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.”

So, Bethesda is sending out invitations for its E3 showcase in June already. The image contained within it could hint at what franchises will be involved in any announcements

Characters featured include Wolfenstein’s BJ Blazcovicz, Doom’s Cyberdemon, a tallboy from Dishonored and others, but there doesn’t seem to be any signs of Fallout characters which could suggest that the Fallout 4 rumours are once again untrue. Sorry Fallout fans.

Of course, this could just literally be a piece of design that was whipped up for the invite and could mean absolutely nothing as far as what news will be covered. It could be that if there is any Fallout-related news that they’re keeping it very much under wraps until the time comes to reveal it to all with much fanfare.

Either way, their showcase is schedules for June 14th which is the Sunday at the end of E3. And that’s where we’ll find out all that Bethesda is planning to offer us that day…

Dark Souls 2 has had a strange bug related to weaponry with it since its release. Somehow if the game is played at the higher framerate of 60FPS instead of 30FPS, the weapons will degrade significantly faster. And obviously, this is quite an annoying problem for players.

The bug was discovered about a year ago by players and they’ve been telling developer From Software about it since then. It’s only now that the game has hit consoles and had those players saying “This is a problem.” that they’ve begun to report that they’re looking for a fix.

The bug got spread onto the Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions through the game’s most recent DLC, Scholar of the First Sin and seems to have upped the number of players reporting the problem to the point where From Software have taken notice. Or maybe they’d always been working on a fix and are saying now because of the increased numbers. Who knows?

Although there’s no release date yet for the patch, the studio has stated that “Fixed issue whereby weapon durability was decreased drastically when used on enemy corpses, friendly characters, etc.” with the publisher of Bandai Namco adding “The fix will be issued for PS4, Steam and Xbox One, and will be apparent for people running the game at 60fps as the durability decrease rate is linked to the frame rate.”

Get ready Star Wars fans. Official Teaser #2 for the Force Awakens is here. I could go on about it, but you really just want to watch it. I’ll get out of the way now…

After months of waiting for it, Blizzard’s popular free-to-play collectable card game Hearthstone has finally released onto iPhone and Android mobile platforms.

The interface of the game has been slightly tweaked for a smaller screen, moving certain elements around so there’s enough space for everything to be visible. A shot of that can be seen below. It will also let current players use their existing decks and the mobile version will continue to be updated with the same new features and content as the PC and tablet versions are. To celebrate all players who play a game on their mobile will receive one free pack of Classic cards.

Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime said of the release, “We’re excited to welcome mobile gamers to the Hearthstone community. Hearthstone’s quick, super-accessible gameplay is perfect for gaming on the go, and with the mobile versions it’s incredibly easy to jump into a match and have some fun.”

The iOS version of the game is available from the iTunes App Store while the Android versions can be found at Google Play or Amazon.