Steam's community market may have started as a system for buying and selling silly hats in Team Fortress 2, but it's evolved over the years. These days, its an active economy and item trading system with heavy account security and complicated transaction restrictions. It has to be, Valve says. When it comes to hacking, "all Steam accounts are now targets."
Source: Valve
Electronic Arts, the studio responsible for Star Wars: Battlefront, SimCity and the Battlefield franchise, has launched a new Competitive Gaming Division led by former COO and EA Sports President Peter Moore. The goal of the new business is to cultivate eSports opportunities within EA's library, most notably in the Battlefield, Madden NFL and FIFA franchises. EA's CGD will develop live events and broadcasting featuring eSports, plus create new, officially branded competitive experiences, CEO Andrew Wilson says in a blog post.
Source: EA
Whether or not the art world wants a robotic painter, it's going to get one. Chris Chen, founder of Instapainting, a web service that converts your photographs into paintings, has built a machine that's creating an artwork live on Twitch. Users can punch in commands on the gaming platform for the paint brush wielding machine to follow.
There are lots of ways to enjoy the button-mashing guilty pleasure of a Dynasty Warriors game: the trappings of the original series in ancient China, the robot-smashing action of Gundam Reborn and even a foray into the Legend of Zelda universe. Not enough? Okay fine. Here's one more: 'Dragon Quest Heroes.' Join Sean and Tim at 6PM ET / 3PM Pacific on Twitch as a venture into a mash-up created from games neither of them have played. Check us out here on this very post, the Engadget Gaming homepage, or, if you want to join us in chat, Twitch.tv/Joystiq.
It really shouldn't surprise anyone that the new Apple TV is already home to over 2,600 apps. The company that helped launch the entire app-centric industry might have been a bit late to the streaming-media box app store, but according to data collected by appFigures, tvOS is well on its way to becoming another popular platform for developers to build upon.
Source: appFigures
By Nathan Ingraham and Aaron Souppouris
A big question has followed Oculus around since its Rift unveil back in June: How will it persuade the public that virtual reality is ready for primetime? Today we have the answer: Oculus VR has announced that Eve: Valkyrie, CCP's multiplayer dogfighting shooter, will be a pack-in with every pre-order of its upcoming VR headset when it launches in early 2016.
Sony has an early gift for you this holiday season: more tools for its PlayStation 4 video editing app, Sharefactory. The electronics giant says that the ability to manipulate time has been among the most requested features and that's where Time Bender comes in. With it, you can slow nature's most effective killer down or implement time lapse to your gameplay footage. What's more, Sony's also increasing the number of clips that you can add to your masterpiece; the new limit's 50 for video and 12 for music.
Source: PlayStation Blog