Epic Games announced in a Wednesday blog post that a preview build of its new Epic Games Store launcher is available for download, claiming it is faster than Steam in several areas. By Epic's own admission, the launcher was "vibe coded."
Epic says it intends to bring Fortnite to Linux, but first it is rebuilding Easy Anti-Cheat, and will launch the game via the Epic Games Launcher once EAC Linux v2 works with a critical mass of distro maintainers. Epic says the Steam Deck does not currently support the new EAC Linux v2 solution and that it is talking with Valve, while game security engineering director Rick Deist said Epic is investigating compatibility with Steam Deck and SteamOS devices. Epic has also released a new Epic Games Store client that includes a Linux version for the first time.
Total War: Shogun 2 Complete Edition, released on October 13, has drawn 82 percent negative reviews on Steam in the last 24 hours, with players citing poor performance, old and new bugs, broken mod support, graphical issues, and alleged undisclosed AI upscaling of unit cards. Sega also delisted all previous versions from Steam and raised the price, while the install size grew from 3.85GB to 45GB. Kotaku compared original and new images, found lost detail, and has asked Creative Assembly about AI use without a reply yet.
Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, apologized in an official blog post for the performance of Facepunch's s&box, saying he is ashamed and embarrassed by its reviews and that selling it as an engine and development experience was the core mistake. Since its April release, s&box has sat at 47 percent positive reviews on Steam with roughly 500 daily players, while Garry's Mod still draws nearly 30,000 concurrent players a day. He plans to bring the sandbox mode to parity with Garry's Mod and beyond with more NPCs, vehicles and first-class multiplayer, drop Facepunch's own backend for Steam Workshop, and move the game from $10 to free-to-play before the end of the year, with existing buyers receiving exclusive Steam inventory items.
Valve has officially ended the Index VR headset and is selling off remaining stock at a discount. Digital Foundry reported the news and linked to its article.
SteamDB shows Valve's Steam storefront hit a new concurrent player record on Sunday with more than 43.5 million users, over 14 million of whom were in-game at the same time, also a record. This marks the second time the platform has surpassed its own peak this year, after previously hitting 42 million concurrents in January.
Steam hit an all-time concurrent user record of 43,505,724, the third time this year the figure has been broken and the first time it passed 43 million in the service's 23 years. Of those, 14.5 million were actually in-game, also a record. Valve is likely to make $20,000,000,000 this year.
Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams says he has never been tempted to use generative AI in the game, calling AI-written code bloated and saying you can tell a vibe-coded game when your computer fan starts spinning. He notes he has worked with traditional AI for decades but now avoids the term entirely, and says only platform pressure from Microsoft could force him toward generative AI.
Valve has released the CAD files for the Steam Frame for free, giving modders the material to build their own parts. The release covers the light blocker, head strap, battery housing, facial interface, core module and controllers, and documents how to use the expansion port Valve calls the auxiliary port. Valve has confirmed it is working on an upgraded head strap with interchangeable batteries and off-ear speakers, described as coming soon.
Valve just dropped the Steam Frame's CAD files for free https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/here-come-the-weird-and-wonderful-mods-for-the-steam-frame-as-valve-drops-the-full-cad-files-for-free/
For the second time this year, Steam has set a major new concurrent user record
Steam hit a new concurrent user record of 43,505,724 on Sunday, the highest in its 23-year history, with over 14 million of those users in-game. It marks the second time this year Valve's platform has broken its own record, following over 42 million concurrent users in January. Recent launches including free-to-play MMO Aion 2 and a major Deadlock update helped drive the surge.
For the second time this year, Steam has set a major new concurrent user records
Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a 1987 arcade game that never received an official PC port, appeared on Steam on September 28 under publisher Retro Maniac with the name misspelled as "Wonderboy." Original composer Shinichi Sakamoto called the port illegitimate and noted it is unavailable in Japan, while the listing is said to be a ROM running in the MAME emulator with the Sega logo removed. The page remained live as of the article.
Steam hit a new all-time record today with 43.5 million concurrent users.
Easy Fox's DMV simulator Teach My Little Sister How To Drive uses an AI chatbot as the student sister players instruct to pass her exam. A Steam page update says demo players grew more than twentyfold over the past month, pushing operating costs above $1,000 a day and forcing the team to take out a bank loan, a cost it says will factor into the final price. The four-person team says it hopes to keep the demo running but may close it earlier than expected before release, a decision it has not yet made.
As of October 1, Valve has given developers access to frame rate data reported by Steam Deck users, showing what percentage of sessions run at each frame rate. The data is only from users who opt in, and Valve claims a majority of Steam Deck players have opted in. Developers can use it to adjust graphical options, though it currently only applies to Verified games and can't be used in the verification process.
Steam Deck compatibility could be about to get much better https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/handheld-gaming-pcs/valve-is-telling-devs-how-well-their-games-actually-run-on-steam-deck-with-real-world-data/
Christopher B. Didriksen, a student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, based his Master's thesis on a biometric system that identifies Counter-Strike 2 players by their mouse and keyboard movements. In a dataset of more than 1,000 players, keyboard use identified the right player 98% of the time, and the method found unreported smurfs. He proposes the system could work alongside Valve Anti-Cheat and Trust Factor, and his thesis received an A.
Two more Leisure Suit Larry games are getting delisted from Steam in October. Larry Laffer's latest adventures are about to disappear from the platform.
Denuvo has asked a California federal court for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve, and Reddit for information on the username voices38, the person it believes is behind multiple cracks. In September, Denuvo filed a DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit accusing voices38 of bypassing its technology on 26 games in a way that undermines how Denuvo works. Denuvo's lawyers admit they do not know whether voices38 is an individual or a group, and a judge must now decide whether the subpoenas can proceed.
AMD has confirmed plans to bring FSR 4 upscaling to the Radeon APUs used in handheld PCs, via both new APUs with native FSR 4 support and a lightweight version for older integrated graphics, both targeted for the end of 2026. RDNA 3-based handheld chips were already intended to get FSR 4 this year, but AMD has previously said RDNA 2-based Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED support will take until 2027. FSR 4 offers sharper visuals than FSR 3.1 at the cost of a smaller performance boost.
Denuvo has asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit to determine the real identity of the cracker it is suing, voices38. The complaint lists 26 games, saying voices38 bypassed Denuvo Anti-Tamper, including Resident Evil Requiem, Stellar Blade, Black Myth Wukong, Pragmata and Hogwarts Legacy. Denuvo says Discord did not reply to its earlier request, while Valve and Reddit said their privacy policies prevented them from sharing the information without legal backing. Separately, Tom's Hardware reports that a group called DenuvOwO, which released cracks for dozens of Denuvo-affected games, has disbanded, reportedly citing the court case.
Valve updated the CS Major Supplemental Rulebook after several organizations moved from the Europe to the Asia VRS to improve their Major chances. The new rule requires a roster to have not appeared in another region's VRS list in the preceding three calendar months to be eligible for a regional assignment, so any region change takes three months to take effect. Valve told HLTV the change applies to the Singapore Major and that teams which swapped regions ahead of it are disqualified from the Major run unless they reach out and find a solution.
Alinea Analytics estimates Valve could make $20 billion this year from Steam game sales alone, including $1.7 billion in September 2026, $5.5 billion in Q3, and $16.5 billion so far this year. Steam takes a 30 percent cut of every sale, and with 20,000 games launching on the store each year, the article argues Valve should reduce that cut, create a developer panel, and curate the store in-house.
Facepunch founder Garry Newman responded to s&box criticism in a lengthy YouTube comment, saying he doesn't like giving up on things and is stubborn. Creator Eridium criticized the game's "citizen" character models, low-quality AI content flooding the platform, and Facepunch's lack of community outreach. The UGC platform, billed as a Garry's Mod successor, has struggled in its first five months on the market.
On its FY 2026 earnings call, Micron said memory demand will exceed supply in 2027 and 2028, with industry tightness greater than in 2026 and no line of sight to when supply and demand will rebalance. The company said it has already sold most of the memory it expects to produce next year at much higher prices than in 2026, and that new factories coming online in 2028 will not immediately improve availability or lower prices. Rising memory and storage costs have pushed Microsoft, Apple, Valve, Sony and Nintendo to raise hardware prices, while Micron and two other major RAM makers face a class action alleging they fixed supply and prices.
Alinea Analytics estimates Steam generated $1.7 billion in September 2026, up 13% year over year and its best September to date. The firm's head of market analysis, Rhys Elliott, said Steam's Q3 revenue reached $5.5 billion, up 12%, bringing the 2026 total to $16.5 billion so far versus $14.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025, with full-year revenue on track to pass $20 billion for the first time. Among September releases, Wardogs was estimated at $86.9 million on Steam, alongside Onimusha: Way of the Sword, The Blood of Dawnwalker, Bodycam and EA Sports FC27.
Valve announced it will change how games get discovered on Steam during sales and promotions, moving from a manually curated calendar of fixed front-page slots to dynamic, personalized recommendations based on user preferences and purchase history. Valve said preliminary experiments produced up to 10 times as many games appearing per day in the Discounts & Events section, with measurable increases in store page visits and wishlist additions. Valve has paused curated placements in Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals and Daily Deals, and the change is set to roll out in early 2027.
Valve is updating Steam's Discount & Events section, moving from manual, calendar-based placements to a more dynamic and personalised system to improve discoverability. Valve said the shift lets it display ten times more games daily and has produced increases in store page visits, wishlists and cart additions, with the new system to be fully implemented in early 2027 and new tools coming for developers. Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender said the section, once weighted toward best-selling games, is now showing indie titles with under a hundred to a few thousand reviews, with some small games going from near-zero visits to a few thousand.
People Playground developer Mestiez said on September 22 that the Steam Workshop had been disabled hours earlier because of another malicious mod, calling this one especially bad. Players who used mods between 6PM and 8PM CEST on September 21 are urged to run antivirus scans, delete all mods and avoid launching the game until the developer says it is safe. According to Kotaku, this is the second malware attack via a Steam Workshop mod on the game in a year, after a similar incident in February.
Denuvo filed a DMCA complaint on 14th September in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against a person or group called voices38, accusing them of circumventing anti-tamper technology on 26 games including Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages. Denuvo does not hold the copyrights to those games and instead invokes the provision against bypassing digital locks, seeking damages and an injunction against removing anti-tamper software from any past, present or future game. Denuvo knows the cracker only through a Discord ID, a Reddit account and a few Steam profiles, naming the defendant as an unknown individual or entity alongside 10 other unnamed defendants; Torrent Freak suggests the filing is partly meant to let Denuvo subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for more information.