The European Commission just announced that they've now issued formal fines against Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax for breaching their antitrust rules. An investigation that has been going on for some time now since early 2017, and certainly not the first fine Valve has dealt with for breaking some rules here.

What's the deal? The EU say that Valve and the others restricted cross-border sales on the basis of their location inside the European Economic Area (‘EEA'). To put it simply: Valve allowed certain developers and publishers to block keys being redeemed in one country, that were purchased in another (where it might have been cheaper). Out of all those named, Valve is the only company that did not cooperate with their investigation and so they got slapped a lot harder.

The EU Commission made this handy chart for the issue:

Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "More than 50% of all Europeans play video games. The videogame industry in Europe is thriving and it is now worth over € 17 billion. Today's sanctions against the "geo-blocking" practices of Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales. Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU".

The fines:

For a company as big as Valve (and the likes of ZeniMax), they won't be losing any sleep over fines that for them will most likely be a drop in the ocean. Valve especially, as the Steam store pretty much prints money for them.

You can see the full announcement here .

By now you've probably heard either through us in our previous article or elsewhere that Valve are cooking something up to help Linux gaming even further. We have an idea on what one part of it is.

Valve already do quite a lot. There's the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, the new container runtime feature to have Linux games both natively supported and Windows games in Proton run through a contained system to ensure compatibility, their work on Mesa drivers and much more.

In Valve's review of Steam in 2020 that we covered in the link above, one thing caught our eye and has been gaining attention. Valve mentioned for 2021 they will be "putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" so what exactly does that mean? Well, a big part of that might have already been suggested directly.

Back in November 2019, the open source consulting firm Collabora presented an overview of the work they have been doing funded by Valve. Towards the end of the talk they mentioned ongoing work towards foolproof and fast instant upgrades of Linux systems. Collabora mentioned it could work for specialised systems like consoles or other systems where you don't expect users to be highly technical. Leading into that, a Valve developer posted on Reddit to clarify more details around this:

The image-based updater work is part of a set of efforts to attempt to improve the experience of trying out Linux on a normal PC with live USB media, and instantly updating said media from the other OS without losing user data. There's no "locking down" involved, as it can easily be disabled by the user to fall back to the normal package manager.

Linux has long been able to run directly from USB drives but what about the next stage of this evolution? That appears to be what Valve are hinting at in their 2020 review blog post.

Imagine if you will for a moment: a SteamOS-style USB stick, that's highly optimized for Linux gaming, with drivers ready to go and Steam pre-configured with everything it needs all direct from Valve and also this special update system to ensure it keeps on working. Now add in some pre-configured persistence so your games, files and so on stay on it and that sure sounds like a new way for users to get into and experience Linux gaming doesn't it? Steam Machines didn't work, so a way to properly experience Linux gaming in full on hardware people already own? That could certainly work.

That could be a much more interesting way to actually market and advertise Linux gaming too. It's not enough to have Linux distributions be fast and stable, and to have plenty of games available to play otherwise we would already be in a better position as a platform. The conversation changes with such an easy to use way to get involved. Burn it to a USB stick, load it on your PC and login to Steam, download a game and away you go — you're now gaming on Linux .

USB drives have been ridiculously cost effective in the last few years too, along with plenty of USB3 options now existing for the speed and you can get quite a lot of storage on them so it would be a pretty interesting move.

Over to you in the comments, what are your thoughts?

We know that Source 2 from Valve is a pretty capable game engine, and we've seen what they've been able to do with it over the years (and Half-Life: Alyx turned it up a notch) but what's next? Ray Tracing perhaps.

It's not a whole lot to go on but Artifact, the card-game failure from Valve that's currently going through a complete overhaul continues to be upgraded and SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik spotted something interesting that they posted up on Twitter :

What they found mentions "Raytracing Shader" and "RTX", which is pretty damn clear. The full link to all the new bits mentions plenty of other things too including Vulkan API additions.

To what end though? Where will this be going into Valve games? It doesn't really seem like a fit for Artifact, and the constant rumours of CS:GO moving over to Source 2 probably still wouldn't give it Ray Tracing either since it's a highly competitive game and it needs a level playing field. Then again, it would still be thoroughly interesting to see in action no matter what.

So what do you think this could be for? Perhaps just as a side-effect of Artifact developers pulling in newer code over all Source 2 updates, that Valve are working on overall to be available somewhere else? Half-Life: Alyx already looked pretty fantastic (from footage I've seen, no VR kit here), imagine how that would look with Ray Tracing added in.

Valve along with PGL have announced the return of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's next Major Championship that will take place this year in Sweden.

Not only has competitive esport CS:GO returned, it's coming back with a bang too. This will be the biggest single prize pool in CS:GO history with twenty four teams competing for 2 million dollars USD. Not only that, this will also be the first event that is broadcast live in 4K resolution. The main event will be during November 4-7, so they're leaving enough time to hopefully see COVID-19 get a little more under control as this will be an in-person event with a live audience.

"First of all, my colleagues and I are passionate fans of CS. We grew up and watched this game getting bigger and bigger, just at the same pace as our development as a company. We have timeless memories with our past Counter-Strike shows, and, honestly, we owe a lot to this game, as players and as a company. We believe that this community deserves the best product this franchise has ever seen. Our goal is to celebrate the game in the best way possible, and we will work hard for this" - Silviu Stroie, CEO PGL.

Teams will be picked based on progress through a series of Regional Major Ranking (RMR), these will be online to begin with and eventually an offline in-person event for each region before the Major begins.

More info on the event here .

You can play CS:GO free on Linux from Steam .

The Proton compatibility layer for running Windows games on Steam for Linux has levelled up some more with the latest Proton 5.13-5 now available to everyone.

Pulling in some of the bigger changes from the Proton Experimental testing area, it has some impressive increased compatibility. You will find that Red Dead Online and the online features directly in Red Dead Redemption 2 will now work. This is something we showcased before which you can see below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Here's what else is new apart from that:

• Previously in Experimental: Support new OpenXR virtual reality API. Microsoft Flight Simulator's VR mode is now usable on AMD hardware
• Previously in Experimental: Update vkd3d-proton to v2.1.
• Previously in Experimental: Fixed world sounds in Cyberpunk 2077.
• Fix hangs or crashes in Gears Tactics, Fallout 76, Kingdoms Reborn, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, and Conan Exiles.
• Screenshot function is now usable in Fallout 76 and Path of Exile.
• Most games will now stop accepting input while the Steam game overlay is up.
• Fix missing text in Lumberjack's Destiny.
• Fix display resolution issue in DLC Quest and other XNA games.

You can find the full changelog on GitHub . It will appear in your Steam client as an update for Proton 5.13.

Need help with Steam Play Proton? Check out our dedicated area .

With 2020 done and out the way, Valve have put up a 'Year in Review' post highlighting a bunch of facts about what people were doing on Steam and some of the numbers are pretty surprising.

Going over their past Year in Review posts for 2018 and 2019, it shows that Steam is growing nicely. 2018 saw 90 million monthly active users, 2019 saw 95 million monthly active and 2020 jumped a lot up to 120 million monthly active users. That's a pretty huge jump for one year, likely down to the COVID-19 lockdowns across various countries.

To put that into some perspective for the Linux side of things. If we take the December 2020 Linux user share on Steam as reported by the Steam Hardware Survey (0.78%) that gives us a figure of about 939,120 Linux monthly active users - which we note at the bottom of our Steam Tracker . Quite close to 1 million then!

Is Linux growing then? Well, obviously yes it is overall but not dramatically so - more of a slow and steady build up. If we take the 2018 numbers of 90 million, with the Linux share back in December 2018 of 0.82% it would have been 738,000. So we've added around 201,120 users between Dec 18 and Dec 20. None of that is exact of course, we're guesstimating based on the share Valve gives out in their surveys.

Linux and the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer got a mention too which is always good to see:

Throughout 2020, work continued on Steam Play and extending Proton , our runtime for seamlessly running existing Steam games on Linux without additional developer work. We released Proton 5 , which supported many new games, improved performance, and introduced support for DX12 and EA Origin games on Steam. For a full list of changes, see our changelog .

We also saw an increase in developers engaging with Valve for early Proton testing during their game development, and fixing Proton-specific issues post-release. All in all, this resulted in exciting new releases this year such as DEATH STRANDING , Horizon: Zero Dawn , and Cyberpunk 2077 being playable on Linux at or shortly after release.

It's still amazing that Valve do actually put all this effort in for Linux with Proton, and all their other contracted developers to work on other parts of Linux from GPU drivers to the new container runtime system. Lots going on for Linux overall when it comes to gaming.

Looking to the future for Linux, Valve stated their clear intention to continue supporting Linux and not just with what's already mentioned. They said they're "putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" - which sounds pretty exciting. What do you think Valve are cooking up to further Linux gaming? After all, I've long said they must have some real goals with all this work since Steam Machines / SteamOS didn't go far.

Through 2020 the Steam store expanded a bit too through features like the Points Shop, Text and Chat Filtering systems for both the Steam community areas and for developers to use in their games, the News Hub, support for Subscriptions and more.

VR seems to be doing quite well too, with Valve seeing 1.7 million first-time users of SteamVR through 2020. Valve has also been regularly pushing out upgrades to SteamVR and it's steadily become much more stable. On the subject of hardware, they saw a 66.6% increase in gamepad use over 2019 - showing to developers that well tested gamepad support can often be essential.

All in all, a really big year for Valve and Steam. You can see their full post here with lots of details.

A fresh update to Proton Experimental has gone live, the special version of the Proton compatibility layer where all the latest features appear first. Seems like quite a big one, especially if you have a VR kit.

Need more info on what Steam Play and Proton are? It's a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows games on Linux. See our dedicated page for more.

In the update released January 7, Proton Experimental gained support for the new OpenXR virtual reality API which now means that Microsoft Flight Simulator can work in VR mode with compatible headsets and they specifically mention "AMD hardware.

Gamepad support has been improved too with hotplugging working nicer with Subnautica, many other Unity titles and DOOM (2016). Yakuza: Like a Dragon should also see improved Xbox controller support. Additionally they now support setting thread priorities via RTKit, or Unix priorities if your user has permissions.

That's all on top of the existing additions in Proton Experimental. Here's the full list of what's in it now:

• Beginnings of Wine architectural work to reduce CPU overhead and improve performance in scenarios related to input and windowing.
• Memory allocator performance improvements.
• Implemented the Spatial Audio sound API, fixing Cyberpunk 2077 world sounds.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to 2.1, fixing Cyberpunk 2077 facial animations.
• Improvements for non-US keyboard layouts.
• Better support for Red Dead Online, Kingdoms Reborn, and Anno 1404 - History Edition.
• Improved video support, including infrastructure work for supporting video playback from Media Foundation. You may see test pattern videos. This is normal.
• Support new OpenXR virtual reality API. Microsoft Flight Simulator's VR mode is now usable on AMD hardware.
• Support setting thread priorities via RTKit, or Unix priorities if your user has permissions.
• Improvements to controller hotplugging in Subnautica and other Unity titles; and DOOM (2016).
• Improvements to Xbox controller support in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
• All other changes from 5.13-4.

While Steam as a gaming platform is facing ever increasing competition, Valve likely aren't too worried given how much Steam has been growing over 2020 and into 2021.

After setting a new concurrent user record of 24,804,148 in December 2020, that was once again smashed on January 2, 2021 with 25,415,080 user accounts online but only 7.4 million were actually in-game (thanks SteamDB ). It's not exactly a surprise, with multiple user records for both Steam and games being broken through 2020 with many more staying at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The top dog on Steam remains as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve's first-person shooter originally released back in 2012. It obviously helps that it went free to play back in late 2018 which helped keep its popularity and since the pandemic really hit, the numbers for CS:GO have repeatedly hit new highs.

It will definitely be interesting to see how the Steam playerbase evolves through 2021, especially if we see Valve release one of those secret projects they teased before. Hopefully one that's more available to everyone and not a VR-only title like Half-Life: Alyx, since the cost of VR is still rather high. Considering they're a private company though, they can do and work on whatever they want.

Another season another big Steam sale, is your wallet prepared? There's plenty of huge discount going on right now for you to take a look at. Plus to save you a click - there's a new Codemasters Humble Bundle.

With this latest Steam sale live until January 5, 2021, developers have put up thousands of games for discount. Plus, Valve has added new seasonal items to the Points Shop. Not only that, the Points and Profile system on Steam has now been expanded. You can upgrade your Steam Profile showcases to get more room, you can get additional profile showcases and there's new award types too for actual Steam Profiles and community posts. Read more on that here .

For the discounts, we've rounded up some we consider to be great purchases for a Linux gamer:

• Two Point Hospital - a modern take on Theme Hospital from some of the original team (75% off - highest discount yet).
• Pikuniku - an absurdly wonderful puzzle-exploration game, it's bizarre but brilliant (75% off)
• Streets of Rogue - an open-world roguelite action game with tons of character classes, lots to unlock and it's just absolutely fantastic (71% off - highest discount yet).
• Mainframe Defenders - it's a genuinely good turn-based tactical battler with a retro terminal theme (60% off)
• Baba's Sausage Expedition - this bundle includes the excellent A Monster's Expedition, Stephen's Sausage Roll and Baba is You (56% off together!).
• Fort Triumph - a brilliant XCOM-style turn-based strategy with environment interactions and a HOMM exploration style (50% off).
• Opus Magnum - to this day it remains as one of my favourite games from Zachtronics (50% off).
• Dicey Dungeons - a roguelike dungeon crawling deck-builder…with dice! (50% off).
• Hellpoint - it's a Souls-like in space. Brutal combat but a huge amount of fun to explore (40% off - highest discount yet).

See all the discounts over on Steam .

As for Humble Bundle, they're doing something of a rehash. They've put up the Codemasters bundle again under the name of The Humble Codemasters Racing ReBundle 2020 which has the likes of Overlord II, DiRT Rally, DiRT 4, DiRT Rally 2 and more. Still a pretty good deal and it's going until January 5, 2021.