Pity the poor Pyro from Team Fortress 2. He (or she—or it) simply wants his rivals to join him in the splendor of “Pyroland,” but his delirious kindness actually leads him to burn up everyone and everything he encounters. But now you can take home one piece of Pyroland without winding up in a burn ward afterwards: The bouncy, fluffy Balloonicorn.

Valve has announced the sixth batch of Greenlight games to make the transition to Steam. With 18 games in total – as well as two pieces of software – it’s one of the biggest groups yet.

Have you ever wanted to be a video game tester? I mean, playing all those new games before anyone else just seems like the best job in the world (except for writing about games, that is!). Well if you’re a Steam user, then today is your lucky day. 

The OUYA’s Kickstarter campaign hit its lofty $950,000 goal in only eight hours. The Gamestick, a competitor to the OUYA, had no trouble reaching its goal, either. Not long after, both Valve and Nvidia announced they would be releasing devices that simplified the process of playing PC games on a TV. Change is coming soon to the console market, and based on everything mentioned above, it’s clear microconsoles will be leading the charge. To learn more about what we as consumers can expect in the months and years ahead, we reached out to Tadhg Kelly, author of the What Games Are blog and creative director at Jawfish Games.

In their ongoing quest to dominate the world of PC-based game distribution, powerhouse Half-Life creator and hardware developer Valve has announced that the company’s popular Steam client is now available on Linux. Steam can be downloaded for free through the Ubuntu Software Center, which has proven to be the most popular distribution method for Linux users in the past.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has a grand idea of where the Steam platform should go. He finds the store as it is to be “really boring,” and would like to see users play a bigger role in both the creation and curation of content. He’s also dissatisfied with how Greenlight operates, and hopes to do away with it completely. But this only touches on the surface of what Newell would like to see changed, and he recently outlined his hopes for the platform in a talk at the University of Texas.

Living room gaming will no doubt change quite a bit over the next few years. Sony and Microsoft will release their new consoles, sure, but they’ll be up against a whole new cast of competitors, such as Android-based consoles like the OUYA and the forthcoming third- and first-party Steam Boxes. And while Microsoft and Sony are surely quivering in their boots at the potential of the Steam Box, the feeling isn’t necessary mutual: as far as Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is concerned, the real threat here is Apple.

We at Gamezebo are big fans of Steam’s Greenlight service, as evidenced by our recurring Greenlight Spotlight feature. So whenever Valve announces that a new batch of games are heading to Steam, we throw confetti around and binge on cupcakes. This is the fourth time we’ve done this, and boy do our stomachs hate us.

As everyone knows, Steam is powered by a weird form of arcane magic that puts games on sale the day after you purchase them at full price. It's been this way since roughly 8,000 B.C., and there was little reason to think it would ever change. But a website called Steam Alerts has taken a significant step towards ending this madness, allowing people to set up alerts for when the games they want go on sale at (or below) a price of their choosing.

It wasn’t so long ago that the Steam Box seemed like an idyllic dream. But then, seemingly out of the blue, Valve CEO Gabe Newell revealed that the company would in fact be making one, and so would third-party companies. Yesterday at CES, Xi3 Corporation made good on the latter half of Newell’s announcement, unveiling a Steam-enabled box for use in the living room.