The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[vonAchdorf]

The more successful a publisher/developer is the more creatively bankrupt they become. Happened to EA. Happened to Blizzard. Happened to Valve. Happened to most every other AAA out there that spews out more iterative shit.

That's we are seeing yearly HL releases?

Their business is to take good ideas from modders with mass market appeal and turn them into polished F2P titles. That's their craft and they are quite good at it. And GabeN doesn't care about creative bankruptcy as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line, which it certainly doesn't at the moment.

 

[Metro]

Dota2 is iterative shit. So is CS: GO. That's what you're seeing. So is L4D3 when it comes out in a year or so. The rest of your post is a tautology that follows from what I wrote.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Snatched from the GAF:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1084357

Rumor: Half Life 3 still not in full development

HL3:
1. in development but by a small crew of ~10 people currently
2. project status is the script is complete
3. valve management not invested in releasing it anytime soon
4. was in development with larger team in 2009 but devs got moved to other projects which needed attention
5. mass effect 3 backlash influenced them. devs saw how passionate fans turned on the game and didnt want that to happen to the company's banner franchise
6. game culture has changed since 2004 ("sadly, most people are shitheads" - anonymous source at valve)

$$$:
7. cash flow from steam and F2P microtransactions is more than sustaining valve
8. staff moved to projects that bring in the money
9. Dota, CS Go, TF2 earned valve over $400 million in 2014.
10. Conservative estimate for total steam revenue in 2014 at $1.5 billion (1st and 3rd party)
11. Valve's 30% cut of $1.1 billion (3rd party only) combined with their top 3 F2P game earnings = $730 million in 2014.
12. no financial pressure to release HL3 (generous 12 million units full price retail for HL3 equals $720 million).

6. game culture has changed since 2004 ("sadly, most people are shitheads" - anonymous source at valve)

I understand that completely Valve, but where's ma Half-Life 3 Lebowski Gaben???

bullshit post that is wishy washy for the sake of pandering to gaf's typical agenda.
(Shitty ending of ME3 doesn't mean squat when it sold for a few mils)

 

[LESS T_T]

Over night it looks like a Steam bug that let users reset passwords for accounts they do not own was discovered and fixed, though not without it costing a few streamers their accounts for a number of hours. The bug required knowledge of the username of the account, hence why community figures with publically known information were the most effected.

Via Reddit, here's how it worked:

Valve have since fixed the issue and those with Steam Guard enabled - the additional layer of protection that e-mails you a code whenever your account is logged into from an unknown device - merely lost access rather than exploiters actually getting into their accounts. Still quite the foul up and a reminder that single misplaced lines of code can shutdown the majority of our game collections.

There is a five-day trade ban put onto every account that changes e-mail or password, to prevent this sort of issue costing users hundreds of e-bucks in lost items. It triggered as it should, though now those players that were effected can't trade anything for another four days, even after getting their accounts back.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-exploit-costs-some-streamers-their-accounts



And today Steam Community pages are very laggy for whatever reason.

 

[Thane Solus]

the more i work with valve and their users, i am starting to hate it more and more. I am talking from indie dev standpoint, their lack of moderation, their hipster homepage, the banning of mobile port tag and 30 fps tag, the payed mods fiasco, putting five years old games on new popular releases, their visibility conversion lower than porn hub, etc... Its all awesome!



hopefully my next game will be worthy for GOG and i wont have put up with this fucking google play steam store.

 

[Thane Solus]

Over night it looks like a Steam bug that let users reset passwords for accounts they do not own was discovered and fixed, though not without it costing a few streamers their accounts for a number of hours. The bug required knowledge of the username of the account, hence why community figures with publically known information were the most effected.

Via Reddit, here's how it worked:

Valve have since fixed the issue and those with Steam Guard enabled - the additional layer of protection that e-mails you a code whenever your account is logged into from an unknown device - merely lost access rather than exploiters actually getting into their accounts. Still quite the foul up and a reminder that single misplaced lines of code can shutdown the majority of our game collections.

There is a five-day trade ban put onto every account that changes e-mail or password, to prevent this sort of issue costing users hundreds of e-bucks in lost items. It triggered as it should, though now those players that were effected can't trade anything for another four days, even after getting their accounts back.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-exploit-costs-some-streamers-their-accounts



And today Steam Community pages are very laggy for whatever reason.

And i cant access my build depots in the last 2 hours, its awesome. Hopefully will be fixed until monday...

 

[Metro]

No one cares about your shitty phone games, Thane.

 

[darthaegis]

the banning of (...) 30 fps tag

Well they have a curator for that now.

 

[Thane Solus]

the banning of (...) 30 fps tag

Well they have a curator for that now.

You can remove them, at least i can remove most of them, not sure about those that have a very high follower count.

 

[Astral Rag]

The Steam Store and the Steam Community stuff are failing to load for me. Gabe is probably uploading the Half Life 3 shareware

¯\(°_o)/¯

 

[MicoSelva]

I was not sure where to post this, and I did not want to create a new thread, but the guy calls himself Steam Spy, so...

An interesting article about 'target audience' and PC gamers' types and their habits.

Catchy clickbait title included.

EDIT: it discusses why terms like 'core gamer' are misused, as well as estimates how many actual 'typical gamers' exist on Steam (not that many, which explains why big publishers treat PC as a secondary market).

https://medium.com/steam-spy/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae

 

[Infinitron]

I was not sure where to post this, and I did not want to create a new thread, but the guy calls himself Steam Spy, so...

An interesting article about 'target audience' and PC gamers' types and their habits.

https://medium.com/steam-spy/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae

Worry not, you have found the right thread

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Very questionable conclusions.You need to get in consideration that DOTA2 and CS:GO numbers are inflated by trade and a lot of accounts are created just for that.Also VAC bans in CS promote lone game accounts just for that.And ofc even the blind will tell you looking at the graph-bundles and sales.Torchlight 2 was in a lot of them.Also there is definitely MOBA or MMO market and big one too,people do seek replacement for LoL,WoW etc. Just look at the launch numbers for new MMOs(SWTOR,ESO,Wildstar)all around 2 milions are looking for new games in the genre.Same for dota-clones.The spy gay looks clueless to me even with all the data he has.

 

[buzz]

He's still technically right. 2 millions is not really that big of a number for considered high-budget wow killers, especially since that 2million audience is slightly different from the 10million+ audience of the popular shit. These 2 million people of players who want to try a new MMO and drop it pretty quickly, not going for the long haul like the wow addicts. Getting free-to-play in one year is certainly not a sign of success, not when WoW lasted for 10years plus and still has more subscribers than these games combined, didn't go fully f2p and the game has suffered all the shitty changes.

Or take the DC moba mentioned in the article, that one closed just a few weeks ago. For a game with such a giant pull and marketing advantage (play as DC superheroes!), that sucks really hard. If the sequel to the game who essentially made the moba genre what it is today or the blizzard version of the genre can't pass LoL, nothing else should possibly even try at this point.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

That's because they are shit ,not that there is no MMO or MOBA market.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Eyestabber]

Just passing by to say that Lord Gaben is Our Lord and people who don't use Steam deserve to be slaughtered for offending Our Lord.

Thank you, have a good day.

 

[Caim]

Just passing by to say that Lord Gaben is Our Lord and people who don't use Steam deserve to be slaughtered for offending Our Lord.

Thank you, have a good day.

And let me guess, you gotta kill the Origin jew and the Uplay muslim?

 

[Dexter]

Did everyone notice that Steam seems to be streaming movies now? http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Movie/

They seem to have added all the Mad Max-es and various others.

 

[Infinitron]

Did everyone notice that Steam seems to be streaming movies now? http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Movie/

They seem to have added all the Mad Max-es and various others.

Steam has had indie movies going all the way back to 2012 (although they were mostly gaming-related documentaries at first). These may be their first "Hollywood" releases though.

 

[you know what time it is]

 

[Astral Rag]

Valve hits a Linux landmark: 1,500 games available on Steam

 

[Drax]

This truly is the year of linux.

 

[racofer]

They all are, except they never are.

 

[Infinitron]

Half-Life 3 won’t be a VR game, says Valve

Valve’s Chet Faliszeck spoke at EGX today and of course someone asked him about Half-Life 3.

In a Q&A session following his talk on VR, one member of the audience cheekily asked if Half-Life 3 would be a VR game.

“No,” he replied.

He then spoke about how VR headsets will not be going wireless anytime soon due to the bandwidth problems (two screens need to refresh 90 times a second, basically. You need cables for that).

When asked about the Half-Life 3 question again by the same person, he joked “I said ‘no’.”

Was it a serious question from the audience? We’ll, it was certainly genuine and we’ve all thought about it. But was it a serious answer?

When it comes to the near-mythical Half-Life 3, who knows.