Engadget: Among the handful of announcements Valve made at this year's Game Developers Conference was a subtle and hugely important one: Lighthouse. What in the world is Lighthouse? It's the "base stations" referenced in Valve's VR headset announcement, and it's even more important than the incredibly impressive headset. Valve president Gabe Newell compares it to USB and expects it to fundamentally change how people interact with virtual reality. "Now that we've got tracking, then you can do input," Newell said in an interview with Engadget this morning. "It's a tracking technology that allows you to track an arbitrary number of points, room-scale, at sub-millimeter accuracy 100 times a second."
Half-Life and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has detailed how his team has been using Generative AI for research and development at Valve.
Valve has responded to New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit against the firm, stating it does not believe that lootboxes in its Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 games unlawfully encourage minors to gamble, adding it was "disappointed" to see the action go ahead despite efforts to "educate" the NYAG about virtual items since "early 2023."
The Performing Right Society (PRS) has "commenced legal proceedings" against Steam owner Valve over the use of its members' works on Steam "without permission."
This won't hold up, it's the game developers that licensed the music to use in their games with Steam being the distributor of those games. By that logic they would have to go after Nintendo, Sony and Xbox for also doing the same thing.
