ValveTime

Following up on the success of their major tournaments in 2011 and 2012, Valve has today announced "The International 3" for Dota 2, which is set to be hosted in Seattle in August 2013. Similarly to previous years, the International 3 will feature the top 16 Dota 2 teams from all corners of the globe in a massive tournament, all of whom are fighting to win a grand prize of $1,000,000.


The tournament was unveiled earlier today via an announcement page and accompanying post on the Dota 2 blog. While both of these sources are particularly light on information, Valve have promised that more teams and information will be revealed in the coming days. At time of writing, Chinese team Invictus Gaming are currently the only confirmed team to appear on the tournament page after having secured their place as the 2012 International 2 champions. The event, which is scheduled to take place between the 7th and 11th of August 2013, will be held at the Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Washington, which is the same venue used for last year's International 2 tournament. 12 of the remaining teams will be added to the tournament roster in the near future via invites from Valve while the last 3 team slots will be selected through a pair of qualifier tournaments set to take place in May. The winners of each tournament will receive a guaranteed space in the tournament and the runners up from both qualifiers must fight one another to determine which team will become the tournament's "Wild Card" team.

We can also confirm that Valve can officially use the number 3! As usual, stay tuned to ValveTime for all the latest news as we learn more.

Valve have officially announced functionality for subscription-based billing services within Steam. While the Steam Store already contains a sizable library of subscription-based games, Subscription Plans will, for the first time, allow developers to offer users the ability to make regular payments without the need for a second, external account.

The news came alongside the release of the greenlit Fantasy MMO Darkfall: Unholy Wars, which will be the first release to make use of the new system. Valve also stated that "additional subscription-based games" will follow, and included a full FAQ on the Steam Support page.

UPDATE: Cry of Fear has since been released on Steam as a free to download mod as originally planned. You can find it over on Steam at this cleverly placed link.

You may have noticed that promised release of the Half-Life 1 mod Cry of Fear on Steam didn't happen today. According to a post on the Cry of Fear Facebook page this is because Valve thought the team wanted to charge for it when they in fact wanted it to remain free. They're currently in discussions with Valve to resolve the issue and hope they will still be able to release it for free.

The memorable Xenian sound dog from Half-life 1 has reappeared on Valve's horizon in the form of a courier for Dota 2. As with all couriers in Dota 2, the Houndeye has a walking and flying model, the latter of which does look a little ridiculous.

For those of you hoping this is a Half-life 3 pre-order bonus, you should be aware Half-life already has a tie-in to Dota 2 in the form of the Dr Kleiner Announcement Pack and Half-life is seemingly no closer than before! (Image: balladofwindfishes)

I think a lot of people have been wanting this one for a while. A new Steam client beta update adds an option to limit the rate at which games are downloaded. This should help with cases where Steam hogs a user's bandwidth and prevents them from using other internet services while downloading games with Steam. To opt into the beta look for the beta participation section in the Account tab of your Steam settings. Once you've downloaded the beta the limiter setting can be found in Settings -> Downloads and lets you set limits between 128 Kbps and 250 Mbps or no limit at all.