Image: The Verge Steam just removed its forced arbitration policy, opening the door for lawsuits against its parent company, Valve. In an update on Thursday, Steam says its subscriber agreement now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration."Many companies include a forced arbitration clause in their user agreement, waiving a person's right to a trial in court. Arbitration involves settling a dispute outside a legal system before an impartial third party. This method is often faster but may not get the best results for consumers, as arbitrators don't need to consider the law when issuing a decision.Many services put mandatory arbitration agreements in their terms of service, which people may not even read or fully... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Steam Game Recording is officially out of beta and available to all users, giving PC, Mac, and Steam Deck players a built-in way to record and share audio and video from their gaming sessions. It joins many other ways PC gamers have been able to record their highlights, including as a feature of tools like the Xbox Game Bar, Nvidia GeForce, and AMD's Adrenalin.This version of the Steam client is also the first to drop support for Windows 7 and 8 machines, as well as Macs running macOS 10.13 and 10.14 after Valve announced the move at the beginning of this year. Image: Valve After an automatic update, players can start recordings manually using a hotkey (Ctrl + F11 is the default) or set it to trigger automatically,... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge US Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Valve CEO Gabe Newell asking if the company intends to take measures to curtail extremist content on Steam. The letter references a report by the Anti-Defamation League that identified a large number of user accounts and user-created groups that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender- and sexuality-based hate, and other extremist ideologies" on the PC gaming platform.The letter features a high-level view of the kind of hateful content the ADL found on Steam. That includes 40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, with the most prominent being 1488,' shekel,' and white power'." Warner's letter highlights how the apparent preponderance of hateful content... Continue reading...