Morning DLC: Video Games News And Rumors 12/27/13
By Nick Tylwalk
"It’s been a couple of weeks since Valve sent out prototype Steam Machines and Steam Controllers to beta testers. At the same time they released SteamOS to anyone who cared to download and install it.There’s a lot more talk about the Steam Controller itself; this is probably because it’ll work with Windows, as well as with SteamOS (and I assume, Steam on Linux) so there’s a lot more to do with it.One thing I was really interested to hear about is playing a FPS with the Steam Controller. I don’t think any control issue is as polarizing in gaming as mouse & keyboard vs game pad when it comes to first person shooters. Can the Steam Controller convince the mouse & keyboard set to leave their desks and hit the couch for some FPS action?"
"Gaming for Good, a charity established and fronted by celebrity gamer Bachir Boumaaza, aka Athene, has this week passed the significant milestone. At time of writing the group’s tally stands at $10,035,284.If you’ve never come across Gaming For Good before, it works like this: developers and publishers donate games to the charity. Regular folks donating money to get points. The more they donate, the more points they get. Those points can then be spent on the donated games. So in one way they’re really just buying games, but instead of the money going to publishers, it’s going to a good cause."
"For Hui Chen, watching a big game these days doesn’t have anything to do with football.Instead, Chen spends hours on Twitch watching other players stream their video game sessions or catching a major e-sports tournament. And that’s when he’s not broadcasting his own game sessions for others to view.Video gamers like Chen are why Twitch CEO Emmett Shear decided to pivot his San Francisco company’s business strategy. The decision is paying off – since launching at E3 in June 2011, Twitch has grown from 3.2 million unique viewers per month to more than 45 million."