A few days ago Valve announced that they were planning to make an update to the Steam Workshop to allow modders to make money from their mods, with the first game to feature this being Skyrim. Needless to say the Internet is divided on the issue, for different reasons. I personally have concerns about the fact that it’s regulated by the users of Steam rather than Valve themselves.

However, some are a little bit more creative and… blatant about how they feel about the new system. Most people against it have complained, debated the pros and cons with friends or even signed the petition that’s going around (which has already reached over 101k signatures at time of writing). Two users have teamed up though to make a protest mod. Really.

Created by users Fuck Valve and Cuscino, the mod is called ‘No more imperials‘ and does just as it says. It eliminates all the Imperials from the game, which kind of makes it difficult to do very much of… well, ANYTHING in the game. Which is the point actually.

The description on the mod’s Workshop page reads: “This mod removes every imperial from the game, effectively breaking the game, just like how valve broke the modding community.” Funnily enough there’s also a banner on the page noting that the mod is ‘incompatible’ with the game of Skyrim right now.

The mod has gotten a lot of five-star ratings from people even though it hasn’t been downloaded an awful lot (well, would you download a mod that is meant to break your game?). This has pushed it to the top of the popular mods list and gotten it a good amount of attention. Which again, I suppose was the point.

Never let it be said that the Internet can’t be creative in their unquestionable dislike of an unpopular change to something they love.

Microsoft’s got a lot of hype going behind the release of Windows 10. One of the major selling points is that for a lot of users they’ll be able to upgrade free of charge to the new OS, which if you’ve ever paid for the installation of an OS you’ll know is a very attractive selling point to push it with. They’ve been saying that they plan to release it towards the end of 2015, but sources are now saying that it’s now been confirmed that it’ll be releasing much earlier than that.

Supposedly the CEO of AMD Lisa Su let slip the detail during a call with financial investors last week, saying that the new OS was due out “at the end of July”. AMD are apparently holding off on the marketing of their Carrizo technology to factor in “the Winsow 10 launch at the end of July.”

It’s not known whether or not this is legitimate information but AMD would have to had been working with Microsoft on DirectX 12 as well as other OS compatibility issues with their hardware, so it’s not out of the question that this is true. Alternatively it could just be that another more complete beta version will be released at the time, replacing the current technical beta.

Stay tuned for details as they emerge.

Yesterday, right on cue, WoW Tokens went live.

Today, they’re worth quite a bit less. The tokens are in-game items which can be purchased for $20 and exchanged for gold or game time, with their value in gold determined by the market. Blizzard said last month that it would set an initial value and then let it fluctuate based on supply and demand. And fluctuate it has, with the Token shedding a full quarter of its worth in gold in a single day.

At launch, a $20 Token was initially valued at 30,000 gold, and actually pushed beyond that in the first few hours after release. But then it started to go down, down, steadily down, and now, according to wowtoken.info, your $20 Token now equates to 22,405 gold, more than a quarter less than the starting price.

The slump is not entirely surprising. As VentureBeat points out, the great likelihood is that players rushed to buy Tokens as soon as they were launched, then dumped them on the auction house to turn around some quick gold. And it’s not as though 22k is an inconsequential sum, either.

The potentially interesting part is what happens next: If the gold value continues to fall, players could be tempted to forgo their $15 monthly subscription fees in favor of Tokens, tradeable for 30 days of game time, purchased with gold. Will Blizzard take action to stabilize the market? My guess is that they’ll eventually settle into a sub-30k stability, but given how the Diablo 3 real money auction house turned out, a small part of me wonders if maybe WoW Tokens could have unforeseen effects on the way the in-game economy is balanced.

For more info on the WoW token system, follow this link!

The fact that games are priced differently for the online markets of different countries should come as no surprise to many of you, if you’ve been paying attention to the news in the last few years. The fact that a Steam key is cheaper in eastern European countries is why so many of them end up being sold through sites like G2A and other third-party retailers to people looking for a bargain. Now though, the European Commission want to create a Digital Single Market for all of Europe and that means setting the prices equal too.

The managing body in charge of proposing legislation and implementing decisions in the EU is the Juncker Commission, and just last week it declared that it was dedicated to bringing down the national barriers that section up the digital stores online through European countries.

“Let us do away with all those fences and walls that block us online,” said Andrus Ansip, Vice-President for the Digital Single Market. “People must be able to freely go across borders online just as they do offline.”

One specific area they’re looking at tackling is the practice of geo-blocking – whereby users are re-routed to local websites with different prices to those seen elsewhere in the EU. It’s familiar but the Commission insists that “such discrimination cannot exist in a Single Market”.

Of course, such a decision can not be taken lightly. The average wage, a country’s economy, agreements with developers and Valve and other big online-sellers; this all must be dealt with if the Commission is serious. Who knows, they might succeed.

Let’s just hope the Digital Single Market turns out to benefit all European gamers.

Just before GDC 2015, HTC announced that they were entering into a partnership with Valve to construct one of the first VR headsets that would use the SteamVR technology that Valve had previously announced would be shown at the event. Now Valve say that the headset – the HTC Vive – will be given away free of charge to qualified developers to allow them to develop games for it.

Speaking to Ars Technica about the move which they hope will jumpstart interest in the Vive, Doug Lombardi said that the Developer Edition kit version of it will be “free, at least initially”. The Vive itself will launch in a consumer version sometime later this year.

Already some studios such as Bossa Studios, makers of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, have registered interest. A site is being set up to go live later this week so that developers can sign up for a Developer kit.