In an attempt to combat the creation of new accounts for phishing and spamming on Steam, Valve are changing the requirements for fully ‘activating’ a new account. Now in order to get access to things like the sending of friend requests and voting on Greenlight the account in question will need to have have purchases of about $5.

Before then all accounts are created as ‘limited’ accounts barring them from sending friend requests, chatting with other players, voting on Greenlight and Steam reviews and more. The $5 barrier can be passed in a few ways though, the most simple being the straight purchase of a game worth that much or more. Other ways include gifting a game of that value or more to another player or by adding $5 to their Steam Wallet.

In a recent post on the ruleset change, Valve wrote: “We’ve chosen to limit access to these features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing. Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam.”

Grand Theft Auto V for PC launches next week, and we’ve gotten a peek at the physcial copy which comes in a box set containing 7 DVDs. Those that have been following GTT V will be aware that the game clocks in at a hefty 65 gb. DVDs have long been the medium of choice for PC games, but this would seem to indicate that games are getting a bit to large for DVDs these days.  Interestingly, a Dual Layer DVD holds about 8.5 gb, meaning that 7 of them would hold 59.5 gb of data. So it seems likely that even those who purchase the physical addition will still be looking at a hefty download before they can play.

Grand Theft Auto V releases world wide on PC on April 14th and is available for digital pre-load now from Steam and the Rockstar Warehouse.

No doubt, many of you saw PredictedCyborg’s article on the deficiencies in Dead Or Alive 5: Last Round’s PC port. I’ve checked the game out, and now bring you my video first impressions.

Be warned, the following video contains: Jiggle Physics, Rage, Cursing, Boobs, Rage, Shitty Textures, and Rage AND NO F###### ONLINE MULTIPLAYER.

Dead or Alive players have already had some reason to be irritated at the developers of the latest installment of the game series. About a month ago modders of the game were warned to tweak their game in a “good moral and manner”, which drew some furor from some about limiting freedom of expression. Now though, the PC version has released on Steam and there seem to be a few bits missing.

Dead of Alive 5: Last Round has been released, but right now it lacks online multiplayer. That’s expected to arrive as a patch to the game in three months time, although publisher Koei Tecmo have said that until that update is added the game will be 10% off. Other issues include the variety of different graphical standards with it mostly being said to resemble the PS3 version, except the shadows which seem more like they come from the PS4 version apparently; as well as two stages being missing entirely – Crimson and the Danger Zone.

On the other hand it does support up to 4k resolution, but I’m not entirely sure that’ll make up for it. Especially as the consoles released their versions on February 20th and the PC fans were left waiting for over another month for this release, so they must be a bit disappointed that the release is lacking some parts – especially the online multiplayer function.

Let’s hope that these issues are fixed quickly, otherwise I don’t see the game doing too well on PC…

An earlier update that released this month means that the developers of the game Rust, Facepunch Studios, have made it so that every player of the game has now been assigned a permanent in-game appearance. Because it’s coded to your Steam ID, every character created on your account will look exactly the same.

Facepunch founder Gary Newman said that the decision was because it’s “just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. Everyone now has a pseudo unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face. It’s actually tied to your steamid.” He does say though that there’s a lot of work to still be done and that they would be adding more combinations so that character faces might still end up changing.

However it’s not gone down well with everyone, especially those who liked being able to customise their characters. Quite a few are hoping that future updates will bring the ability to add scars or tattoos on top of the parts that won’t be able to change, or will add in the ability to have female characters. Others have actively looked for ways to change their characters.

Newman hopes that this idea will diversify the game, adding in characters of races who are less represented in gaming and reminding people that everyone’s still human no matter what.