The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Outlander]

Damn, Divinity: OS2 still up there

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/2/1...ller-of-shovelware-pulls-out-of-game-business

Steam’s biggest seller of shovelware pulls out of game business
“This situation has completely destroyed everything we have been working for,” developer says

After Valve pulled more than 200 of the company’s titles off Steam last week, notorious “fake game” seller Silicon Echo Studios tells Polygon that it has been forced to leave the development industry.

Valve pulled Silicon Echo’s entire catalog from Steam last week after users reported that its games were examples of “asset flipping,” or games made on a shoestring budget with pre-made assets, which are then sold cheaply with the purpose of turning a profit through the Steam trading card marketplace.

In an email to Polygon, a representative for Silicon Echo spoke out against Valve’s decision to abruptly remove the studio’s games from the storefront.

“The only information we have been given is that our games were consistently at the top of user reported titles primarily for practices that are deceptive to the customers,” Silicon Echo said. “This did not fully explain the reason for complete account and business termination, so naturally we sent an email to Valve politely asking some additional questions.”

Silicon Echo shared its email to Valve with Polygon. The studio had never received a warning from Valve until its games were removed from Steam, according to the email; Silicon Echo also claims that it is a separate company from Zonitron Productions, another developer whose games were removed and which YouTuber SidAlpha alleged is a front for Silicon Echo. You can read a portion of the email to Valve below:

Silicon Echo is an account completely separated from Zonitron Productions even though it is connected in some ways and while Zonitron Productions got a warning about some developer naming issues, Silicon Echo didn't get a warning of that or any other nature ever. We do not believe that we have been deceiving or lying to our and your customers in any way — all of our games' descriptions were describing the games exactly how they are and the same thing is with the screenshots and trailers which were taken directly from the gameplays of our games. We never insulted any of the customers on the Steam forums or banned them without any reason absconding to answer truthfully about the games. Everyone who has ever bought our games did it by their own choice and everybody knew exactly what they were buying. People who are calling us asset flippers are correct only partially because we always made our own levels using the basic assets provided for us when we bought the asset kit and all of the kits had licenses allowing us to use them in commercial purposes. We have all the required bills to confirm our purchases on the Unity Asset Store.

That being said, it was impossible for us to ever know that there were some problems with our games mostly because a great number of games sent for reviews were being approved on daily basis (EVEN ON THE SAME DAY YOU HAVE SENT US THE EMAIL ABOUT TERMINATING OUR BUSINESS). Another thing is — why did all the older games which passed Greenlight by the choice of Valve Business Team and Steam users also get banned now? And why were they even approved and greenlit in the first place if there were problems with them all along?​

Customers have criticized the Steam Greenlight program and its successor, Steam Direct, for having lax approval processes and being easy to abuse. The number of games allowed onto the platform has boomed in recent years, with low-quality or questionable software making it onto the marketplace with apparent ease. Silicon Echo’s extensive library — the studio published the majority of its games in the last three months alone — stood as emblematic of this problem, even those who admitted to picking up the titles for cheap or free as a means of flipping their trading cards for cash.

Even as it defends itself, Silicon Echo admitted that some of its business practices were questionable.

“We are no heroes, we have indeed sometimes been conducting our business with some practices people may call shady,” the studio said. “For example, creating more developer names even though they were on the same account and listed under the same publisher. This was done primarily for easier statistical tracking as we did not believe it to be a problem since all the games were publicly listed under the same publisher and there was no deception included.”

Valve’s decision to erase Silicon Echo’s entire collection from Steam will have long-ranging ramifications, according to the studio. Not only will this prove to other studios that getting the go-ahead from Valve to publish on Steam may come with caveats, it wrote, but it could tank an entire indie company’s business.

“This situation has completely destroyed everything we have been working for in the past 3 years and we are forced to give up game development at this point for more that [sic] one reason,” Silicon Echo said. “Mainly because our reputation is destroyed beyond repair, but also for financial reasons. We wish we have been warned about this before, in that case we would focus on a different business plan of development.”

 

[gaussgunner]

People who are calling us asset flippers are correct only partially because we always made our own levels using the basic assets provided for us when we bought the asset kit and all of the kits had licenses allowing us to use them in commercial purposes. We have all the required bills to confirm our purchases on the Unity Asset Store.

Wow, creative.

Good to see Valve seems serious about policing blatant abuse of Steam Direct. I wonder if they'll go beyond trading card scammers.

 

[Thane Solus]

steam direct, works as intended guys, it only needs some human interaction (after many users complained) when somebody posts 200 clones.

GG Valve you POS company.

 

[LESS T_T]

Valve doing some "least" quality control:

Spoiler

• 691840 Removed store name – Halloweenistry
• about 5 hours ago697790 Removed store name – Christmastry 2
• about 5 hours ago707780 Removed store name – Catistry
• about 5 hours ago697780 Removed store name – Thanksgivingistry
• about 5 hours ago697820 Removed store name – Halloweenistry 2
• about 5 hours ago697830 Removed store name – Winteristry
• about 5 hours ago668860 Removed store name – Christmastry
• about 5 hours ago707800 Removed store name – Zooistry
• about 5 hours ago707790 Removed store name – Dogistry

http://steamcommunity.com/games/668850/announcements/detail/1465217836059341024

Hello everyone. We have been informed by Steam that they would like for us to fold all the Istrys into Cubistry as DLC. In order to make this transition happen we've requested that all other Istrys which are currently available on Steam be retired and that Steam customers who purchased the other Istrys are given a refund if possible. If that is directly not possible then we plan on figuring out a way to pay them back some how. We will share more information as they become available. Thank you and we look forward to serving you in this new way.

Sincerely,

Hohng LLC

This developer released several games with (seemingly) same gameplay but different skins.

Low effort yeah, but they don't look like shady as ones profiting from trading cards. They don't do trading cards and don't have absurd amount of achievements.

 

[vdweller]

Goodbye asset flippers, you won't be missed. I only hope that this will, in the long run, will help devs who put real effort in their games.

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) have some fresh new entries:

#10 - Call of Duty: WWII
#9 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#8 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate
#7 - The Guild 3
#6 - Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
#5 - Grand Theft Auto V
#4 - Cuphead
#3 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#2 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) are headed by cups (let's ignore PUBG):

#10 - Battle Chasers: Nightwar
#9 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#8 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#7 - Dying Light
#6 - Grand Theft Auto V
#5 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War
#4 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#3 - Total War: WARHAMMER II (early purchase package)
#2 - Cuphead
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[Thane Solus]

http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/558755530422746564/

tldr:

All Discussions > Steam Forums > Help and Tips > Topic Details

Plaxus 12 May, 2014 @ 3:44pm
Steam after death
Ok, funny but grim question. What happens to your steam acount after you are dead? Say for example you share your pc with your family and your little brother plays on your account but you keep it password protected to keep him off rated M games. You die violently when your car gets hit by a train, plummits 60 feet off a bridge, what's left of you starts drowning as paranahs eat your flesh and then BOOM! Car explodes shortly after impact because christian bale was invovled. What happens to all the money and games you invested in. Is there a way to retrieve your account games or move them or anything set in place? Little brother needs to play some terraria after I become fish food at the bottom of a river. This is a very interesting concept? Do you seriously lose all access to your games? Even if you could get steam open, what if you need to change the password. It's still tied to a dead mans email?
Last edited by Plaxus; 12 May, 2014 @ 3:54pm
Showing 1-1 of 1 comments

Spawn of Totoro

12 May, 2014 @ 4:18pm
The account lives on, gathering digital dust. Accounts can not be transferred (under any circumstances) as you do not own the account or the games on it.

You can not "will" your account, and if it found out that you are using someone's account, the account will be disabled.

http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

"You may not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account, nor may you sell, charge others for the right to use, or transfer any Subscriptions other than if and as expressly permitted by this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use)."

"The Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Software."
Last edited by Spawn of Totoro; 12 May, 2014 @ 4:21pm

Gabe, "saving PC Gaming" one shovelware day at a time...

 

[Gerrard]

I'd like to see you paying the tax from that inheritance.

 

[LESS T_T]

Valve sharing more VR tech for free:

Valve, creator of Steam and SteamVR, a leading platform for games and virtual reality (VR) applications, today announced the availability of new core components needed by VR hardware manufacturers to deliver best in class VR systems.

Complementing the existing free license for sub-millimeter room-scale tracking and input technology, today's news marks the addition of other critical pieces for developing state-of-the-art VR hardware: an advanced optical system, manufacturing and calibration tools, and the supporting software stack to unify the hardware into an optimal user experience.

"World class VR requires highly precise tracking, matched optics and display technologies, and a software stack that weaves together the interactions between these components," said Jeremy Selan of Valve. "For the first time, we're making all of these technologies available to anyone who wants to build a best in class VR system for the millions of Steam customers accessing over 2,000 SteamVR compatible titles."

About the Display and Optics Technology

Valve has spent years working closely with display manufacturers to adapt their technologies to the unique challenges of VR. Recent advancements in Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology combined with VR specific calibration now make it a viable technology choice for high end VR systems. LCD manufacturers have demonstrated fast-switching liquid crystals, low persistence backlights, and high PPI displays that, when calibrated and paired with the right software, are well matched to the highest quality VR experiences. Of course, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology was critical to the first generation of VR (being first to demonstrate fast transition times and low-persistence illumination), and it remains an excellent option for new head mounted displays (HMDs). While both display technologies have inherent artifacts unique to head-mounted usage, Valve provides custom hardware and software manufacturing solutions as part of the SteamVR technology suite to enable high quality visual VR experiences.

In addition, Valve has developed custom lenses that work with both LCD and OLED display technologies and is making these lenses available to purchase for use in SteamVR compatible HMDs. These lenses and Valve's unique calibration and correction software are designed specifically to be paired with several off-the-shelf VR displays to enable the highest quality VR visual experiences. These optical solutions currently support a field of view between 85 and 120 degrees (depending on the display). The lenses, which are designed to support the next generation of room-scale virtual reality, optimize the user's perceived tracking experience and image sharpness while reducing stray light. Valve is including the custom lens calibration and correction software within the SteamVR technology suite.

Finally, Valve continues to offer full room-scale, sub-millimeter tracking technology by providing a reference design for the "Watchman" tracking module and by offering Valve manufactured base stations with SteamVR Tracking 2.0 technology for sale to licensees.

For more information about VR technology licensing, please see http://partner.steamgames.com/vrlicensing

 

[Infinitron]

Looks like it's Orange Box Day at PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/valve-reflects-on-the-orange-box-ten-years-later/

Valve reflects on The Orange Box, ten years later
Robin Walker discusses the impact of Portal, Team Fortress 2 and more.

THE ORANGE BOX 10TH ANNIVERSARY
Our other anniversary pieces:
- The Orange Box review from 2007
- Remembering HL2: Episode 2
- How TF2 changed FPSes
- Portal and the cake meme

The Orange Box launched ten years ago. It was undoubtedly the greatest bundle of games ever, with the simultaneous launch of Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, alongside the existing Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. The former three were instantly significant in the landscape of PC gaming: Portal was an influential puzzle game that many cited as the surprise highlight of the set, while Team Fortress 2 arrived as a fully-formed multiplayer phenomenon that would constantly evolve across the next decade. Episode Two, of course, was the last time we experienced a new chapter of arguably the greatest singleplayer FPS series of all time.

It was a massive moment: imagine that many amazing games dropping at once now, from the same developer. It just wouldn't happen. Here, Valve's Robin Walker reflects on the factors that led to The Orange Box's release, and offers some behind-the-scenes insights on both Portal and Team Fortress 2.

PC Gamer: What did the release of The Orange Box mean for Valve at that time, and what does it represent as part of Steam's history?

Robin Walker: The Orange Box was a huge step for us internally because it was the first time we’d ever managed to complete more than a single product at a time. In some ways, the Orange Box was a company level 'hack' where we made three separate products that all consider themselves the same product for shipping purposes, which meant that people could rationally prioritize their work across all three of them. If you were on Portal, and everything was going well, but TF2 was struggling, it made sense for you to jump over and help TF2 out because all three games needed to ship together.

The Orange Box was also a great product to really highlight why the retail channel was reducing game developer’s options. We found with Episode One that retail really didn’t understand or like a premium quality $20 title—they stood to make less money per box, and they had a limited amount of shelf space in their stores. The Orange Box avoided this by combining multiple quality products into a single box that was worth that full amount, but in doing so it created other problems. Retail had never seen a new, high quality box containing more than one title. Historically, a box that contained multiple titles was a bundle of old or low quality titles.

So in terms of Steam’s history, to us the Orange Box represents the era in which distribution channels placed a huge amount of friction on what kinds of games were made, how big they should be, and how much they were sold for. These weren’t things that retailers should be blamed for, they were simply the side effects of operating in physical space. It’s great to be able to look around and see such an enormously wide spectrum of games being made today, many of which wouldn’t have had much of a chance to find their audience in that physical distribution world.

Were you surprised by the response to Portal, in that a lot of people considered it to be the highlight of The Orange Box at the time?

We didn’t really know what to hope for with Portal. We’d put it in front of enough play testers to be confident that players would have fun with it, but Portal didn’t fit any existing model of a successful game for us to know how it was going to really turn out. There wasn’t much of a history of first person puzzle games, let alone ones that combined a new gameplay mechanic with comedy. The Orange Box really solved Portal’s biggest challenge, which was to explain itself to players. By putting it in the Orange Box, we didn’t have to do the heavy lifting of explaining to people why they should buy this thing that was unlike anything they’d played before—instead, we could lure them in with Episode Two & TF2, and surprise them with the game they had the least expectations for.

Portal became incredibly influential to the indie games scene—its length, storytelling and environmental design are felt in a lot of today's games. Can you recall that process of the Narbacular Drop team joining Valve, and the key decisions that eventually made that game what it is?

By the time we saw Narbacular Drop at the Digipen student day, we’d already hired multiple groups of inexperienced developers who had built interesting things. When we hire those kinds of teams, we’re fundamentally more interested in the people than the thing they’ve built, and in our discussions with them, the Portal team seemed like a group of people with a huge amount of potential. We paired them up with some experienced developers at Valve, and let the team loose.

In any game's development, there are too many decisions to count, and many of them will ruin the game if made incorrectly. One decision that ended up being very important was the one behind GladOS. We had been working on Portal for about a year, and at that point we had 14 levels of the game in a state where they were being regularly playtested. There was no GladOS, the player just moved from puzzle to puzzle without any sense of progression or reward beyond the increasing complexity of the puzzles. The playtest response we kept seeing could be summed up as "This is really fun! When does the game start?". This was both great and terrifying. Players were having fun, but they seemed to consider everything they played as just training leading up to something else. Considering the entire game was really just a process of learning about the core gameplay mechanic, this scared us a lot, making us worry that we’d have to create a whole other section of the game afterwards.

But first, we asked ourselves what it was that was causing players to consider everything as training. After much discussion, we settled on the idea that it was the lack of threat or pressure. Nothing in the game pushed back on the player. There was no real failure, no cost to mistakes, nothing overall to fear, no larger goal to strive for, and hence no real reason to advance. We talked about various solutions, and in the end decided that introducing an antagonist made the most sense. The antagonist could start as a narrative tool for introduction & reward, and over time become the thing that pushed back on the player, eventually giving them the core goal of the game—"I want to learn all this because I need to be able to defeat X". We had little in the way of art production on the team, so it being a character that largely spoke to you via voice over was a straightforward production solution.

In the end, there are many important decisions after this that were critical to GladOS working as well as she did, such as her entire personality. But her genesis begins with a straightforward process of us trying to solve the core gameplay problem in Portal. Even today, it’s always fascinating to us that players seem to start Portal talking about the gameplay, but after they’re done, all they talk about is GladOS.

You've kept updating and transforming Team Fortress 2 over the years, and few competitive games have that kind of lifespan. What's been the philosophy behind that? How have you kept reinventing the game while still making it recognisably TF2?

The philosophy is pretty simple—listen to your players, pay attention to what they're doing, ship your work, and iterate as much as possible. But TF2's a strange thing. In some ways, it seems so different to how it launched in 2007, but at the same time, it still feels utterly familiar. There are still Snipers on the battlements in 2Fort having a fine old time paying no attention to what's going on with their flag in the basement. There's a much wider set of potential threats to deal with than they faced back in 2007, but they now have many more choices in exactly how they want to face them. And no matter what they decide, they can ensure they look different to all the other Snipers in the game.

So TF2's core gameplay seems to be fairly resilient in the face of all the horrible things we've done to it, and I think that's largely due to how we've approached our role in the process. We've always felt that our job was to support players in whatever they're trying to do. As a result, it's the players who've decided how TF2 should be played throughout the last decade. We've added all kinds of elements to the game, from both our and the community's minds, and the players have been the ones to digest and choose the way those elements ended up incorporated into the whole, even if it meant outright rejection in some cases.

You provided audio commentary for The Orange Box at the time, which was a really nice opportunity to let players get granular with the various games' creative processes, having previously tested it in Lost Coast. Can you recall the process of doing that? What was it like to examine your work through that lens as a developer?

We approached commentary as a tool to explain our craft. In our experiences listening to commentaries of other creative works, it was the nuts & bolts of how they actually did the work that interested us the most. Throughout our years of developing games, we constantly found that problems we thought were going to be straightforward to solve turned out to be nasty, thorny issues involving complex tradeoffs between design and technology. Often, that complexity was hidden entirely by the solution. So we thought it might be interesting to players if we could lift the rock and show them everything that’s going on underneath all that apparent simplicity. We’re game developers, so hopefully players will forgive us for thinking that game development is a fun thing to talk about.

Also, that commentary and accompanying analysis was all written before the product launched, which means we didn’t have the chance to examine our work through the context of how it was received, let alone how it would fit into the gaming landscape 10 years later. Would Portal be something people would like? Or would it be some weird puzzle game Valve made that no-one wanted any more of? Without that perspective, we found it hard to talk about anything other than what we were confident in—what we did, and why we did it.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/10/10/valve-the-making-of-the-orange-box/

Making The Orange Box: how 3 Valve games became 1

The Orange Box is one of the strangest quirks of gaming history. Never before had a developer released three brand new, entirely separate games at the same time in one package, and thanks to digital distribution, it probably won’t happen again. What makes The Orange Box truly remarkable though is that it contained two of the most-anticipated games of 2007, and what proved to be the biggest surprise hit of the year (some might argue ever).

The company was Valve and the games were Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2and Portal.

Bundling them together under the unassuming title of ‘The Orange Box’ would seem like commercial suicide to most marketing execs and yet it proved the complete opposite. How did this happen? What possessed Valve to put these three games, each of which would have been a huge release in its own right, in the same package? (and let’s not forget that Half Life 2 and Episode One were included as well).

As it turns out, The Orange Box began as an experiment in work psychology. “In our prior history, we’d never shipped more than a single product at a time, and we’d never shipped multiple platforms simultaneously,” says Valve’s Robin Walker. This sequential approach to releases was down to the company’s atypical structure, where designers are encouraged to create and work on the projects of their choosing, rather than being told what to do.

A side-effect of this is that designers can also drift between projects, which would happen frequently when a specific project neared completion. “As a project started to head for the finish line, it created such a gravitational pull that it would pull people from other projects to help.” Walker explains. “Not because they had to, but because they could see that an hour or two spent on an almost finished game was significantly more efficient than the same time spent on a game that was still a long way from shipping.”

After Episode One, however, the situation changed. Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal all hit their final phases at roughly the same time. This meant the organic pulling-together that occurred previously couldn’t happen in the same way, as Valve collectively couldn’t decide what order the games should be released in. In theory the company could have assigned people to specific tasks, but that’s not the Valve way. “So we started to think about the idea of putting them all in the same box. If we did that, and succeeded in making everyone think of their job as shipping all three titles in a singular shipping event, then maybe they’d apply their efforts across them as a whole.”

Once this idea was out in the open, Valve realised that it might solve other issues the company had been struggling with. Although the games included in the Orange Box are very different, they complemented each other well, each offering something that the other two games lacked. “TF2 had no singleplayer component, and Episode 2 had no multiplayer. Portal seemed like an entirely new kind of creature, one that challenged us to figure out how to convince players to buy a comedy wrapped inside a first-person puzzle game,” Walker points out. Pricing was also an issue. “[Not one of the three seemed] like a title that we should charge full price for, and our experience with Episode One taught us that retailers had real difficulty selling a low priced box containing a new, high quality game,” Walker says. “With each of these issues being helped by the existence of the other two games in the same box, it seemed like a thing worth trying.”

As a way of distributing the workload evenly across the three projects without nailing people to their desks, The Orange Box was successful. “If one of the games was going to make our release target, but the other two weren’t, it didn’t make much sense for people to continue working on that first one. So it worked as a method of getting us all to think of ourselves as part of a single large team,” Walker says. But it also affected the process of shipping a game in several unanticipated ways. For starters, it confused the hell out of the retailers, as there was a general assumption that one new box meant one new game, whereas multipacks were reserved for “bundles of old titles or bundles of low quality ones.”

“Another obvious one was what to call the damn thing,” Walker adds. “It was really hard to find a title that made it clear what was in it, and that it wasn’t a shoddy bundle. We even toyed with the idea of having three different boxes, each including all the games, but named after just one of them.” In the end, Valve went with the Orange Box because of the colour’s prior association with Half Life, having been the colour of the box of the very first game, and also the colour of Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit.

Even advertising the Orange Box proved more difficult than Valve had anticipated. This was particularly the case with TV advertising, where Valve needed to advertise one box containing three completely different games, all in half a minute. “Designing a TV spot that tries to explain what a video game is and why someone should buy it is a tricky problem when you only have thirty seconds, and you start by immediately losing some of it to entry/exit title screens. I don’t think we’d realized how much harder it was going to be when we tried to use those same thirty seconds for three new titles instead of one.”

Despite these unanticipated issues (which Walker emphasises were “entirely self-adopted pain”), Valve never doubted the core appeal of the box itself. “We felt like each game would satisfy such a different desire on the part of players that they would all be able to find their place and audience,” Walker explains. What Valve didn’t anticipate was just how diverse that appeal would prove to be. Many assumptions made both by Valve and third parties about how the Orange Box would sell, who would buy it and who would play which games, proved to be wildly inaccurate.

“We’d been showing Portal to publishers and distributors in the months leading up to shipping, and we were often told that we’d made a game that would really appeal just to female gamers, or to people who weren’t into shooters, and so on. They felt we should target specific products to specific demographics, and that combining them into one was going to torpedo the whole affair,” Walker says. “After we shipped, we saw people of all kinds playing everything in the Orange Box, and they didn’t break down along those kinds of simplistic lines. Portal players spent a lot of their other gaming time in Counter-Strike, and TF2 attracted players from all across the gaming spectrum. Both attracted many new players in the process.”

The complex way the Orange Box was bought and played opened Valve’s eyes to the nuances of the market, and acted as a catalyst for how it operates Steam today, collecting statistics on who plays what games for how long, and tailoring the service around those stats. “The Orange Box applied pressure on the communication channels through which we talked to players about our games, and the distribution channels through which they bought them. That pressure highlighted the ways in which those channels were affecting the kinds of decisions and games we could make,” Walker says.

Although The Orange Box was created as a problem-solving experiment, putting it together was nevertheless tough on Valve, as it meant dealing with a lot of unique problems that weren’t strictly to do with game design. “The process itself had the pretty immediate effect of us saying ‘yeesh, let’s not try and do that again!’ Walker says. “But overall I think it ended up furthering our belief that we needed to get to a place where we could do whatever we wanted with our games, without having to worry about factors other than what players would think.” Indeed, perhaps the most significant legacy of the Orange Box is it helped Valve envision a future in which there are no boxes at all.

 

[LESS T_T]

Now there's a fake developer:

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

 

[Thane Solus]

before ze sellout)

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Thanks for painfully reminding me that Valve once also used to be a game developer.

 

[LESS T_T]

Another purge

:

• about an hour ago667070 Removed store name – OHOTA KREPKOE
• about an hour ago693680 Removed store name – O! STRELALKA!!!
• about an hour ago686690 Removed store name – AOK Adventures Of Kok
• about an hour ago681650 Removed store name – Douche Bag
• about an hour ago676780 Removed store name – OHOTA KREPKOE - Soundtrack
• about an hour ago676710 Removed store name – Simulator gas station
• about an hour ago693720 Removed store name – NeonGalaxy Wars
• about an hour ago707690 Removed store name – I LOVE DROZDOV "TERRA VIVA"
• about an hour ago697700 Removed store name – Pixel War
• about an hour ago710390 Removed store name – Real ★1942★
• about an hour ago714350 Removed store name – C2H6O

This time it's an entity called *gasp* ILLUMICORP.

Sample of their sinister "games":

 

[vdweller]

Yup, that's quality you see in those screenhots.

Let old vdweller share a story.

I'm currently making a game. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's shit or going for a Nobel prize, nor will I talk about how long I've been developing it. I'm gonna go with just one tiny little detail.

So the main character of the game is a guy who does stuff. In short, we're looking at 170 frames of hand-drawn, pixel art style animation of average frame size of 18x24 or whatever.

Alright. So we also need to make a female version of the guy. Yup, that's another 170 frames for ya.

Yeah, but they need to wear clothes: Hats and some torso pieces can't be nicely represented just by color switching, so we have to draw them over each character and frame.

So that's another 170 frames of animation for each of those 15 pieces of worn equipment.

All this "female version / worn equipment" thing ate me an entire week, which may be one thing out of 500 for my game, but also happens to be the entire development time needed for any of the cuntware above (and I'm probably being lenient here in my estimation).

Again, never mind what I'm doing or if it's good. Just a little something to put things in perspective when developing a game as, well, a game developer and not a cash grabbing hack.

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions) are headed by cups (let's ignore PUBG):

#10 - Battle Chasers: Nightwar
#9 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#8 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#7 - Dying Light
#6 - Grand Theft Auto V
#5 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War
#4 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#3 - Total War: WARHAMMER II (early purchase package)
#2 - Cuphead
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Last week's top sellers (by revenues, not counting microtransactions). Grim Dawn expansion got a place; Divine and Cups are still there; and The Evil Within 2 is below them; on the other hand, Shadow of War doing fine:

#10 - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands
#9 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#8 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#7 - Grim Dawn - Ashes of Malmouth Expansion
#6 - The Evil Within 2
#5 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#4 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War
#3 - Cuphead
#2 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[Latelistener]

#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Nuke it from the orbit already.

 

[gaussgunner]

#5 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#3 - Cuphead

What's #4, some kind of horrible unmentionable shit game?

 

[LESS T_T]

#5 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#3 - Cuphead

What's #4, some kind of horrible unmentionable shit game?

Oh, it's other edition or pre-order version of Shadow of War.

Edited the post.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[gaussgunner]

Login required to see geography stats, though.

Never mind.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.teamfortress.com/jungleinferno/