The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[BlackAdderBG]

If you think Skyrim-like games are RPGs then VR is for you.There must be stats and simulation ,not larping and immershun.Darker times ahead if this trash gets off the ground.

 

[sser]

Does anyone here even have the Steam Controller or one of the Machines? Nearly bought a the controller the other day. I like the idea of streaming games onto my laptop and then playing them on my T.V.

 

[talan]

Steam streaming is a good idea but the execution isn't great (at least when I tried it about a year ago). I would get Windows error popping up at startup, wouldn't show the whole screen, audio wouldn't play, some games just didn't work. Some worked great, but it's not consistent like a console.

If I were to try again, I'd just buy 10m cables for HDMI and a USB hub.

 

[DosBuster]

It works pretty well now, provided you have a fast internet connection.

 

[Country_Gravy]

I have 2 steam controllers and the link. Eh...probably been better off with just an Xbox controller to play my shitty console ports I bought in sales past to play once I got a controller.

It just proved to me what I already knew. Consoles =

 

[talan]

It works pretty well now, provided you have a fast internet connection.

That doesn't sound right. It would be your local wifi/Ethernet speeds if anything.

 

[LESS T_T]

As expected, most played games among western RPG owners in the last 2 weeks is Fallout 4.

For Fallout 4 owners, (other than Fallout 4 and CS:GO) it's Dark Souls 3.

 

[MicoSelva]

Early Acess is doing better than ever and is here to stay.

Spoiler

EDIT: RE Immortal below.

Steam Spy has commented on Twitter that while the tail does get longer, the top 10 / 100 Early Access games are doing better than last year. So yeah, the low-sellers will keep selling less and less, getting cheaper and more desperate, but this does not seem to affect the top-sellers. At least for now.

 

[Immortal]

Early Acess is doing better than ever and is here to stay.

Spoiler

That was inevitable as more people got on board.
Great post MicoSelva

I do wanna put on my market analysis hat for a second and pretend I know what the fuck I am talking about.. (Spoiler: I don't)

A few things that popped out for me..

• Average Price of Early Access Games has dropped ~22%
• Average Discounts Offered Increased ~2%
• Total copies sold essentially doubled but the amount of games offered in that program almost tripled. (110 - 282)

These stats look very similar to a certain other market that eventually became completely saturated with F2P / .99 cent games. Can you guess which?
If this trend continues.. this will become an unsustainable market where the strong survive and the weak die. You could consider this a good thing because shit games with no future will die before they get a chance to rip users off.. You will need to make competitive products. It's easier to serve garbage to customers when you're the only restaurant on the block.

We already have many early access games burning in fire giving the platform a bad reputation.. You have three times as many games available but sales have only doubled..
I'm no stats major but I think you are seeing a serious diminishing return on this market.

What happens if in 2017 there are 400 or 600 early access games.
What will the sales look like?

I'm curious to find out but I think they won't be that fun for your average shovel ware dev.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://www.patreon.com/posts/5212208

A bit on differences between 2016 and 2015 Published Apr 26, 2016 0" data-ng-bind-html="trust(creation.content)">A year ago I wrote that an average game on Steam had 32,000 owners. I've just checked, and this number dropped to 21,000.


Obviously, I got interested and did some digging. Here are the results.


As you'd probably expect, we saw a lot of new games released since the last year, and they've skewed the numbers toward lower sales. But the distribution of sales (second graph) remains pretty much the same with some minor increase in lower sales and minor decrease in the middle.


Or, in layman terms: we've got a lot of new bad-selling games on Steam, but it didn't affect the top games, which still sell pretty well.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-04-28-you-can-now-buy-steam-games-with-bitcoin

 

[Jigawatt]

And yet I still can't use my pound denominated card unless I'm physically in the UK. (or risk a ban by proxying) I guess now I can if I want to go via a third currency first.

 

[pakoito]

And yet I still can't use my pound denominated card unless I'm physically in the UK. (or risk a ban by proxying) I guess now I can if I want to go via a third currency first.

You can by using ?cc=uk if that still works.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-04-28-you-can-now-buy-steam-games-with-bitcoin

I'm still butthurt I didn't get them dirt cheap (I first heard about them when they were under a dollar). :<

 

[LESS T_T]

http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/

Customer Review System Updated To Show Recent Reviews And Summary

One common theme we've been seeing in customer feedback about the Steam review system is that it isn't always easy to tell what the current experience is like in a game months after release. This new set of changes released today is designed to better describe the current customer experience in those games. We do this by better exposing the newly posted reviews and by calculating a summary of those recent reviews.

Visibility For Recently Posted Reviews

While there are plenty of new reviews posted every day, we saw that it was often difficult for newer reviews to be seen and voted on enough to become listed as most helpful. As a result, the most helpful reviews presented on a store page would often describe an outdated view of a game that might have changed dramatically over the course of Early Access or post-release development. By listing recently posted reviews more prominently and by defaulting to recent helpful reviews, Steam can now show a more current idea of what it's like to play the game now.

Recent Review Score

Another problem we identified was that review score that appears at the top of a product page didn't always reflect the dynamic nature of the game. For that review score, we'd previously only been compiling an overall score using a simple calculation of the percentage of all reviews that were positive. This let us be really transparent in how the score was being calculated, but didn't accommodate cases when a game has changed a lot (for better or worse) over time.

To address that, we've now added a Recent review score that calculates the positive percentage of reviews within the past 30 days (as long as there are enough reviews posted within those 30 days and as long as the game has been available on Steam for at least 45 days). The overall score is still present as well in case you still find that information helpful.

Other Review Updates

In addition to the above updates, we've made a few other changes:

• The customer review section on a game's store page has a new "Summary" tab that focuses on recent helpful reviews and recently posted reviews. You can still find overall most help reviews by selecting "Most Helpful" tab.
  
• There's a new checkbox when writing a review to more easily disclose if you received the copy of the game for free.
  
• You can now view all reviews regardless of language by selecting "All Languages" from the language dropdown in the reviews tab of the Community Hub for the game.

If you have questions, feedback, or find bugs in the review system, please let us know in the Steam discussions: http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/

For example:

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Sounds good, especially showing the recent reviews average score.

 

[Baron Dupek]

GI.biz: Steam's turned toxic, and Valve doesn't care aka was it worth to save PC gaming?
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-05-06-steams-turned-toxic-and-valve-doesnt-care

Sometimes, though, you look at Steam and wonder if PC gaming was worth saving. All too often, browsing through Steam to look for interesting things to try out leaves you feeling not so much that you want to close the application in disgust, but that you'd like to set the whole damned thing on fire. The reason isn't usability, or bugginess, or anything like that - Steam has its issues, but by and large it's a solid piece of technology - but rather the "community" that Valve has allowed to thrive on its platform. On a platform that aims to expose and promote great games from newcomers and relatively unknown indies, community feedback, reviews and recommendations are vital components, but a legacy of poor and deeply misguided decision making from Valve has meant that engaging with those aspects of Steam can all too often feel like swimming through hot sewerage.

Riot's done a good job of this because, I believe, Riot genuinely believes that it's the right thing to do. Therein lies the rub; I don't think Valve cares. It should care. It has a damn-near monopoly on PC game distribution through its storefront, and that gives it responsibilities - if it doesn't like or want those responsibilities, that's sad in and of itself, but I'm sure a quick dip in the swimming pools they're filling with money from Steam might take the edge off the pain. It should also care, though, because there's a hard limit on how much a business can grow if it permits abusive behaviour towards whole classes of customers or clients.

I stated earlier on that Steam ended up this way because of bad decision making down the years, and this is what I meant; there has never been a sense that Valve wants to tackle this problem. Rather, they've given the impression that they hope they can fix it with some clever engineering tweak, some genius little bit of code that'll somehow balance the need for community feedback to expose good games against the need to stop harassers and trolls from treating the platform as a 24 hour public toilet.

That's not how community moderation works. It's a fundamental, obtuse misunderstanding of how any sort of system designed to manage, build and support a community works - from statecraft right on down to housemate meetings to discuss unwashed dishes. You need people; you need actual people doing actual moderation jobs, granted the training and the authority to step in and put the community back on the rails when it falls off. It's hard, and it's actually pretty expensive, and it takes a lot of care and attention - but it's not impossible. Look at the progress Riot Games has made in turning around the community of League of Legends, which was formerly one of the most grossly toxic communities in gaming. It's still by no means perfect, but Riot has shown that it cares, and that it's willing to fight to improve things, and LoL is by far a better, more welcoming and more fun game for it. Some of that was achieved with tweaks to systems and protocols; but in the end, it takes a real, breathing, thinking human to counteract attempts by other humans to be unpleasant to one another, because if there's one thing our species has demonstrated extraordinary affinity for over the centuries, it's finding creative ways to skirt around rules in pursuit of being unpleasant to other people.

 

[Zewp]

Targets are chosen for daring to include content that doesn't please the reactionary hordes, or for being made by a developer who once said a vaguely liberal thing on Twitter, or - of course - for being made by a woman

Jesus, at least be subtle if you're going to make up lies. I spend a lot of time around the Steam forums and there are very view instances of brigading like this article explains

This is probably butthurt because of the Siege of Dragonspear incident.

 

[FuriousGamer87]

Can't score them sweet invitations to parties if you don't make up blatant lies using circular references.

 

[Sam Ecorners]

Fuck those people. They are the same people who 8 years ago were telling us how ungrateful we are for Bethesda "saving" Fallout. They are just simpleton mass consumerists and mass consumer serving idiots, always serving to the lowest common denominator. And we will always be the glittering gems of hatred to them.

They don't care about games, they only care about looking cool. They are hipsters, but not even the kind of hipsters who are actually poor and move into shitty neighborhoods first. No, they are the kind of hipsters that move in after gentrification happens, with their parents' money. They are leeches who never create and have no real beliefs. They just blindly follow the whims of the market, because that is all they're capable of.

Fuck them. Or not, they are worthless anyway.

/drunken rant

 

[LESS T_T]

Heh, Steam now display top seller chart for your country by default.

Top Seller for your country: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=topsellers&os=win

(You can use country codes to check out other country's top seller (this only works while you signed out). e.g. "cc=uk" for UK.)

Global Top Seller: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=globaltopsellers&os=win

Looks like they've ditched the regional charts and reverted to the one unified global chart. You cannot see regional charts anymore.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Good, why would I want to see what bundle fodder my fellow poor latvians are buying.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Good, why would I want to see what bundle fodder my fellow poor latvians are buying.

So you can pay your Lithuanian hitmen with better bundle fodder than the Latvians?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Metro]

I wonder if people would still care? I guess so but that's more because of hype/marketing than anticipation of the actual game.