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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Mr. Pink

Travelling Gourmand, Crab Specialist
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The big thing right now is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences. We think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as we're designing our own VR games.

Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kinds of areas where machine learning should work well.

Personally I'm looking at research in brain-computer interfaces.



SOON
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
ValveTime's summary of AMA: http://www.valvetime.net/threads/gabe-newells-ama-summary-january-17-2017.257716/

On their new offices

Yes. We move into the new offices on July 22nd.

On Source 2

We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.

On Steam Support

Yes! We are continuing to work on improving support.

Since the last AMA, we've introduced refunds on Steam, we've grown our Support staff by roughly 5x, and we've shipped a new help site and ticketing system that makes it easier to get help. We've also greatly reduced response times on most types of support tickets and we think we've improved the quality of responses.

We definitely don't think we're done though. We still need to further improve response times and we are continually working to improve the quality of our responses. We're also working on adding more support staff in regions around the world to offer better native language support and improve response times in various regions.

On Half-Life

The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that in which I was less directive.

On Left 4 Dead

Products are usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges.

When we decided we needed to work on markets, free to play, and user generated content, Team Fortress seemed like the right place to do that. That work ended up informing everything we did in the multiplayer space. Left 4 Dead is a good place for creating shared narratives.

On Half-Life and Portal movies

Yep. They're coming.

On Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode Three

The number 3 must not be said.

On what he regrets about Half-Life

If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons. And Xen.

On possibility of a new IP in the Half-Life/Portal universe

Yep.

Dave Riller on Team Fortress 2

TF2 has millions of unique players per month, and the team is staffed by a group of people that love and play the game. We're committed to supporting and growing TF2 with new features, content, and player experiences.

We're currently working on our next major update, which features a new campaign, the Pyro class pack, matchmaking improvements/features, and lots of game balancing improvements.

Dave Riller on Team Fortress 2

The count varies depending on what the team is working on, but the current count is 16. This includes programmers, artists, writers, level designers, and sound engineers.

As far as the 10th anniversary, we have lots of things we're excited to get into the community's hands this year, but we can't promise a major update will land on that day/date.

Ido Magal on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

As far as a roadmap is concerned, our priorities for 2017 are to replace the UI with Panorama, to make CS:GO available in more territories where a lot of Counter-Strike fans don't have easy access to it (like China), and anti-cheat. Of course, we're also planning on continuing to ship bug fixes and new features throughout the year, as in the past.

We plan to continue updating every week or two. As for Operations, there's no set schedule. We weigh that work relative to other work we could choose to focus on and other recent work seemed better for the product. For example, at the end of 2016 we chose to focus on shipping Inferno, improving spatial audio via HRTF, joinable public lobbies, and some long-term work that hasn't shipped yet.

We haven't considered community managers because in general we prefer to communicate by shipping game updates. We try to avoid disrupting conversations happening in the community, which is why we tend to be quiet a lot of the time. But we do weigh in when we have useful information to help those conversations along.

Ido Magal on Source 2 version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Source 2 is a bunch of system rewrites. For CSGO, we evaluate these new systems on their individual merits. Some CSGO rework is in progress, such as the UI that utilizes parts of Source 2. Other systems might follow. Some Source 2 systems might never be right for CSGO.

Relevant anecdote: When we used to be approached about Source 2 at Majors we would ask "what is it that you're hoping Source 2 will do for CSGO" and for a while the response was "I expect hitboxes will be better." Moving everything to Source 2 would not actually solve that problem. We just went ahead and spent time working on better hitboxes.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-10-valve-is-making-three-fully-fledged-vr-games

Valve is making three "full" VR games
"It feels like we've been stuck with mouse and keyboard for a reeeaaally long time."

Valve is in the process of developing three VR games. And these won't just be small free VR experiments, either.

jpg

The next generation of HTC Vive controllers.

"Right now we're building three VR games," Valve founder Gabe Newell confirmed to Eurogamer during a media roundtable at the studio's Bellevue, Washington office.

"When I say we're building three games, we're building three full games, not experiments," he later clarified when asked about Valve's free HTC Vive prototype The Lab.

While Newell wouldn't say anything about the games themselves, he did note that they're being built in both Source 2 and Unity.

"One of the questions you might be asking is 'Why in the world would you be making hardware?'" Newell continued. "What we can do now is we can be designing hardware at the same time that we're designing software.

"This is something that Miyamoto has always had. He's had the ability to think about what the input device is and design a system while he designs games. Our sense is that this will actually allow us to build much better entertainment experiences for people."

Newell insisted that VR isn't a gimmick, but rather a completely new language in the realm of virtual experiences. "It feels like we've been stuck with mouse and keyboard for a reeeaaally long time and that the opportunities to build much more interesting kinds of experiences for gamers were there, we just need to sort of expand what we can do. But it's not about being in hardware, it's about building better games. It's about taking bigger leaps forward with the kinds of games that we can do."

In other words, Newell believes that VR needs to offer something that cannot be obtained elsewhere. "VR is not going to be a success at all if people are just taking existing content and putting it into a VR space," he said. "One of the first things we did is we got Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress running in VR, and it was kind of a novelty. That was purely a developer milestone, but there was absolutely nothing compelling about it, the same way nobody's going to buy a VR system so they can watch movies."

Basically, it doesn't sound like Valve is going to repackage its older titles with some VR implementation at a premium price. Whatever the Half-Life studio is cooking up sounds a lot more ambitious than that.

jpg

These are more comfortable than they look.

The downside to Valve's ambition is that it is not going to come cheap. Newell isn't interested in what low-end VR can do. He wants to see what the cutting edge kit is capable of. Because in the end, it doesn't matter how affordable VR headsets are if there isn't a strong reason to acquire one.

"If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 per cent cheaper there's still not a huge market, right? There's still not an incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR," Newell stated. "Once you've got something, the thing that really causes millions of people to be excited about it, then you start worrying about cost reducing. It's sort of the old joke that premature cost reduction is the root of all evil."

One of Newell's boldest predictions about VR is that its display tech will improve immeasurably in the next two or so years. "We're actually going to go from this weird position where VR right now is kind of low-res, to being in a place where VR is actually higher res than just about anything else, with much higher refresh rates than you're going to see on either desktops or phones," he prophesied. "You'll actually see the VR industry sort of leapfrogging pretty much any other display technology in terms of those characteristics. It's probably not obvious from the first generation of products, but you'll start to see that happening like in 2018-2019."

Despite all this, Newell is humble in his predictions. The Valve founder freely admits that he was completely wrong about the potential of Nintendo's hardware, twice.

"You can always be surprised, right? Personally, I thought the DS was kind of stupid," Newell recalled of his initial impressions. "It was totally wrong. I thought Sony was going to crush Nintendo in that generation of handheld devices. I hadn't worked on it. I hadn't tried to design any games for it. And clearly the DS ended up being the winner.

"The flipside was the first time I played Wii Sports (to continue to use Nintendo as an example) I was like 'Oh my god! There's so much opportunity! There's so much potential here that we're all going to go discover!' Then it turned out that Wii Sports had pretty much nailed it and that was it."

Newell isn't afraid of failure, a philosophy he and his colleagues bring up multiple times throughout the meeting. "If you're not failing then you're probably not exploring the potential space wide enough. We're sort of optimistic, right? We think VR is going right. It's going in a way that's consistent with our expectations. We're also comfortable with the idea that it may turn out to be a complete failure, simply because if you're not trying to do things that might fail, you're not actually probably trying to do anything very interesting at all."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...lve-doesnt-have-any-current-gen-console-games

Why Valve has no interest in making console games
"We love the PC right now. A lot."

It sounds like Valve has no interest in making console games.

"We get really frustrated working in walled gardens," Valve founder Gabe Newell said at a media roundtable at Valve's offices attended by Eurogamer.

Valve released a plethora of console games in the last generation, including The Orange Box, Portal 2, both Left 4 Dead games and Counter-Strike: GO. The current generation of consoles is selling even better, relative to how far along in its lifespan it is. So why is Valve yet to get stuck in?

jpg

Valve released a number of games on the last generation of consoles, including the wonderful The Orange Box.

"So you try to talk to someone who's doing product planning on a console about free-to-play games and they say 'Oh, we're not sure free-to-play is a good idea' and you're like 'the ship has left'," Newell said of the cultural difference working with console developers after specialising in PC.

A couple of Valve's big games are free-to-play, including massive MOBA Dota 2 and competitive shooter Team Fortress 2. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, however, remains £11.99. Left 4 Dead 2 is £14.99.

"There have been cases where we've updated products 5-6 times in a day," he added. "When we did the original iOS of Steam App, right, we shipped it, we got a whole bunch of feedback and like the next day we're ready to do an update. We weren't able to get that update out for six months! And we couldn't find out why they wouldn't release it! They wouldn't tell us. This is the life that you have in these environments. And finally they shipped it! And they wouldn't tell us why they finally shipped it.

"So for us, while we're spending all of our time trying to be as tunnel-vision in this loop with our customers, to all of a sudden have this complete uncertainty about doing updates... Like we don't know how to operate.

"We're just too stupid to know how to be a successful iOS developer," he railed. "'Cause for us, everything that we do, is to make our lives easier and build tools to make other software developer's lives easier.

"We don't know how to do what we do,' he says, with a heaping spoonful of salt.

"I'm sure that other people are wildly successful in those environments, but sort of our DNA tend to not work well when someone is trying to insert a lot of process between us and our customers."

When Eurogamer asked if self-publishing had got any better in the current console environment, Newell replied: "We love the PC right now. A lot."

So there you have it. Don't expect Valve to release new games - or even its current ones - on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One any time soon.
 

Latelistener

Arcane
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
2,579
They need to update the library window. It was good when you had less than 100 titles, but now it's next to impossible to navigate through it.
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
They need to update the library window. It was good when you had less than 100 titles, but now it's next to impossible to navigate through it.

I recommend making custom categories.

Example:
5ST3sXi.png

Categories work for 40-50 games but when you got 500 it's pointless.

I have around 600. Sure there is a lot to scroll through regardless, but if you are looking for something genre specific it will be easier. Also using the "install" tab helps a lot (after installing stuff of course).
 

Latelistener

Arcane
Joined
May 25, 2016
Messages
2,579
I recommend making custom categories.
I do that, but it doesn't help much, although I prefer to sort by publishers / developers, since the definition of genres became very blurred.
Usually I just add games I wanted to play to Favorites, and then switch to Installed. At least it makes it somewhat tolerable.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014

And with that, they're opening the gate to even more crap:

Valve’s employees will review submitted titles. As long as they function as advertised, and don’t violate legal restrictions or local bars on pornography or types of content, the aim is to approve the titles.

Employees this week said they were reluctant to play tastemaker and weigh in on the quality of a game.

http://www.seattletimes.com/busines...eam-stores-greenlight-video-game-voting-tool/

“There was a time when we would get into a room and there would be 400 good games that we wanted to bring to Steam, and we were looking at the tools we had and the bandwidth we had, and we would say, ‘OK, let’s pick 10,'” Steam business lead Tom Giardino said.

And those 10 games would never serve the tastes of every gamer that is now on Steam. By “getting out of the way,” which was a theme that Valve touched on repeatedly during our conversation, the company is stepping back and treating this PC gaming portal like a much more open market when the consumers will end up choosing the winners and losers instead of Valve.

Of course, this means that Steam may end up getting a lot more crap — only, Valve points out that your definition of crap is likely different from mine. But, that said, the company still plans to offer DMCA takedown options for games that violate copyright law, and it wants deter lazy pranks. For the latter, that’s one of the reasons the company is considering a per-game submission fee as high as $5,000. Right now, Greenlight developers submit one fee and then they can put as many games as they want up for voting.

With Steam Direct, Valve’s gaming platform is more like Apple’s iOS App Store and the Google Play market than ever before, but the company claims that the big difference is discoverability.

“We want to have happy customers, and we do that by having as much of the content on Steam that customers are interested in,” Steam engineer Alden Knoll said. “It’s really all about building a system where good content will naturally rise to the top.”

Now, I pointed out that Google and Apple would likely point out that, if you don’t count their store ads, they are both trying to enable the best content to rise to the top. But for both of those app markets, most developers believe they will never succeed unless they get a curated Featured slot by Google or Apple. Valve, however, won’t feature certain games for everyone. Instead, it wants Steam to naturally show each game to the customer that is most likely to care about it. The company claims it is already doing that. In a blog post about its Discovery 2.0 features, Valve claims that despite having more games than ever on Steam, key metrics like the time people spend playing games and the number of games that make more than $200,000 in their first three months are on the rise.

Knoll and Giardino credit Greenlight with enabling Valve to figure out how that discovery would work before launching Steam Direct.

“Steam Greenlight, and a bunch of the tools and features that we worked on in the interim years were a super useful bridge, but now, instead of having a bunch of good games where we’re the bottleneck — where we’re in the way — we want to get ourselves out of the way so more of those games can come to Steam faster,” said Giardino. “Greenlight was a super-useful stepping stone. It helped us go through and solve a bunch of problems for developers.”

But now, with Steam growing rapidly, the company sees now as the time to turn the reigns over to the community. That might mean that the service gets hundreds of new games every couple of days, but it is confident that its algorithms will show you the handful that you actually may want to spend money on.

http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/10/steam-greenlight-is-dead-valve-introduces-steam-direct/
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
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Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Greenlight was worthless years ago. Devs would bribe idiots to vote for their games by giving out copies free or putting them in $1 bundles.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Footage of Steam with current version of Greenlight:

giphy.gif


Footage of Steam after Greenlight is shut down:

flooding.gif


EDIT: (Found this while looking for the above images, don't ask me how)

Reactions of modders about paid mods making a return:

giphy.gif
 

gaussgunner

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http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751
A better path for digital distribution
The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.

Nice to see an effort to cut out the middleman publishers and trash games. The application fee makes more sense than relying on Valve, intermediary publishers, or users (for fuck's sake) to vet games for quality. It puts the onus on developers to judge the quality of their own work. Even $100 will discourage indie noobs from submitting low-effort garbage. It might have to be higher to stop the more successful shovelware companies though. Also, lots of whiners in the comments wanting lower fees for devs in 3rd-world shitholes, but of course the shovelware companies will simply virtually relocate there if they aren't already there. There's no solution for economic arbitrage.

As an indie dev, I'm not complaining. I'd rather pay up front than compete with shovelware. This is not so different from the barrier to entry before Steam: you had to pony up $1000+ for a CD/DVD production run (500-1000 copies minimum), or burn them one by one, and mail them out yourself.

I guess "recoupable" means Valve refunds the fee if you sell the minimum amount, in addition to paying your 70% cut. Unlike the scumbag record companies who wouldn't pay artists a dime until sales revenue had covered all their production costs.
 

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