Over at Steam Review they spotted an update for the Steam Player statistics. This update, which took the stats down for a brief outage last week, now allows you to see the current players, and the peak number of players for all of the games that are available of Steam.
Currently, out in the lead is a (slightly) surprising Counter-strike: Source (with over 77,000 players at it’s peak today), followed closely by the original Counter-strike (with 64,000). I was personally expecting Team Fortress 2 to be out in the lead, however that comes in 3rd place at a measly (by comparison to the other two) 15,000 players at it’s peak.
The stats are quite interesting, and definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in what’s going on behind the scenes. One thing that they certainly prove is that with a peak today of over 1.1million players, there is definitely a massive audience of people that consistently use Steam, and that support the digital download model. Looks like we’re in the right place!
You will notice when you next boot up your Steam Client that there is a brand new update for the Client itself.
This update adds a number of neat fixes, but the one that I’m most pleased about is “Fixed apps getting stuck at Updating 0% when downloading”
This has been bugging me for a while now, so hopefully I wont have to see that dreaded 0% again!
Full list of updates after the break…
Continue reading ‘New Steam Client Update’
This weekend has seen a few updates hit steam, bothe for the Steam Client, as well as the games Call of Duty 4 and Frontlines: Fuel of War.
The Client update fixes a minor bug which prevented some games running immediately after install under Windows Vista, so nothing to shout home about.
The CoD4 update however is well worth a mention, adding the much anticipated and long awaited map pack as well as adding a couple of server filters to go alongside these and a DoS (Denial of Service) Attack fix.
Frontlines’ update adds a few fixes and updates to improve online play, the most prominent being the addition of the Punkbuster anti cheat system.
All updates are available through your steam client now.
Today has seen the release of two updates, one substantially bigger than the other!
The first is a new update for the Steam Client, and has the following changes and updates:
- Enabled ClearType fonts if they are enabled in Windows
- Improved in-game status and play time tracking for games with launcher apps
- Improved in-game overlay input handling in a variety of games that previously did not capture or block keyboard input correctly
- Added D3D10 support to the in-game overlay
- Made voice chat requests ignored if you’ve blocked communications from the caller
- Fixed the original Half-Life not getting to 100% complete downloading when it should
- Improved server selection logic for Friends and VAC server connections
- Improved Steam network connectivity in the face of dropped UDP packets
- Fixed the overlay not recognizing the Tab key in some games (breaking the default hot-key)
- Improved Friends duplicate name collision detection
The other update is a small fix for the Day of Defeat: Source Beta, which fixes a possible crash when launching rockets!
Both can be installed by a restart of your client (as per usual)
May 22nd saw the release of the latest Valve Harware Survey Results (which are conducted through Steam).
The results (as ever) give an insight into what other people who use Steam have inside their machines, and rather than re-write an already extensive list of the key points, I’ll point you over to GamesRadar to see their breakdown of the most important aspects.
It looks like i’m mostly in with the the majority; over 2Mb broadband, Intel CPU, over 2Gb RAM and 4:3 monitor (not for long!) 
All of this is running on Vista however, which only 17% of people are running.
Have a look at the full breakdown on SteamPowered.com; how does your system stack up against the results?
A couple of fixes have been made to the Steam Client as follows:
- Fixed Portal: First Slice being unable to launch for some users
- Fixed GoldSrc MODs being unable to launch from the Steam serverbrowser
- Fixed network issue on startup
Nothing major here, but worth the update none the less.
A new Steam Client update has been released. Changes include:
Added the ability to block all communications from another user
Added an option to timestamp friends messages
Added an option to configure taskbar window flashing behavior on friends messages
Added background detection of game updates while Steam is running
Fixed backups failing for certain games, and made other improvements to it
Personally, as someone who leaves Steam running all the time, i’ve been waiting for the background detection of game updates for a while!
