In the near future, Left 4 Dead developer Valve may take a scientific approach to making games by scanning players' brain waves, co-founder Gabe Newell has explained.

"Right now we have to [observe players] simply by watching them and then we have to guess as to how certain things are affecting the player," Newell stated in an essay appearing on Edge. "We want to take that even further in the future," he wrote.

Getting scientific, Newell wrote, "One of the areas that we're really interested in is testing biometrics on player state." Biometrics is the practice of measuring activity in the human body such as heart rate--or, in this case, brain activity.

"There are new technologies where we can wire players up with EEGs and actually have direct exposure to their physical reactions to the games," the Valve head continued. EEG is the technology that measures brain activity by placing electrodes on the scalp. The product of an EEG is usually a chart with spikes and troughs, like a seismometer.

The benefit to Valve is precise knowledge of what works, and what doesn't, when making a game. "We can know for sure of something is actually frightening the player--their heart rate is going up ... appropriate parts of their brains are being activated," Newell asserted.

Concluding, Newell called the possibility "super exciting."

Attention all videogame fans that deserve to have their Videogame Fan Card revoked: Valve is currently running a great deal on its entire back catalog of PC titles with the Valve Complete Pack.

For a mere $99, one can score every Half-Life game and Counter-Strike iteration, as well as Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. If that's not enough, they also throw in Peggle Extreme.

With Left 4 Dead selling for $45 currently, you're basically getting all of Valve's previous releases for $55, or $15 less than the price of High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance.

Valve is running the deal on Steam, so head over to the big gray internet store to pick up the bundle. Thanks to Demius for the heads up.

Not content with offering up user-created mods for Valve-developed Source-engine powered games, Valve has expanded Steam's offerings to include free mods for Tripwire's 2006 first-person shooter Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 (PC).

Available now, the first Red Orchestra mod on Steam is Mare Nostrum, which brings three nationalities to the game along with 8 new maps, 8 weapons, and 10 vehicles.

In celebration, Tripwire has dropped the price of Red Orchestra to $4.99, a 75% price reduction that will run until the end of the weekend.

Upon purchasing Red Orchestra, any compatible mods will be listed under the "Not Installed" portion of Steam's "My Games" section. As with the previous batch of mods, the community-made Red Orchestra add-ons will be automatically updated by Steam, just like any other game on the digital distribution platform.

Update: The mods are now available for download and can be found under the "Not Installed" portion of Steam's "My Games" section. In addition, Valve has put Half-Life 2: Episode One on sale for $4.99, offering cheaper access to the Source Engine.

The mods, playable for anyone with a Source Engine-powered game like Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2 or The Orange Box, are:

• Age of Chivalry
• D.I.P.R.I.P.
• Insurgency
• Synergy
• Zombie Panic: Source

Original Story (10/2/08): As promised earlier this week, Valve is scheduled to make five user-created mods available on its Steam digital distribution service later today.

Additionally, the mods tie in to the Steamworks toolset, providing community services and automatic updates like full retail games.

Prior to working with Sony on the physics-based platformer LittleBigPlanet (PS3), developer Media Molecule has revealed that it was working on a game described "more Portally than Portal" and "Portal, but with scale factor."

The company even met with Valve, which suggested the two work on the game together.

"We were very tempted," studio co-founder Alex Evans told Kikizo. "But in the end we decided to talk to Sony and they just got the game at the beginning."

Media Molecule had previously worked with Valve for the Steam release of its physics-driven action game Rag Doll Kung Fu.

Developed internally at Valve, Portal (PC, PS3, 360) and its wit-driven take on puzzle-action shooting was released last fall to critical acclaim. It was inspired by the 2005 independent game Narbacular Drop, the creators of which are now at Valve.

LittleBigPlanet, originally unveiled in early 2007 as part of Sony's Game Developers Conference presentation, is slated arrive on October 21 as a PS3 exclusive.

Expanding the breadth of its online PC digital distribution platform Steam, creator Valve has announced that it will begin offering free downloads of user-created mods.

Playable so long as a user has a Source-powered game installed--such as Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2 or The Orange Box--the mods will appear under the My Games listing, and will receive automatic updates like any other Steam release.

The initial batch of mods slated to arrive this week are:

• Age of Chivalry
• D.I.P.R.I.P.
• Insurgency
• Synergy
• Zombie Panic

In addition to automatic updates, the mods will incorporate other aspects of Valve's Steamworks toolset, with the company promising that this will result in "stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community."

Update: Valve has issued a series of succinct responses that deny a Google buyout.

"Rumor," Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi told Shacknews, while clarifying to MTV Multiplayer that the entire affair is a "complete fabrication."

Original Story: "Well placed sources" reportedly tell UK tabloid The Inquirer that software giant Google is primed to buy independent developer and Half-Life series creator Valve "any minute now."

If the dubious rumor is to be believed, Valve's PC digital distribution client Steam is a major factor in the acquisition, as many speculate that Google will further expand into content distribution and the gaming market.

"We do not comment on rumour and speculation," a Google representative told MCV. Valve has yet to provide an official response, as the rumor surfaced overnight.

Valve had previously said it was "happy to have that talk" should the company be approached with a buyout offer, though at the time, marketing VP Doug Lombardi stated that the studio was "doing pretty well" and was "really happy with what we're doing."

Faylor's Take: Anything is possible, I suppose, but I really don't see this happening.

Plus, as Blue's News points out, I don't exactly trust the "well placed sources" of a tabloid that specializes in speculation and sensationalism, not to mention one that rarely reports on games and is so far removed from the overall industry.

Independent developer Valve is "happy to have that conversation" should the company be approached with a buyout offer, marketing VP Doug Lombardi has revealed.

That said, he noted that the independent studio behind Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal and the Steam digital distribution platform is "doing pretty well" and is "really happy with what we're doing."

Lombardi also heaped praise on publishing partner EA, describing the relationship between EA and Valve as "really good," with Valve yet to see the fabled EA "boogeyman." id Software president John Carmack had previously said that Valve's positive experience with EA was a key factor in its decision to let EA publish id's Rage (PC, PS3, 360, Mac).

"We set up the deal so that it turned out that if EA was this evil empire, that it wasn't going to last forever," Lombardi explained to Gamasutra. "But it's turned out that all those scary stories--maybe some of them were true, and maybe some of them are history; I don't know--haven't appeared to us. We haven't seen the boogeyman."

"EA was very progressive about saying, 'We understand who you guys are. We understand what Steam is. We don't want Steam to go away,'" he continued. "Well, they might want Steam to go away, but they're not asking us to make Steam go away."

With Valve's wit-driven action-puzzler Portal hitting Xbox Live Arcade this fall, marketing VP Doug Lombardi has expressed interest in releasing more of the studio's catalog, which includes shooters Half-Life and Counter-Strike, as Xbox 360 downloads.

"We'll certainly consider [bringing old games like Counter-Strike to XBLA]," Lombardi told OXM UK. "If you look at what we've done on Steam, we try to make all our games available and we're always reviewing the prices to keep them current. We'd love to do that, but this is our first step at doing that beyond the PC."

When asked about a possible console release of the Team Fortress 2 add-ons that PC gamers have been receiving for free, such as new maps and weapons, Lombardi stated that the company was still discussing the specifics of pricing.

"We're accumulating a lot of TF2 content for PC and at some point there'll be a sweet amount of stuff that's ready to go and large enough that if people have to pay for it [on consoles], they'll be happy," he noted. Earlier in the year, Lombardi told Shacknews that the content was likely to hit Xbox 360, but wasn't sure if it would arrive on PS3.

Valve's multiplayer-focused zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead (PC, 360) will include two-person split-screen play in addition to four-person online cooperative survival play, co-founder Gabe Newell revealed at EA's E3 press event.

It was unclear if that functionality is limited to the Xbox 360 version, or if it will be included in the PC edition as well. The game will let players assume control of undead foes as well, though the exact details of that functionality have not been disclosed.

Newell also noted that the game's four survivor characters have been redesigned. The new character designs better reflect the characters' status as survivors of a recent outbreak instead of hardened battle veterans.

Louis, for example, has lost his dreadlocks and battle armor, replaced by blood-splatted dress shirt, a loose tie, and a bald head.

Left 4 Dead is slated to arrive November 4. More details on the playable undead are expected to arrive tomorrow during Shacknews' hands-on time with the title.

Valve Software and publisher Gamecock Media Group today announced a partnership to bring Gamecock titles to Valve's PC gaming digital distribution platform Steam.

The first Gamecock-published titles on the platform are Firefly Studios' Stronghold Crusader Extreme and the first installment of Crackpot Entertainment's episodic action-adventure title Insecticide.

"No RTS fan can ignore Stronghold Crusader Extreme as the pinnacle of hardcore warfare," Valve stated in a press release.

Additional Gamecock-published PC titles, including Replay Studios' World War II stealth title Velvet Assassin, Spark Unlimited's fantasy shooter Legendary and the second episode of Insecticide, are slated to hit Steam later this year.

A man who hacked into a third party Valve file server and stole the credit card numbers of Steam Cyber Cafe users was caught by police in the Dutch town of Maastricht this Tuesday.

According to the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, the 20 year old hacker had managed to "burn 13 million Euros playing poker online and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players" before being caught.

Known by the online handle MaddoxX, the man first made news when he boasted of the Valve hack in April of 2007.

"We also don't want money from VALVe," he wrote on the No-Steam forum last year. "We want a simple message on their site." ... Read more

A number of Valve's PC shooters will soon support Novint's Falcon controller (pictured left) as part of a new agreement, the companies have announced.

Serving as an alternative to the traditional mouse-based FPS control scheme, the Novint Falcon allows for three-dimensional freedom of movement and tactile response. Support for the peripheral will be added in an update distributed through Valve's digital download platform Steam.

Games slated to support the controller include Half-Life 2 and its two following episodes, Team Fortress 2, Portal and Counter-Strike: Source. Valve's ... Read more

Speaking at Valve's PC gaming market conference attended by Shacknews at its offices in Bellevue, Washington, company co-founder and president Gabe Newell said that online PC sales revenue has seen massive growth rates and will soon pass over retail revenue.

"Within the next three months we see sub-10% growth rates in our traditional core packaged goods retail business," said Newell. "But right now we're seeing close to 200% growth in the development of these alternative ways of connecting with customers."

Newell added that the company expects online distribution sales from its Steam platform to pass over its retail business. A graph was also shown illustrating that the company anticipates online revenue to dwarf retail by 2012.

"There have been a bunch of stories written recently, both by the gaming press and the industry business press that PC gaming is dead. There's a ... Read more

Valve today announced Steam Cloud, a free Steam system that will retain users' saved games and configuration files indefinitely.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 will be the first games to support the service. User key mappings will also be saved in Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead will ship with the feature.

If players are offline, the service will store the data and then add it to the network on the next connection. According to Valve, saved games and configurations will be stored forever.

Valve further noted that the service will be freely available to developers, and is set to launch in the "near future."

The company also detailed plans for several new Steam systems, including a driver auto-updater and calendar functionality.

Another feature in development is a system-requirement checker. The program will analyze your hardware and compare it to multiple games, estimating your performance and recommending upgrades.

Valve is also considering storing replay videos and kill-cam screens from games such as Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat: Source.

Entering the final minutes of EA's Spring Break event, most demo stations in the room long since abandoned, the bank of Valve's Left 4 Dead systems were still at capacity.

Zombies exploding in the background, I pinged marketing VP Lombardi on a number of Valve-related topics, including whether we'll see a demo for Left 4 Dead, and the likelihood of launching with a free weekend. We also touch on his company's new Steamworks initiative, as well as what Valve has planned for the future.

We're still sort of tinkering with the model and playing with it a little bit, but we'll definitely at some point do a free weekend for Left 4 Dead. It'll be somewhere near the launch. Whether or not it's the first weekend is still sort of to be determined. Read more...

The PC is no longer a viable platform. The PC is all about casual gaming. The PC market is dying.

We've heard it all before, and so has Valve's Doug Lombardi. I recently caught up with the marketing director during an Electronic Arts press event. At the end of the night, the house music dying down, we had a long chat on a number of topics--many of which pertained to his company's primary platform.

What does Valve think of the PC Gaming Alliance? Are they as tired of the PC gaming "problem" as we are? What is at the root of the issue, anyway? Read on for some answers.

If you go around and you look at all these different things that are happening on the PC, and you add them together, my hunch is that [the sales numbers] would actually be much larger than all of the consoles put together.

Again, minus the DS, because the DS is this crazy thing by itself. But talking purely in terms of the Wii, the PS3, and the 360, if you added those together and looked at the whole picture, I'd bet you PC would be even, if not bigger than those three systems in terms of the money that's changing hands and the opportunity for doing business. Read more..

Valve has revealed the results of its latest PC hardware survey, which polled 1,728,662 Steam users from November 13, 2007 to May 15, 2008.

Among the findings, the company reported that Nvidia cards occupy the top six slots of video hardware among Steam users, with the GeForce 8800 leading at 9.36%. The most common RAM configuration was 2GB and above.

Other interesting results include the ability of 9.57% to utilize DirectX10, the part where 0.55% of Steam users connect with a 33.6 Kbps modem, as well as:

Display

• 73.87% use 4:3 aspect primary displays
• 25.70% use 16:9 aspect primary displays
• 3.49% of use multi-monitor desktop resolutions
• 39.18% run their primary display at 1280 x 960
• 32.02% run their primary display at 1024 x 768

Hard Drives

• 32.59% have more than 250GB in HDD capacity
• The most common amount of free HDD space was 10GB-19.9GB

Following the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Three, and a long period of PC FPS development, it would only be natural for the free men at Valve to try their hands at something new.

But according to Valve's Doug Lombardi, the Bellevue, Washington-based studio may move further away from its typical territory than you might imagine.

"There's a lot of people at Valve who are parents and would love to make a game for kids," said Lombardi to CVG. "We all play the Wii a lot and we think that the proper way for Valve to approach the Wii would be to make something cool designed specifically for it.

"I mean, I'm not making any announcements, but there's a lot of desire internally to do something for kids, do something on the Wii."

And as long as we're talking extreme divergence, why not a Valve MMO... Read more

Independent developer Valve today announced the release of its Steamworks software development kit, a set of free tools that will allow PC game developers to add a number of supporting services to their products.

The list of features includes product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, and anti-cheat technology.

Those interested in the nitty-gritty details can check out the Steamworks partner site, which has now been updated with additional documentation.