Valve have opened up the Steam Inventory for Steamworks developers to use, enabling them to use Valve’s tech to create and store items earned or bought within games. It also allows for players to use the Steam Marketplace to sell items to the rest of the community. Cool.

The inventory and marketplace have been around for a while, being the cornerstone of some of their most popular titles – most notably Team Fortress 2 and its huge collection of wearables/hats. Now it can be used for other games outside of Valve titles.

The announcement of the new service read: “With today’s Steamworks SDK update, we’ve released The Steam Inventory Service beta, a new feature available to developers with games or software on Steam. The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user’s inventory. With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items.”

Gearbox Software have officially announced the Homeworld Remastered Collection at PAX South today. It will feature a high-definition update to all the assets within the game, new voice-recordings for the cast who did the original voice acting and new cinematics that are updated in quality but stay true to the original cinematics’ themes and style. It will also include access to a new Homeworld Remastered Steam Multiplayer Beta, an attempt at combining both of the classic games into one platform for a wider variety.

Gearbox acquired Homeworld back in 2013 when they bid for it at an auction for the sale of assets that belonged to the then recently-defunct studio THQ. Both Paradox and Stardock had also been in the bidding for the IP. In those nearly two years Gearbox have set about giving the classic games an update and overhauled as much as they can while still attempting to stay true to the original games. That can mostly be seen in the decision to bring back as many of the original voice actors as possible, a move that will probably please fans of the original versions of these games. In fact, the fan community’s feedback had an effect on how the remaster was done.

“We received a lot of great feedback from the passionate Homeworld fan community, and we hope to deliver a game they – and new fans from around the world – can get lost in for countless hours to come.” said Brian Martel, CCO at Gearbox Software.

The release date is set for February 25th, but pre-orders will have a 15% discount to the price. Otherwise everyone who buys the Remastered Collection will get both Homeworld and Homeworld 2 as well as access to the Steam Multiplayer Beta.

That’s right folks, we have a copy of Evolve to give away via Steam key on release day, February 10th. To enter, just complete the form below. If you are reading this on the Forum the form will not appear, so use this link to view the contest on the site: https://www.sanitarium.fm/archives/7079

[contesthopper contest=”7075″]

You may submit the above form only once. Additional “social” entries can be obtained by sharing the contest via Facebook, Twitter or Google+ using the buttons displayed after the initial entry. Maximum one email entry and three social entries per person. Prize is ONE (1) Steam Key redeemable for a copy of “Evolve” using the Steam Client by VALVe; and redemption is subject to VALVe’s Terms and Conditions. Sanitarium.FM is not affiliated with Evolve, Steam or VALVe.

Just over a month ago Valve had to step in to help users who were becoming the victim of trades gone wrong when dodgy payments used to buy a game sometimes left one side of the trade with nothing after the game was revoked by Steam. Now they’re stepping in again to tackle another trade related issue, this time to do with malware clearing out accounts.

A new Captcha system is being put into place for all trade offers that go through Steam now, in an attempt to stop malicious programs that are designed to access users’ accounts and make trades on their behalf, thereby clearing out the account in question.

“We’re updating trading to include a captcha as part of confirmation process.” said Valve in an announcement about the change. “This is to prevent malware on users’ machines making trades on their behalf. We know it’s a bit of a hassle, and we don’t like making trading harder for users, but we do expect it to significantly help customers who are tricked into downloading and running malware from losing their items.”

It’s a nice step towards a more secure process, but unfortunately it seems its implementation has reset the trade system – cancelling all current and pending trade offers which has angered some users. Valve is looking for input on the system over on the Steam forums though so feel free to hop over there to have your say.

A new Steam beta client was rolled out yesterday. It contains an element that can be important for PC gamers, especially if you’re the sort to screencapture what you’re doing in an attempt to edit videos for Youtube.

The new feature is an FPS counter, which although small was something you could only previously do via a game’s built-in FPS counter, through a third-party program like FRAPS or various GPU addons/programs. Maybe you still prefer to use one of the previous methods if you’re used to them, but in case you’d like to try the Steam counter here’s the instructions to get it working for you by opting into the Steam client beta.

• Go into Steam, and click the “Steam” menu option in the top left.
• Go to “Settings”.
• In the settings menu, you should default onto the “Account” sub menu. Find the “Beta participation” section, and click the “Change” button.
• Here, you can choose to opt into the Steam client beta. Doing so will require you to restart the Steam client after a small update.