Back in early 2024, Valve put up new rules for game developers on Steam to pull in some information about generative AI, and they now seem to have tweaked it.

As spotted by GameDiscoverCo and posted on Bluesky, the form developers have to fill out has seen a few tweaks in the wording mainly to clarify that it's for content that is actually seen and consumed by players. From marketing materials on the Steam page, to content in the game - but not including AI tool helpers in their game development environment

We already had a list of the first lot of Steam events for the year but now we know everything that's coming, as Valve put up the second half.

The events are a good way to find new games, and lots of discounts. Although for discounts you may want to wait on the major seasonal events if you're watching your wallet closely. Or perhaps saving up for the new Steam Machine and Steam Frame hardware.

It seems it will be easier to be Steam Machine Verified when compared with Steam Deck Verified, according to a Valve designer speaking with Game Developer.

They spoke with designer Lawrence Yang who said there will be "fewer constraints" noting that if you're already Steam Deck Verified it will be Steam Machine Verified. That was pretty much obvious though don't you think? Valve already do something similar with SteamOS Compatible ratings, they just stick it straight on for other SteamOS machines if a game is Steam Deck Verified.

My hope is the text sizing will once again come into focus for game developers. It's often a big problem on the Steam Deck's smaller screen and resolution, with so many developers only seemingly testing their games on rather big monitors. In some games, the text is even too small on my own big monitor. Now think about this issue when you're sitting across the living room on your nice sofa, this could be quite the pain point with lots of games having no text scaling options. You're going to need some binoculars at the ready.

Along with an entirely new set of awards you can give out across Steam the changes should stop all the clown farming on reviews, guides, forum posts and more.

You've probably seen guides and forum posts that are just pure silly bait on Steam, as it has become a bit of a problem since people expected to get a bunch of clown awards — and they did, it was everywhere. This should hopefully now be a thing of the past. In the Steam announcement Valve mentioned that Steam Awards no longer transfer points over, and they've retired the old awards in favour of a completely new set.

Now it's purely about showing appreciation, with all the awards costing the same amount of Steam Points too.

Hardest is getting removed from Steam by the developer at the end of the month, as they say "AI is bad" and "AI is evil" - oh my. Never heard of it until it was pointed out on Mastodon to me.

In a Steam announcement the developer mentioned they made the game in a few Summer months using AI "because in university there is so much brainwashing on students and all the tools are given for free". Now they have "realized the AI is not actually free, and it has a major effect on the economy and environment." and that some AI companies "can use this game just existing as a reason the get more investment for their AI companies, that benefit no one, but rather suck resources from the economy from hard working people".

After a Kickstarter success back in 2022, the medieval kingdom builder Earth of Oryn is set to enter Early Access on January 19th. It looks promising but it's far from finished.

Exciting news for all Linux enthusiasts betting on ARM64 architecture. Ubuntu has taken a step toward making Steam available on ARM64, opening public testing of a new Steam Snap build for ARM.

The testing initiative focuses on a Snap-packaged version of Steam designed to run on ARM64 systems, including modern ARM laptops, SBCs, and servers increasingly used as desktop replacements. For reference, until now, Steam has officially supported only x86_64 systems on Linux, leaving ARM users dependent on unofficial workarounds or entirely excluded from Valve’s ecosystem.

A once popular Flash game has returned and it's now available on Steam, all thanks to a superfan who didn't want to let it die. That game is Dungeon Rampage, a 1-4 player co-op hack-n-slash dungeon crawler.

Originally playable on Facebook of all places, back in the era of Flash games where Facebook had quite a lot of them (anyone remember FarmVille?). Originally taken offline in 2017, the game's revival was sparked by Angelos Mako, a fan who spent a third of their lifetime tracking down the original developers. At just 17, Mako helped recover the lost source code and secured the game’s rights before partnering with industry veterans at Gamebreaking Studios to bring their childhood favourite back to life. It has a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised a surprising $70,463 from 1,603 back in June 2025

If you're after more funny and frightening co-op games to play with friends, the recently announced Dig, Dig, Die could be a good one for you.

In Dig Dig Die, you and friends take on the role of pirates raiding graveyards from a cursed flying ship, digging up coffins and crypts in search of valuable loot. Armed with shovels, crowbars, and questionable weapons, crews must work together, or betray one another, to escape with their haul before the monsters hear them coming. With support for up to 6 players online it sounds like a good time.

Between raids you also get to do various activities aboard your ship and gear up, with vending machines to grab some useful items and there's a full casino to mess with your friends during some blackjack and roulette.

A nice move by Valve to improve the modding scene - as mods on the Steam Workshop can now support multiple game versions.

There's a little work required by both game developers and modders to get it all to work together, but the system sounds quite nice. Might mean in future, eventually anyway, we'll see less compatibility issues when developers put out big updates to their games. Valve put up two separate blog posts on it across Steamworks and Steam Workshop to cover all the details, and they have a new documentation page to cover it.

Another official SteamOS handheld has been announced, and it's Lenovo again with the Legion Go 2. During CES 2026 they announced the Legion Go 2 with SteamOS should arrive in June, with a price starting at $1,199. So we've still got quite a while to wait on it, even though the Windows version has been available since October 2025.

Valve have released the latest stable update for SteamOS version 3.7.19, bringing a bunch of bug fixes to improve the Linux gaming platform. It rolls up a few fixes from previous Betas, so everyone is good to go on upgrading to it.

What games from the Steam Winter Sale have you gotten?

Might get the, erm, Japanese Stonks simulator on this list LMAO

Valve has rolled out a new Steam client update dated December 19, and it’s already being automatically distributed to users.

The most significant change is the transition to a 64-bit Steam client on Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems running 64-bit editions. Valve says systems still using 32-bit versions of Windows will continue to receive updates to the 32-bit Steam client until January 1, 2026, giving remaining users time to migrate.

This is the sale event you've been waiting on isn't it? The Steam Winter Sale 2025 has arrived with a great many thousands of games discounted. No doubt the Steam store will be a little flaky for a while, as it usually struggles to cope with the increased demand of everyone madly throwing their payment cards at the servers.

Valve's Steam Awards is also now open for voting, with nominations over. No big surprise in the final nominations for Game of the Year which includes:

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
ARC Raiders
Dispatch
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Hollow Knight: Silksong

All of them are on sale too.

Valve have released Steam Replay for 2025, showing off some interesting stats about your gaming and how it stacks up against everyone on Steam.

Interestingly, this year they note that only 14% of gaming was "spent by all Steam users in new releases (games released in 2025)". That's actually down a single digit percentage from last year, but continues to show that with the onslaught of over 19,000 games from 2025 that a lot of people continue playing through their older games. According to the stats 44% of playtime from all Steam users were for releases from the last 1-7 years, and 40% playtime from all Steam users was spent on releases from 8 or more years ago.

Valve's stats don't include time spent in offline mode or when you're without internet.

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Steam/comments/1pn3jm0/the_antitrust_case_against_valve_is_collapsing/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.552.0.pdf

Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64.

André Almeida of consulting firm Igalia, which has been longtime partners with Valve on their Linux engineering efforts, presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference last weekend on enhancing the Linux kernel's Futex interfaces for helping ARM64 with an emphasis on a better emulated gaming experience. Igalia has also been helping Valve with the open-source graphics support for the Steam Frame, the color management pipeline / HDR initiatives, and other efforts like crash data collection on the Steam Deck.

Warn you if there’s a way you could get a product for cheaper before you purchase it.

ShiraNamiNani discovered this feature while purchasing Unrailed 2: Back on Track. At press time, this game was 30% off, for a total of $13.99. However, the Unrailed Collection Bundle, which includes both Unrailed 2: Back on Track and its predecessor, had a bigger discounted rate of 58%, meaning it only cost $13.58 – 41 cents cheaper than buying just the second game on its own. This is likely what triggered this alert, as it allowed them to not only save money but also get an extra game in the process.

"they will not be recommended to purchase the larger version if the total cost is still higher."

More Link: https://www.gamingbible.com/news/platform/steam/steam-store-addition-saves-you-money-194091-20251213

Showing just how insane it is to be a game developer right now, we've hit an all-time high for game releases on Steam in 2025 and not many get seen.

Taken from SteamDB, we can see from their data that there's been 19,008 games for 2025. That is a lot of games to be launching in a single year, which is up from 18,558 games in 2024 and 14,111 in 2023. This is a reminder that developers are not just competing with new releases when launching a game, but everything on Steam with many older titles remaining incredibly popular.

Showing just how difficult it can be to actually get a game in front of an audience, of the 19,008 from this year, a whopping 9,269 games have 10 or fewer reviews. There is a slight silver lining here though, as it appears the number of games receiving at least 100 reviews have been growing over the years since 2020. It's a bit lower than 2024 right now, but that will likely even-out before the end of 2025.

At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements.