Steam Gifts is a system set up in Steam to allow you to trade games with other users of the service, therefore both getting a game that you want and everyone’s happy.

Unfortunately there’s been a nasty little bug in the system that scammers have been exploiting to get games for nothing. Simply if the payment is declined for the game you traded for, you lose that game not the scammer while the scammer makes off with the game you traded to them and paid for. Basically it’s not good and so Valve have changed the rules a little bit. Now any game in your inventory set aside for trading can only be traded 30 days after purchase, which gives plenty of time for checks to be sure the payment method won’t be declined. This also means that legitimate trades that get hit with this payment declined issue will no longer happen either, which is good for all.

Valve said: “We’ve made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We’re hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser’s payment method.”

The rule only applies to trading though, so if you want to buy and gift a game to a friend of family member for the holidays this new rule won’t be there to trip you up and stop you sending them your gift.

Paypal have been sending round an e-mail to their customers, and for PC gamers it’s something to be interested in. If you use Steam that is, as many do.

The e-mail contains details of of Steam’s upcoming Autumn sale, and according to it, it will commence this Wednesday – the 26th and will run through until the beginning of the next month ending on Monday December 1st.

The e-mail itself was an advertisement for PayPal as a medium for buying up Steam Wallet codes:

If you wanted an excuse to buy some games for yourself soon, or you were hoping to get friends and family digital copies of games for the upcoming present-giving holiday that is Christmas this is your chance to get some good deals.

Remember to wait for the discount to be big before you commit to buy!

If you were interested in medieval hack n slash game Chivalry: Medieval Warfare when it was released but haven’t gotten around to purchasing again, eyes up. This weekend the game is free to play on Steam.

There is also a sale on the game, the 4-pack and the complete edition which includes the Deadliest Warrior expansion that lets you play as something other than one of the various forms of medieval knight available; for example a samurai or a Spartan. all of these are currently selling for a massive 75% off and with Steam that’s the discount you’re often told to wait for in the big sales.

For those of you who don’t know, Chivalry is a game where teams fight each other with weapons such as swords, bows and other things. There are arenas, death matches and castle sieges to play, which gives a nice rounded choice of play. Also, it’s possible to remove limbs from enemies. That’s cool.

Steam’s Early Access program has been going for about a year and a half right now, and since then although a great many games has passed through it that otherwise would not have… it’s gotten a bit of a reputation for letting some developers get away with selling an unfinished game to customers and then never finishing the game. And that’s just the surface, the rabbit hole sometimes goes much deeper with some infamous games and even lead to them being removed from Steam entirely (*coughthewarzcough*).

Valve has always wanted to be hands-off with the entire thing, not wishing to interfere with the process but it seems that enough is enough. Valve are now setting in place some rules and guidelines for Early Access developers, and the rules at the very least are etched in stone.

First Valve defines what an Early Access game is by saying that it’s a chance to “invite customers to get involved with your game as you develop” and get feedback that will allow for the game to be developed to best fit with what the audience is looking for. But they also note that “When you launch a game in Steam Early Access, there is an expectation by customers that you will continue development to a point where you have what you consider a ‘finished’ game”.

There are three concrete rules that need to be adhered to now, that are as follows:

• Developers need to make it clear on any third-party sites they use to sell Steam keys that the game is not in a completed state. This means that they must include the Early Access branding and a link to Steam’s Early Access FAQ.
• Developers should avoid making promises about the future, such as release dates and additional content. They can talk about plans but try not to make it sound like they will definitely happen – “Customers should be buying your game based on its current state, not on promises of a future that may or may not be realized.”
• Steam Early Access titles should not be made available for purchase on Steam any later than it is made available elsewhere. The game should also be made available for a reasonable price.

There are also a set of guidelines, which are more like a checklist of mistakes past Early Access Developers have made in the past:

• Don’t launch in Early Access if you can’t afford to develop with very few or no sales.
• Make sure you set expectations properly everywhere you talk about your game.
• Don’t launch in Early Access without a playable game (tech demos don’t count as playable games)
• Don’t launch in Early Access if you are done with development.

Sometimes it takes things going wrong to finally set them right, and things must have gone wrong to make Valve go against their typical hands-off policy with regards to Steam. Here’s hoping that the new rules and guidelines will cut down on Early Access issues and those who deliberately exploit the system will now be dealt with by Valve for breaking rules that have finally been set.

Five Nights at Freddy’s was a bit of a surprise hit. It got the attention of a number of prominent Let’s Players on Youtube, and from there the game’s popularity just exploded. It could be called a good example of why Let’s Plays and Youtube have become very effective tools in getting a game out there to a wide audience. The sequel was announced back in September and Scott Cawthon has been releasing teaser images and a trailer since then. A demo was released on November 10th and we were told that we could expect to see the game released on Christmas at the earliest…

… Yeah, this is a game about murderous animatronics sneaking up on you as well as vague and sometimes misleading instructions being given to you; so maybe it isn’t a surprise that the full game released last night on Steam, springing at you with the sudden shock of one of its antagonists. Even better, the person in-game giving you that sometimes misleading information is actually voiced by Cawthon… how’s that for weirdly meta?

Anyway, to the game itself and you find yourself as the night guard for the newly reopened Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. Once again you aim to survive five nights, six hours long each, and keep away or fend off the place’s animatronics who for some reason would dearly love to forcefully make you one of them.

The bad news first, the first game had four main animatronics and one easter egg one (who was fairly easy to deal with). This game has not only those four, but their ‘re-designed’ versions (the ‘Toy’ animatronics), as well as a balloon vendor child animatron, the easter egg and… well, something that isn’t an animatronic and you really do not wish to meet in the dark hallways after hours. That means you’re dealing with eleven antagonists in this game, although you will probably not have to deal with all of them at once until you get late in the game. Add to that one of the trailer’s boasts – no doors. This time you can’t shut them out, and they will enter your office and get up close and personal.

So how do you beat them? The good news is that this time the management has kept the power on overnight, although you do have a flashlight you use to light up rooms and the corridor outside your office and that does have a power limit. Also, if you find that they’re getting too close for comfort you have a spare Fazbear head to slip on which will fool most of the animatronics and make them leave, although it doesn’t work on all of them. There’s also a music box that can be wound up remotely from one of the cameras that will keep the one antagonist you really don’t want to meet locked away, so you need never deal with them.

If you’ve got the stomach for it, or just have been looking forward to the game you can buy it on Steam now for £5.59/$7.99.