Lend your Steam Library to up to 10 of your friends for free
It's finally here! Valve's long-awaited Steam family sharing feature has finally hit the masses. You can now share your games with up to 10 friends or family members. Sharing Steam games isn't as easy as just clicking a share button, unfortunately. Your friend will initially need to log into Steam on your PC to enable the sharing process. To help guide you through this process, we've compiled a step-by-step guide on how to enable the Steam sharing function.
Note: A shared Steam Library may only be accessed by one user at a time.
Step 1: Launch Steam on your computer and have a friend log in to their account. After they try logging in, they will be prompted to enter a Steam verification code (sent to them via email). Once you enter the verification code, your PC will be granted access to their Steam account.
Step 2: Click on the Steam tab and click Exit to log out your friend.
Step 3: Re-launch Steam and log in to your account and click on the Steam tab and then click on Settings.
Step 4: Click on the Family tab and the accounts you can authorize (your friend's, for instance) will be listed below in the Authorized Accounts column. Go ahead and authorize their account.
Step 5: When your friend launches Steam on their computer, your games will show up at the bottom of their library. Note: Only the games you don't already own between you and your friend will be displayed here.
If you're playing a game that belongs to a friend, that title will have its own independent cloud save and achievements for each account. We like this feature as you won't have to worry about your friends overwriting your personal saved data, but we dislike the fact that you can't just lend out individual games to friends, and you have to lend your entire library instead. The good news is that if your friend is playing a game that you want to play, you can simply boot them out. We also don't like the authentication method, which is very clunky and a little confusing as it took us a while to figure out. In addition, it requires the presence of your friend to phyiscally log on to your computer initially. If your friend has a lot of trust in you, however, they can provide you with their Steam login/password to avoid the initial step, but we only advise this if both parties can be trusted.
Valve has made a very smart pro-gamer move to attract more people to PC gaming since new PC gamers will be able to borrow a friend's massive Steam Library for free. It will be interesting to see how PC game sales will be affected by this.
What do you think of Valve's new Steam sharing feature? Let us know in the comments below!
Store closures are part of RadioShack's turnaround plan
If you're the nostalgic type, you may want to visit your neighborhood RadioShack store and savor the moment, it may be the last. That's because RadioShack is planning to close down 1,100 retail locations in the U.S. that are "underperforming," which will leave the electronics chain with 4,000 remaining stores stateside (including over 900 dealer franchise locations). Though that's a lot of store closures, RadioShack is confident it can turn things around.
RadioShack has a turnaround plan containing five pillars. They include repositioning the brand, revamping the product assortment, reinvigorating the stores, operational efficiency, and financial flexibility.
"Our brand equity remains strong, reflected in the sales growth we're seeing in our new Concept Stores which redefine the RadioShack store experience," said Joseph C. Magnacca, CEO of RadioShack. "We have also been encouraged by the positive response to our new brand positioning around 'Do It Together,' which we kicked off with our award winning Super Bowl commercial. Importantly, our key hires during the fourth quarter in merchandising, global sourcing, planning and allocation and, more recently, our new chief financial officer, round out our new leadership team as we continue to re-build the business."
RadioShack's total net sales and operating revenues for the fourth quarter of 2013 were $935.4 million, down from $1.17 billion a year prior. Store sales dropped 19 percent year-over-year, which the chain blamed on soft performance in the mobility business. This led to a net loss of $191.4 million, or $1.90 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $63.3 million in 2012.
For the entire year, RadioShack posted a loss of $400.2 million, or $3.92 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $139.4 million in all of 2012.
"Without minimizing the challenges ahead, we have a detailed strategic path to profitability based upon the five pillars of our turnaround," Mr. Magnacca added. "Our entire team is focused on execution as we work to improve our performance in the coming year."
If it weren't for pesky budgets and a little thing called fiscal responsibility, most businesses would opt for super fast and capacious solid state drives, but in the interest of balance sheets, hard drives are still vogue. There's also room for continued improvement and innovation in the HDD space, which Toshiba tackled with its new enterprise-grade AL13SXB and AL13SXQ HDDs.
The AL13SX series comes in 300GB, 450GB, and 600GB capacities, each one boasting support for industry 512n sector lengths in a space-friendly 2.5-inch form factor. These drives include Toshiba's persistent write cache technology for improved data integrity and performance while spinning at 15,000 RPM. Specs are virtually the same for the AL13SXQ, except that it adds self-encryption to the fold.
"The 15,000 RPM disk continues to be the backbone of mission critical IT operations. Toshiba's AL13SX doubles available capacity while preserving the low-latency and energy efficiency customers require," said Don Jeanette (PDF), senior director of marketing at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit. "While older 3.5-inch 15,000 RPM disk drives are withdrawing from the market, the AL13SX provides a clear migration path to 2.5-inch models with the same 600GB capacity and lower latency for improved performance with a significant power savings – a real win-win for the important mission-critical storage category."
Toshiba didn't say when the new drives will be available or how much they'll cost.
A Chromebook line for Ron Burgandy types who own many leather bound books
The rumor mill was buzzing this week with word of a new Chromebook line from Samsung, and though some of the details were a bit off -- there's no Intel processor inside -- Samsung did release a couple of Chromebook 2 models today, including an 11.6-inch SKU and a 13.3-inch build. Both laptops sport a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor, though they run at different clockspeeds.
The 11.6-inch Chromebook 2 runs at 1.9GHz and features an HD LED display with a 1366x768 resolution. It also has 4GB of DDR3L-1600 memory, 16GB of onboard storage, 720p webcam, HDMI output, USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports (one each), microSD card slot, multi-memory card reader, headphone out/mic-in combo port, and up to 8 hours of run time.
Samsung's spec sheet for the 13.3-inch Chromebook is mostly similar, except that it runs at 2.1GHz, has a Full HD 1080p LED display with a 1920x1080 resolution, and can last up to 8.5 hours on a single charge.
"Chromebooks are particularly important in the education space – according to Futuresource, one in four devices now sold into K-12 schools in the U.S. are Chromebooks – so we've designed our latest models with students and teachers in mind, including features like rapid start times, longer battery life and easy-to-grip design," said Tod Pike, senior vice president at Samsung's Enterprise Business Division.
The "easy-to-grip" design Pike refers to is the fake leather jacket that's stitched around the lid. It's the same material Samsung uses on its Galaxy Note 3.
Both the 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch Chromebook 2 models will be available in April for $320 and $400, respectively.
New cards from Sapphire keep their cool by using multiple fans
Nobody knows how to chill better than Jeff Bridges and John Goodman from The Big Lewbowski, though Sapphire's willing to give it the old college try, only in a different way. Sapphire today announced a pair of custom cooled Radeon R9 Series graphics cards, the Dual-X R9 280 with two aerofoil fans and graduated heatpipes, and Vapor-X R9 280X featuring the company's new Tri-X triple fan design.
Starting with the former, the Dual-X R9 280 is based on AMD's brand new R9 280 graphics card introduced today. Unlike the reference design, the Dual-X design supposedly allows the card to run cooler, quieter, and even a little faster at up to 940MHz Boost (versus 933MHz via Boost), or perhaps Sapphire is just rounding up.
Whereas the Dual-X cooler has been featured on other cards in Sapphire's stable, the Vapor-X R9 280X is the first to sport the tri-fan solution, which uses vapor-chamber cooling. According to Sapphire, this translates into a virtually silent gaming experience with more headroom to explore overclocking. As such, it comes factory overclocked to 1,000MHz core (1,100MHz Boost) and 1,500MHz (6GB/s) memory.
It's on like Donkey Kong between AMD and Intel in the low-cost computing space. In the blue corner is Intel with its Bay Trail platform, and in the green corner is AMD, which just introduced its AM1 platform featuring a socketed quad-core or dual-core Kabini SoC. Put another way, take a Kabini APU and combine it with a socketed FS1b motherboard with a pin-grid-array (PGA) and you have the AM1 platform.
This is AMD's first "system in a socket" offering. The Kabini chips will sport up to four Jaguar CPU cores, a memory controller supporting up to DDR3-1600, a Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, and various I/O functions (two SATA 6Gbps, tow USB 3.0, eight USB 2.0, DisplayPort, HDMI, and VGA). All of this will exist in the APU; supporting motherboards lack a chipset to keep costs down.
"AMD continues our APU technology leadership by introducing the AM1 platform with 'Socketed Kabini', an APU designed for the mainstream market," said Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD. "The AM1 platform gives us a great opportunity to deliver a flexible infrastructure environment, and provides a multitude of options for consumers and system builders looking for upgradeability packed into an extremely affordable solution."
AMD is particularly proud at how its AM1 platform stacks up against Intel's Bay Trail, the latter of which the Sunnyvale chip designer calls a "dead end platform." AM1 supports more memory, faster memory, more flavors of Windows, and has an upgradeable socket.
Have you finally had your fill of Flappy Bird? Good, not put down the tablet and return to the world of power computing. We've missed you. Truly. Unfortunately, while you were preoccupied tapping away at your tablet trying to earn a high score, a band of thieves came into your home and stole everything you owned, even the couch you were sitting on, which you didn't notice because Flappy Bird has that kind of effect of people. They also took your PC - drats! It's time to rebuild your belongings, and where else should you start other than your PC? Yeah, we couldn't think of a better place either. Want to go AMD this time around? Then direct click through to today's top deal for an AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Vishera for $190 with free shipping (normally $200 - use coupon code: [EMCPHHB22]. This 8-core chip flies along at 4GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) and has 8MB of L3 cache.
In last week's Tamriel Infinium, I had my top-tier theorycrafter and friend Calls1gn throw together some off-the-wall DPS builds for The Elder Scrolls Online. But he could theorycraft all day, and it wouldn't mean anything if he couldn't put it into practice. Luckily, ZeniMax opened the doors to the ESO beta again this past weekend. I was totally intrigued by the melee Sorcerer with pets. After playing that type of character at low levels, I have to say that it's an extremely lazy class. Now, I didn't have all the abilities because they required a higher-level character, but even at my low level, I mostly sat back and watched my pets do their thing while I found one mob to beat on. It worked and was more than viable.
Of course, building a DPS class is easy, right? What about something that requires a bit more concentration? What about a tank or a healer? Building a DPS character is a bit less difficult than tanks or healers, but that doesn't make them any less difficult to play. Still, your playstyle does change, and your focus changes if you want to tank or heal.
I asked Calls1gn to build us a few tank and healer classes, too. I wanted a Dragonknight healer because there are few DK abilities that have anything to do with healing, and I wanted a Sorc tank because -- well, just because. He delivered.
The name Icewind Dale conjures a lot of fond memories for fans of both the Forgotten Realms and turn-of-the-century RPGs. Fortunately for both groups, Cryptic and Perfect World are returning to the iconic locale in Neverwinter's next expansion.
Module 3: Curse of Icewind Dale is slated to release "later this spring," according to a news blurb on Cryptic's Arc website. Players can expect "new PvE content," new features, and "completely different ways to PvP."
The Neverwinter dev team has released a brief preview trailer for Module 3, and you'll find it behind the break.
Is that spring ahead? It matters not to the Massively team, since being cooped up inside just means that there's more time to play games! This week on the podcast we talk about the future plans for several MMOs, a revamped UI, and another studio's stab at cleaning up its MMO forums.
Get all of our opinions and analysis on the most important stories of the past week right here on Massively Speaking, the industry's leading MMO podcast. And if you have a comment, question, or topic for the podcasters, send an email to podcast@massively.com. We may just read your email on the air!
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Feel like you're not getting enough info on Star Citizen's development progress? Cloud Imperium chairman Chris Roberts has penned an epically long update that's now live on the game's website. "The concept is simple -- a high level monthly production progress report from the various teams from around the world working on Star Citizen," he writes.
Those teams include a whopping 212 developers, which Roberts says is more people than typically work on a triple-A console title and which makes SC the largest space sim project in history. In terms of alpha progress, Roberts says that CIG will unveil the long-awaited dogfighting module at a special backer-only pre-PAX event. It will be playable "shortly after PAX."
There's much more to the post, including updates from all of CIG's studios, so grab your favorite beverage and click through the links below to get caught up.
Fans of Guild Wars 2's living story villain Scarlet Briar -- all five of you -- will likely be disappointed by the finale launching today in ArenaNet's core MMO, but everyone else will be letting out a big cheer and enjoying some fresh loot piñatas. Marketed as the "final showdown with villain Scarlet Briar," the Battle for Lion's Arch patch will allow players to try to reclaim the beloved capital city that's been under siege for the last two weeks.
Players will engage in a desperate struggle to take back one of the game's most important cities and a major hub for players. The city of Lion's Arch has fallen to a vicious surprise attack from sylvari super villain Scarlet Briar, backed by her army of Tyria's dark forces and an arsenal of war machines. Her weapons of war include the massive airship drill Breachmaker, which continues to bore deep beneath the city's harbor. Under the shadow of this mechanical monstrosity, players must now rally to reenter Lion's Arch to challenge Scarlet's army, and perhaps face the villain herself.
You know you want to see Blizzard's new Heroes of the Storm MOBA in action. Right? Right! Game director Dustin Browder has you covered with a new 17-minute video captured on the Dragon Shire map.
Heroes of the Storm is currently in closed alpha testing, though plenty of screens and playable character info have been sighted in the wild.
Click past the cut to have a look at the gameplay vid!
If you were watching Sunday night's episode of The Walking Dead, you may have noticed a little commercial for Blizzard's Diablo III: Reaper of Souls.
Blizz is certainly no stranger to TV commercials, and this cinematic trailer gives us a glimpse into the good-vs.-evil plot of the new expansion that's set to go live on March 25. You can now update to the pre-patch which already includes plenty of goodies to tide you over before launch, and be sure to watch the commercial included after the jump below.
A recent psychology paper picked up by Slate suggests that maybe there's more to bad behavior on the internet than previously thought. Researchers asked study participants to evaluate what they found most fun about commenting on the internet, then gave those same participants a personality test to determine their levels of sadism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism -- the "dark tetrad" of antisocial personality traits. (One of the agree/disagree statements on the personality exam? "I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.") The researchers found a significant correlation between those who flagged as sadists and those who claimed to enjoy trolling and expressed "sadistic glee at the distress of others."
While the study focused on the 5% of participants who cause comment moderators the most grief on the internet, over here in MMOland I'm wondering whether this study would map equally well to griefers in video games since we might define griefing in a virtual world the same way: causing someone distress because it's pleasurable for the griefer. That guy who ganks your lowbie and corpse camps you for an hour might not be so socially well-adjusted in the real world after all, in spite of what griefer-apologists have been claiming all these years. What do you folks think? Does griefing in MMOs reflect a sinister personality?
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Defiance is going all Old West on us with its next DLC pack, and we've got an up-close look of the update to share with you.
The Gunslinger DLC will take players on a trio of new mission arcs and deliver good-looking Western gear to go along with the theme. The DLC will also include nine additional co-op arenas and a new system of scoring arenas that gives incentives for teams that work together.
Welcome back to No So Massively, where every Monday we round up the highlights from the past week in the world of MOBAs, roguelikes, MMOTCGs, and other games that aren't quite MMOs.
It's time for another EverQuest Next Landmark video dev diary. Your host is EQNL lead systems designer Michael Mann, and he's a got a lot to say about harvesting tools. He enlists a bit of help from lead character artist Kacey Helms, who takes viewers on a journey from in-game axe concept to finished in-game axe model.
Next up is lead animator Aaron Carlson, who shows off mining animations, followed by VFX artist Lisa Charriere, who explains what SOE's thinking in terms of particle effects. Finally, we're treated to a sneak peak of the Pulverizer, which is a new tunneling tool currently in the works. Click past the cut for the full video!
Starting on April 1st, the price to transfer a character between worlds in the game will go from $25 down to $18. Even better, players will no longer have to wait 90 days before utilizing this service again, as the time between transfers will be reduced to a mere three days.
Go ahead and put your April Fools' quip in the comments section. You know you want to do it.
Trion Worlds has today confirmed that its MMORTS-turned-MOBA End of Nations is officially on hold. A spokesperson for the studio sent the following statement to Polygon:
As we informed EON's community last fall, internal development on End of Nations was put on hold in late 2013 while we evaluated potential paths forward for the title. We're currently focusing the company's energy and creativity on Rift, Defiance, Trove, ArcheAge and some new projects that we will be revealing soon.
Last summer, Trion reclaimed the game from developer Petroglyph with the intent to retool it as a MOBA. After Trion's layoffs and restructuring in August, CEO Scott Hartsman told Massively that the team was still working on and evaluating the title.
"We are pleased to announce that as of today, Monday, March 3rd, automated character transfers are available to all players for both Free People and Monsters," Turbine posted on the forums. "This is something you have been requesting for some time, and we are very excited to have the service ready for you now!"
Players can move characters between servers by purchasing transfer tokens through the LotRO Market website. One token is $24.95, three tokens is $69.95, and six tokens is $134.95. Unfortunately the new system will not take Turbine Points, nor will it allow players to transfer between NA and EU servers. Turbine said that players have a "limited time" to request a transfer with Turbine Points by contacting support.
Players who cannot wait to get in on the game, even with placeholder graphics and numerous bugs, should make sure that their Battle.net accounts are up to date and have opted in for the beta. Again, invitations will be extremely limited at first, although the roster of testers will expand as time goes by. If this sounds like your sort of gig, make sure you've opted in, and stay hopeful that Blizzard will grant you a coveted invitation mail.
Steampunk browser MMO City of Steam is landing on, er, Steam today, bringing with it a brand-new server. Says developer Mechanist Games,
Coupled with the latest game version 2.4 ([which] will also be available on the established server), the new server will provide improved team-up function, restructured tourney events, new level content (lvl 50-60), and of course exciting new server event. This time, new server events will become goal-based so that they are capable of benefiting as many players as possible.
The studio tweeted that the Steam launch might be slightly delayed but that developers are "talking with Valve to make the launch ASAP."
[Update: Mechanist has postponed the Steam launch thanks to "critical issues (discovered) when testing (the) live server on the Steam version." The studio promises an update during local business hours.]
Wait a second -- this phase of beta? No, the tweets don't say that there's another beta phase incoming, but that's certainly the implication, which would mean that the game is creeping that much closer to an open beta and a possible release date. So that's good news, although it still doesn't make up for the fact that anyone not already in will be stuck on the outside for the rest of this phase.
Gazillion Entertainment has released Game Update 2.31 for Marvel Heroes, and with it comes a special gift for Mac enthusiasts: closed beta access. Said access will be open to Mac players throughout the rest of the development process until the game's launch later this spring. An open beta is also planned.
Final Fantasy XIV is not World of Warcraft. We are not in urgent need of an ability squish after years of play; you hit level 50 with a pretty reasonable number of abilities. The fact that everything needs to be workable on a PlayStation 3 controller helps discourage button bloat, to boot. But you still wind up with a lot of abilities to use in rapid conjunction and marks to place on various targets as a tank. You can run out of convenient space, in other words.
That's one of the things that macros can help address, but it's not even close to the only thing. You can use your macros to make your rotation tighter, you can combine necessary abilities, you can mark targets, and you can even toss in a text line on every ability use. (But that does get kind of spam-heavy.) So let's look at some simple macros that will make your Final Fantasy XIV experience that much cleaner.
Store closures are part of RadioShack's turnaround plan
New hard drives for mission critical applications
A Chromebook line for Ron Burgandy types who own many leather bound books
New cards from Sapphire keep their cool by using multiple fans
A system in a socket
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's 
