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Valve has announced new features for its online digital platform, Steam – Steam Link Anywhere and Steam Networking Sockets APIs.
Steam Link Anywhere – which permits players to connect to their PC and "play games from anywhere" – has now moved into early beta. The free service will connect the app to any computer running Steam with an up-to-date Steam client beta, although Valve’s keen to emphasise that you’ll need a "high upload speed from your computer and strong network connection to your Steam Link".
Valve also released the Steam Networking Sockets APIs, which gives all Steam developers "access to the technologies and infrastructure built to support CS:GO and Dota 2".
"This enables you to relay your game traffic over Valve’s private gaming network, giving your players faster and more secure connections," Valve says. "The service is offered free of charge to Steam developers and a large portion of the API has been open-sourced. A more detailed write up on the release may be found here."
While available now, more information about these updates – as well as details of other new features still to come to Steam – will be discussed at Valve’s upcoming Steam Platform Update talk at GDC.
However, Valve remains silent on the matter of Scottish MP and department for digital culture, media and sport spokesperson, Hannah Bardell, reporting the game Rape Day to Scotland Yard.
Valve confirmed it will not permit the game – which allows players to rape women in a zombie apocalypse – to go on sale on its digital store, Steam. Rather than condemning the game or banning it for its shocking sexual violence content, however, the company said it wouldn’t sell 3D visual novel Rape Day as the game "poses unknown costs and risks" to Valve.
"A game of this nature has no place in our society," Bardell told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee last week. "I’m glad that it has been pulled by gaming site Steam, but their response was woeful. It did not even accept or acknowledge the risk it could pose. At a time when 1 in 5 women will experience sexual violence in their lives, and in a week when it’s International Women’s Day, will [the DCMS] work with me and others to launch a review into how this game even got to the development and approval stage and make sure it appears on no other platform?"
