam Cloud, etc). Over 100 million save files now use the Steam Cloud service.

This patch updates the retail release of Borderlands to v1.31. It adds support for the Logitech LCD screens found on the G13 gameboard and G15/G19 keyboards. The patch also enables Steam achievements for the game. A separate patch is available for the German release.

Download Borderlands v1.31 Patch (191 MB)
Download Borderlands v1.31 German Patch (194 MB)
Check out Borderlands downloads

A few days ago, Gearbox Software's head man Randy Pitchford used his Twitter page to hint that more downloadable content for its firstp person shooter-RPG Borderlands was going to be announced "soon". Now comes word that the game may be getting Steam achievements as part of that update.

While the PC version of the game shipped in 2009 without Steam achievements, folks on the Steam forums today have spotted a whole set of achievements when viewing the game in their Steam library. Big Download has also confirmed those achievements are visable on the Steam client but are not yet in the game. We've emailed Gearbox to get more info on these achievements and if they are tied into the promised new DLC content for Borderlands.

[Via Shacknews]

Update: Pitchford confirmed to Big Download via email that Steam achievements are coming to Borderlands, saying, "Chris Pickett at Gearbox Software carried this torch and I'm really excited about his work there (with a bunch of other awesome people) to continue to support the game."

Update 2: The Steam achievements are now officially in the game via a new patch. In addition the patch adds support for the LCD screen in Logitech's G13 gameboard and the G15/19 keyboards

As promised on Tuesday Valve has now released the long awaited Mac port of their 2004 first person shooter classic Half-Life 2 via their Steam client In addition Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 have also been released for the Mac. Also, both the PC and Mac ports of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 finally include Steam achievements for the first time and sport some graphical improvements based on the latest Source Engine (which Episode 2 already has). Finally all three games now support Steam Cloud which allows players to save games online and use them on any PC with a Steam client.

To celebrate all three games get a big 30 percent off sale for a limited time. Half-Life 2 is now priced at just $6.99 while Episodes 1 and 2 are on sale for $5.59 each. Finally The Orange Box which has Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (coming to the Mac "soon) is priced at $20.99

As hinted by Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling in a recent "tweet" today Activision and Valve announced that Modern Warfare 2 has become the latest and perhaps highest profile third party PC game to embrace Steamworks. Valve's PC community and development tools will be used in the PC port of Infinity Ward's first person shooter.

Modern Warfare 2's use of Steamworks will include having Steam auto-update the game (no more manual patches) along with using Valve's VAC system for multiplayer anti-cheating (previous games in the Call of Duty series have used Punkbuster). Modern Warfare 2 will also use Steam Cloud to store save games and multiplayer persistence and allow PC gamers to play via those save files from any PC with Steam installed. Finally Modern Warfare 2 will contain 50 Steam achievements that can be unlocked while playing the game.

Now if we can get Infinity Ward to also offer PC gamers dedicated servers and SDK mod tools for Modern Warfare 2, like Valve does for all its games, we'd be all set.

If you like bragging about how much you have "achieved" while playing games, Steam has just set up something for you to show others that, yes, you unlocked that cool achievement in Left 4 Dead while most others players have not. This also applies to any game that uses Steam achievements.

You can check out the full list of games that currently have Steam achievements which include Portal, Team Fortress 2, World of Goo, Zeno Clash, Unreal Tournament III, Braid, Empire: Total War and many others. In fact the newly released Plants Vs. Zombies just added 12 Steam achievements. Signing up to the Steam community will let you see the percentage of players who have acquired each achievement within all of those titles.