"Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal to bring "Call of Duty" and other Activision games to Nvidia's gaming platform, if the Xbox maker is allowed to complete its much-contested $69 billion acquisition of Activision," reports Reuters. It comes hot on the heels of a 10-year deal with Nintendo that guarantees Nintendo players will get Activision games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity. Reuters reports: Regulators and competitors like Sony have come out hard against the proposed Microsoft-Activision tie-up, and a Nvidia deal could allay concerns by ensuring more ways for consumers to get games controlled by Microsoft. [...] Microsoft President Brad Smith told a news conference on Tuesday he was now more optimistic of getting the Activision acquisition done after the Nvidia deal and a similar arrangement with Nintendo.

Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's GeForce Now segment, said that titles such that "Call of Duty" will not be available on Nvidia's service unless Microsoft acquires Activision but that other Microsoft-owned titles such as "Minecraft" are covered immediately under the 10-year license agreement. "We were a little concerned about it at the beginning," Eisler said of the Microsoft-Activision deal. "But then we reached out to Microsoft, and they were very open about wanting to enable cloud gaming and work with us on a 10-year license agreement. So over time, they made us more and more comfortable with it."

Eisler said Nvidia is not paying Microsoft for access to the titles, which has been the chip company's practice with other gaming companies such as "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Instead, Nvidia's 25 million customers will need to pay Nvidia for access to its cloud gaming platform and pay Microsoft for its games. Nvidia said it now supports the Xbox maker's bid to purchase Activision, but the deal could still be a hard sell with regulators. Smith said he hoped that rival Sony will consider doing the same type of deal with Nvidia.

Microsoft president Brad Smith announced that the company has signed a 10-year deal to bring Xbox games -- including Call of Duty once it is acquired -- to Nintendo players. From a report: The signed deal means Microsoft is living up to its promise to the Federal Trade Commission that it will make Call of Duty available to other platform companies like Nintendo if its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard is approved. Smith said in a tweet, "This is just part of our commitment to bring Xbox games and Activision titles like Call of Duty to more players on more platforms." The binding agreement means that Nintendo players will get the games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity, so they can experience Call of Duty just as Xbox and PlayStation gamers enjoy Call of Duty.

Microsoft said it is committed to providing long-term equal access to Call of Duty to other gaming platforms. The FTC has sued Microsoft for potential antitrust claims, and Microsoft has not yet been able to strike a similar deal with Sony, which is trying to get regulators to quash the deal. The feature parity claim is interesting because I think it means that Microsoft will bring the game to a new Nintendo console that hasn't been announced yet, as such a machine would be able to run the full Call of Duty game. The Nintendo Switch isn't capable of running the full Call of Duty, I believe.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital, the developers of Gran Turismo, developed a new AI agent that is able to race at a world-class level. At the time, the experiment was described in a paper in Nature, where the researchers showed that this AI was not only capable of driving very fast -- something other AI have done in the past -- but also learned tactics, strategy, and even racing etiquette. At the time, GT Sophy -- the name of the AI -- wasn't quite ready for prime time. For example, it often passed opponents at the earliest opportunity on a straight, allowing itself to be overtaken in the next braking zone.

And unlike human players, GT Sophy would try to overtake players with impending time penalties -- humans would just wait for that penalized car to slow to gain the place. But in the intervening year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital have been working on GT Sophy, and tomorrow (February 21), GT Sophy rolls out to Gran Turismo 7 as part of update 1.29, at least for a limited time. Until the end of March, players can try their skills against Sophy in the GT Sophy Race Together mode in a series of races with increasing difficulty levels. There's also a one-versus-one match where you race Sophy in identical cars, so you can see how much slower you are than the AI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Roblox is testing a tool that could accelerate the process of building and altering in-game objects by getting artificial intelligence to write the code. The tool lets anyone playing Roblox create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behavior of those things; and give them new interactive properties by typing what they want to achieve in natural language rather than complex code. "Say I need a gleaming metal sword for an experience I'm creating," says Daniel Sturman, CTO at Roblox. "It should be really easy to create that."

Sturman showed WIRED a new Roblox tool that generates the code needed to create objects and modify their appearance and behavior. In the demo, typing "red pain, reflective metal finish," or "purple foil, crushed pattern, reflective" into a chat window changed the appearance of a sports car in the game. It was also possible to add new game behavior by entering "Blink the headlines every time the user presses 'B,'" and "Make it float." Technology dubbed generative AI has captured attention and investment over the past year by showing that algorithms can produce seemingly coherent text and aesthetically pleasing images when given a short text prompt. The technology relies on AI models trained with lots of data, in the form of text or images scraped from the web, and is also at work in the viral chatbot ChatGPT. Some AI researchers are experimenting with similar techniques for generating video and 3D content, but this is mostly at an early stage.

Sturman says the approach holds promise for Roblox because so many of the games on its platform are made by individuals or small teams. "We have everything on our platform, from studios down to 12-year-olds who have had an incredible idea come out of a summer camp," Sturman says. Roblox says the code-making AI it uses relies on a combination of in-house technology and capabilities from outside sources, although it is not disclosing where from. Currently the company is only training its AI using game content that is in the public domain. Sturman says Roblox will tread carefully to ensure that users do not object to having their creations fed into generative AI algorithms.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund became the largest outside shareholder of Nintendo on Friday, in the latest move by the Gulf state to lower its reliance on oil. From a report: The sovereign wealth fund now owns 8.3% of the Kyoto-based games company, according to a filing, building up a position that stood just above 6% at the start of the year. That puts PIF ahead of Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund and behind only Nintendo's own holding, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is making a concerted push to break into the games and esports industry. Most notably, it set up Savvy Games Group under the PIF umbrella with a $38 billion budget and longtime industry veterans in charge. Savvy this week revealed its first foray into China's games sector with a $260 million investment in a Tencent-backed competitive gaming organizer.

Apple has released the first trailer for its movie Tetris, which tells the extraordinary true story of the struggle between Western publishers, Nintendo, and the Soviet Union itself for the rights to Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzle game. Polygon reports: Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, the gaming entrepreneur who was instrumental in discovering Tetris and securing the console gaming rights, thus enabling its release on Nintendo's then-revolutionary Game Boy handheld. To do so, he had to negotiate directly with the Soviet regime, since Communist law dictated that the game belonged to the people of the Soviet Union (read: the government) rather than Pajitnov himself. All sorts of Cold War skullduggery ensued.

It's an incredible tale that forms the centerpiece of David Sheff's classic book Game Over, which chronicles Nintendo's early rise. The film, directed by Jon S. Baird, seems to take a pretty broad approach to the material, drenching it in '80s pop needle drops, car chases (for some reason), retro game effects reminiscent of the dreadful Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels, and Egerton tearing up as he describes "the perfect game." [...] Tetris will stream on Apple TV Plus from March 31.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority's provisional report on the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition includes an admission from Microsoft that putting games into its Game Pass subscription service cannibalizes sales of those titles. GamesIndustry.biz reports: "Microsoft also submitted that its internal analysis shows a [redacted]% decline in base game sales twelve months following their addition on Game Pass," the CMA noted in its report. That confirmation runs counter to claims Xbox head Phil Spencer made in 2018 that Game Pass boosts sales rather than undermines them.

"When you put a game like Forza Horizon 4 on Game Pass, you instantly have more players of the game, which is actually leading to more sales of the game," Spencer said, adding, "You say, 'Well isn't everyone just going to subscribe for $10 and go play this thing?' But no, gamers find things to play based on what everybody else is playing." Elsewhere in the CMA's report, it cites Microsoft as saying that Activision took a dim view on putting its titles into multi-game subscription services on any platform, believing that "severely cannibalize B2P [buy-to-play] sales, particularly in the case of newer releases."

As Kotaku reported late last week, Valve is preparing a major update for Team Fortress 2. The studio published a rare blog post asking the game's community to submit new content to the Steam Workshop ahead of May 1st. "The last few Team Fortress summer events have only been item updates. But this year [Valve's emphasis], we're planning on shipping a full-on update-sized update -- with items, maps, taunts, unusual effects, war paints and who knows what else?!" Valve said. Engadget reports: By our count, the "as as-yet-unnamed, un-themed, but still very exciting summer-situated (but not summer-themed)" update Valve has planned will go down as TF2's first major content release since the company came out with the Jungle Inferno update in 2017 for the game's 10-year anniversary. Valve has released smaller updates since then mostly to address the botting problem that made it impossible to play the game, but new content additions have been few and far between.

Despite the absence of cryptocurrency ads, this year's Super Bowl still managed some geek-friendly advertisements. There was even a riff on "the classic intro from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the live-action series that ran from 1989-1991," according to Kotaku: the infamous Mario Rap, which advertised Mario's plumbing business (and in its 2023 version featured the URL for a website).

[T]hat website is indeed up and running, and is everything you would hope it would be from a struggling small business servicing the Brooklyn and Queens areas. There's excessive animation, broken image links, a careers page (still under construction, sadly) and even a novelty mouse cursor.
Kotaku's article includes both versions of the rap, along with reactions from Twitter. (Apparently the phone number in the advertisement really works).

There were also several ads from major tech companies. Google purchased a long ad touting their Pixel phone's ability to remove people from photos (starring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat, and Giannis Antetokounmpo), while Workday drew attention to its enterprise-grade finance and HR software with an ad in which actual rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, blues player Gary Clark and members of KISS all urged the software's corporate users to stop calling themselves "rock stars".

Other tech-company ads aired from E*Trade, SquareSpace, and a star-studded Uber One ad in which rapper Puff Daddy auditions singers for their new jingle.

There were also the obligatory celebrity reunions — like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, or the actors from Breaking Bad. But for comic book geeks, a trailer for D.C.'s new movie The Flash included a surprise appearance by Batman — play by both Ben Affleck and by a 71-year-old Michael Keaton, a full 34 years after Keaton played the caped crusader in Tim Burton's 1989 movie Batman. "Worlds collide in The Flash when Barry uses his superpowers to travel back in time in order to change the events of the past," according to a press release cited by People. James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy and new co-CEO of DC Studios, recently said, according to Deadline, that The Flash "is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made." He added that the film's storyline "resets everything" for the franchise.
The last Blockbuster video rental store in America played its own advertising prank during the Super Bowl. They announced their own ad which could only be viewed on their Instagram feed during halftime -- or in person at their store in Bend, Oregon. But, as CNN points out, "the store is also renting VHS copies of it for $2."

And for those geeks concerned about the drawbacks of climate change-fighting vehicles, RAM trucks ran an ad about "Premature Electrification" — for consumers excited about electric vehicles but "lacking the confidence about getting and being able to keep a charge." (Although a disclaimer printed at the bottom of the ad warned "Get excited, but not too excited. Pre-production model shown. Availability in the U.S. expected late 2024. Range lengthening technology to come later.")

"Never before have I seen live service game development summarized so well," quips GamesRadar, summarizing an official tweet Thursday about the game Tom Clancy's The Division 2.

The developers basically had tweeted that The Division 2 "cannot be updated because a recently-delayed seasonal update broke the system used to update the game, so the developers trying to update it have to first update the updater to accept new updates.

"So that they can update it." To recap: the fix for an error that delayed an update resulted in an error that broke the updater which would deliver that update to The Division 2. Consequently, the devs "are unable to make server or client side updates until the build generation system is restored," meaning they can't even extend existing seasonal content to help fill the gap between updates.
"We have good news!" the developers tweeted in an update Friday. "We have successfully created and deployed a server-side update. This is now live and extends Season 10 content. We deeply appreciate your support and patience!"

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for submitting the story

An anonymous reader shares a report: Things aren't looking great for the Microsoft-Activision merger. The EU has issued a statement of objections, the UK's CMA issued a provisional report finding the merger would stifle competition, and the FTC has outright sued to make sure the merger never happens in the US. It seems every major world regulator has a problem with Microsoft and Activision shacking up. It's at this point that most C-suite executives of a major corporation would start hedging their bets, but Sony has started screening Bobby's calls.

"It's funny, Sony's not on the phone to us," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. "In fact, they're not returning our phone calls." In an interview with Fox Business, Kotick talked about the embattled merger and how normally he'd be on the phone with Sony executives talking about new business ventures. That's all changed because of the Microsoft merger.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Hasbro continues to dilute the brand value of its popular Magic: The Gathering card game, according to a Tuesday note from Bank of America, which said that the company faces a steep decline in its share price if it continues to "destroy customer goodwill." The bank reiterated its "Underperform" rating for Hasbro and its $42 price target, which represents potential downside of 29% from current levels. According to BofA, Hasbro continues to over-monetize the brands within its Wizards segment, which includes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. "Within its Wizards segment, Hasbro continues to destroy customer goodwill by trying to over-monetize its brands," Bank of America said. The bank said that while it preannounced negative earnings, the stock is still not de-risked "given a host of outstanding issues." Mainly, Hasbro is attempting to squeeze out as much profit as possible from its Wizards products in the short-term without any thought as to the long-term durability of its brands. And the over monetization is irking customers, according to BofA.

"We remain especially cautious on Hasbro's Wizards segment given its over-monetization of Magic. Wizards recently tried a similar tactic with D&D -- proposing changes to its licensing agreement which led to substantial pushback from the community including calls to boycott the D&D movie," BofA explained. [...] "We've spoken with several players, collectors, distributors and local games stores and have become aware of growing frustration. The primary concern is that Hasbro has been overproducing Magic cards which has propped up Hasbro's recent [earnings] results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand," Bank of America analyst Jason Haas wrote in November. The oversupply of Magic cards means "card prices are falling, game stores are losing money, collectors are liquidating, and large retailers are cutting orders," Bank of America explained. The bank names "weak fan engagement with Hasbro's brands" and "fading appetite for Magic releases" as key downside risks for the stock.

Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard will harm competition in the UK gaming market, Britain's antitrust watchdog provisionally warned, saying it could force the selloff of the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said it took an initial view that the deal could result in a substantial lessening in competition, higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation for UK gamers, according to a statement published Wednesday. Microsoft first announced the Activision deal last year, looking to add games like Call of Duty to a business that already includes the Xbox console, the Halo franchise and Minecraft world-building software.

But the tie-up has fallen foul of global regulators who fear that Microsoft could make it harder for rival platforms to get unfettered access to Activision's most popular titles. The British agency has suggested a number of structural remedies that include the divestiture of the business associated with Call of Duty, the Activision part of the business or blocking the merger altogether. The CMA also said it would consider a behavioral remedies that would promise rivals can access to Call of Duty, although it flagged concerns about its ability to manage these.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: The month before Dwarf Fortress was released on Steam (and Itch.io), the brothers Zach and Tarn Adams made $15,635 in revenue, mostly from donations for their 16-year freeware project. The month after the game's commercial debut, they made $7,230,123, or 462 times that amount....

Tarn Adams noted that "a little less than half will go to taxes," and that other people and expenses must be paid. But enough of it will reach the brothers themselves that "we've solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people." It also means that Putnam, a longtime modder and scripter and community member, can continue their work on the Dwarf Fortress code base, having been hired in December.

The "issues of health/retirement" became very real to the brothers in 2019 when Zach had to seek treatment for skin cancer. The $10,000 cost, mostly covered through his wife's employer-provided insurance, made them realize the need for more robust sustainability. "You're not just going to run GoFundMes until you can't and then die when you're 50," Tarn told The Guardian in late 2022. "That is not cool." This realization pushed them toward a (relatively) more accessible commercial release with traditional graphics, music, and tutorials.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Over the years, King of Kong star Billy Mitchell has seen his world-record Donkey Kong scores stripped, partially reinstated, and endlessly litigated, both in actual court and the court of public opinion. Through it all, Mitchell has insisted that every one of his records was set on unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware, despite some convincing technical evidence to the contrary.

Now, new photos from a 2007 performance by Mitchell seem to show obvious modifications to the machine used to earn at least one of those scores, a fascinating new piece of evidence in the long, contentious battle over Mitchell's place in Donkey Kong score-chasing history.

The photos in question were taken at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention, which hosted Mitchell as part of its "80s Arcade Night" promotion in July 2007. Mitchell claims to have achieved a score of 1,050,200 points at that event, a performance that was recognized by adjudicator Twin Galaxies as a world record at the time (but which by now would barely crack the top 30). In his defamation case against Twin Galaxies, Mitchell includes testimony from several purported witnesses to his FAMB performance. That includes former Twin Galaxies referee Todd Rogers (who was later also banned from Twin Galaxies), who testified that the machine used at the event was "an original Nintendo Donkey Kong Arcade machine as I have known since 1981."

But the pictures from the FAMB convention, made public by fellow high-score-chaser David Race last month, raise additional questions about that claim, thanks to what Race calls a "glaringly non-original joystick" seen in the machine shown in those photos.

Earlier this week NME reported: With an update to Ubisoft Connect, Ubisoft has broken Steam Deck and Linux compatibility for a number of its biggest games including The Division 2 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. As reported by GamingOnLinux, the compatibility issues were caused by Ubisoft issuing an update for its Ubisoft Connect launcher. Even if Ubisoft's titles are bought through Steam, they still launch with Ubisoft Connect and require a connection with the third-party launcher to run.
"Thankfully, Steam Deck users have already figured out that updating the device's Proton Experimental version and switching all Ubisoft games to use it resolves the issue," added GameRant.

But Gaming on Linux described the incident as third-party launchers on Steam "once again being a massive nuisance." Why do developers and publishers keep forcing these absolutely useless third-party launchers on us? Never once have I, or anyone I've spoken to, actually wanted them. They only ever cause problems and solve basically nothing that Steam cannot already do directly.
And PC Gamer agrees: This is yet another example of frustrating third-party launchers only making everyone's lives more difficult. I don't even want to know Ubisoft Connect exists, let alone have it flash up in my face and not be able to play my games because it's not working properly. I understand these companies want my data but you're supposed to be sneakier and better at getting it than this by now.

More than 30 years ago Nintendo released the third game in its Legend of Zelda series — appropriately titled, "A Link to the Past."

This week Neowin called it "one of the most beloved video games of all time," reporting that it's now been reverse-engineered by a GitHub user named Snesrev, "opening up the possibility of Link to the Past on other platforms, like Sega's 32X or the Sony Playstation." This reimplementation of Link to the Past is written in C and contains an astonishing 80,000 lines of code. This version is also content complete, with all the same levels, enemies, and puzzles that fans of the original game will remember.

In its current state, the game requires the PPU and DSP libraries from LakeSNES, a fast SNES emulator with a number of speed optimizations that make the game run faster and smoother than ever before. Breaking from the LakeSNES dependency, which allows for compatibility on modern operating systems, would allow the code to be built for retro hardware. It also offers one of the craziest features I have seen in a long time; the game can run the original machine code alongside the reverse-engineered C implementation. This works by creating a save-state on both versions of the game after every frame of gameplay, comparing their state and proving that the reimplementation works.... Snesrev now works alongside 19 other contributors.

Despite the immense amount of work that went into this project, the result is brilliant. Not only does the game play just like the original, it also includes a number of new features that were not present in the original. For example, the game now supports pixel shaders, which allow for even more stunning visuals. It also supports widescreen aspect-ratios, giving players a wider field of view, making the game even more immersive on modern displays. Another new feature of this reimplementation is the higher quality world map. The new map is much more detailed and gives players a better sense of the world they are exploring....

The amount of time, effort, and talent that went into creating this is simply astonishing.
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the article.

Electronic Arts announced it is canceling its Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile games. And as a result, it is shutting down its Industrial Toys game studio. From a report: Apex Legends Mobile debuted last year, bringing Respawn Entertainment's hot Apex Legends shooter game to mobile devices. It won Apple's Game of the Year for 2022 as well as the same for Google Play. Now the game will shut down in 90 days. Battlefield Mobile was in soft launch, but it will also end. In a blog post, Respawn Entertainment cited slipping quality for Apex Legends Mobile's updates as a reason for shutting down the title. EA made the announcement as it released earnings for the third fiscal quarter ended December 31.

Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations." Ars Technica reports: The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just 1 million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report. The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC.

The Quest 2 has a few key advantages in the competition with Sony's upcoming headset, including an asking price that's $150 less, even after a recent price hike. The self-contained Quest 2 also doesn't need to be tethered to any external hardware, contrasting with the PSVR2's reliance on a hookup to a $499 PlayStation 5. Despite the Quest 2's success at its relatively low price, though, the VR industry at large seems to be moving toward the higher end of the pricing spectrum these days. Meta's Quest Pro launched last October at a bafflingly high $1,499, though a one-week sale has slashed that price by $400 for the moment. And next month's standalone Vive XR Elite will cost $1,099.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Jack Wallen: PikaOS is very similar to that of Nobara Linux, which opts for a Fedora base. But what are these two Linux distributions? Simply put, they are Linux for gamers. [...] So, what does PikaOS do that so many other distributions do not? The most obvious thing is that it makes it considerably easier to install the tools needed to play games. Upon first logging in, you're greeted with a Welcome app. In the First Steps tab, you have quick access to tools for updating the system, installing patented codecs and libraries, installing propriety Nvidia drivers, installing apps from the Software Manager, and installing WebApps.

Next comes the Recommended Additions, where you can install the likes of: PikaOS Game Utilities is a meta package that installs Steam, Lutris, GOverlay, MangoHud, Wine, Winetricks, vkBasalt, and other gaming-centric tools; Microsoft TrueType fonts for better Windows font emulation; Blender for creating 3D images; OBS Studio for streaming; Kdenlive for non-linear video editing; Krita for painting; and LibreOffice for productivity. In the Optional Steps tab, you can add AMD proprietary drivers, ROCm drivers, Xone drivers, and Proton GE (for Steam and Wine compatibility). Finally, the Look And Feel tab allows you to customize themes, layouts, and extensions. The layouts section is pretty nifty, as it allows you to configure the GNOME desktop to look and feel like a more traditional desktop, a MacOS-like desktop, a Windows 11 layout, a throwback GNOME 2 desktop, and even a Ubuntu Unity-like desktop.

As far as pre-installed software goes, it's pretty bare bones (until you start adding titles from the Recommended Additions tab in the Welcome App). You'll find Firefox (web browser), Geary (email), Pidgin (messaging), Weather, Calculator, Cheese (web camera software), Rhythmbox, Contacts, a few utilities, and basic games. However, installing new apps is quite simple via the Software Manager app. Of course, the focus of PikaOS is games. When you install the PikaOS Game Utilities, you'll get Steam installed, which makes it easy to play an endless array of games on the Linux desktop. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you launch the PikaOS Game Utilities installation, it opens a terminal window to run the installation. Give this plenty of time to complete and, in the end, you can launch Steam, log in to your Steam account, and start playing. Just remember, the first time you launch the Steam app, it will take a moment to update and configure. But once it's up and running... let the games begin.