Valve’s cool new tech can make games sound more realistic than ever with minimal effort

Gaming giant Valve has just released Steam Audio, a free toolkit for developers to add realistic spatial effects for sounds in their games. In the company’s own words, “Steam Audio adds physics-based sound propagation on top of HRTF-based binaural audio, for increased immersion.” That means that when you’re in a game environment, you’ll hear sounds as they bounce off surfaces, travel through space, and reverberate as they would in the real world – instead of