The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[pippin]

Who the fuck is buying that shitty ARK game? And why is rocket league so popular? It's like a multiplayer Cyberball or something?

Ark seems to be a legit open world sandbox kinda thing, but I'm going to say both games are popular because of memes.

 

[Caim]

Who the fuck is buying that shitty ARK game? And why is rocket league so popular? It's like a multiplayer Cyberball or something?

ARK is popular because the big name youtubers play it and it's postapocalyptic survival stuff with dinosaurs.

Rocket Leage is football with cars and seems to control surprisingly well.

 

[sullynathan]

Who the fuck is buying that shitty ARK game? And why is rocket league so popular? It's like a multiplayer Cyberball or something?

ARK is popular because the big name youtubers play it and it's postapocalyptic survival stuff with dinosaurs.

Rocket Leage is football with cars and seems to control surprisingly well.

rocket league is

 

[Drax]

Rocket league is pretty fun.

 

[Alienman]

Arma 3 still selling that good. I'm genuine surprised.

 

[you know what time it is]

Both are fun if you have friends

 

[Spectacle]

Arma 3 still selling that good. I'm genuine surprised.

People are buying it to play DayZ. I doubt many ever try the regular campaign.

 

[Infinitron]

Arma 3 still selling that good. I'm genuine surprised.

People are buying it to play DayZ. I doubt many ever try the regular campaign.

That was Arma2. DayZ has been standalone for a long time...

 

[Spectacle]

Arma 3 still selling that good. I'm genuine surprised.

People are buying it to play DayZ. I doubt many ever try the regular campaign.

That was Arma2. DayZ has been standalone for a long time...

Ah, I'm mixing things up then. Good to see there is interest in military simulation

 

[Jick Magger]

That and DayZ kinda hit the peak of its popularity around about a hear and a half ago, and since has been on a pretty steady decline. Game's still got enough good reviews to maintain a positive rating on the steam page, but all the most helpful reviews on the front page are negative. Doesn't help that word of mouth has drifted to other, arguably better survival games that actually have a lot of content (i.e. Rust, Ark, H1Z1, etc).

EDIT: That seems to be something of a recurring theme with early access survival games: game is released, builds up popularity due to positive word of mouth and YouTube personalities, keeps its peak popularity for a year or two, then slowly sinks back into obscurity due to a mixture of disinterest and building negative feedback towards things like performance issues, lack of content, hackers or the imbalance inherent in multiplayer survival games, etc.

 

[moraes]

GTA V netted more or less $1 billion in revenue and only 161 mil of these where PC sales. Console market is very very big indeed.

Also, GTA V costed 266 million. Even being a PC best-seller, it could not have been profitable being a PC exclusive. Interesting.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

GTA V netted more or less $1 billion in revenue and only 161 mil of these where PC sales. Console market is very very big indeed.

Also, GTA V costed 266 million. Even being a PC best-seller, it could not have been profitable being a PC exclusive. Interesting.

Nice logic,if it was only for PC there would be more sales due to exclusivity and smaller budget due to less platforms.

 

[Spectacle]

GTA V netted more or less $1 billion in revenue and only 161 mil of these where PC sales. Console market is very very big indeed.

Also, GTA V costed 266 million. Even being a PC best-seller, it could not have been profitable being a PC exclusive. Interesting.

That's only the revenue on Steam though, retail copies and copies sold on other download stores are activated with Rockstar Social Club so they don't appear in the steam charts. I have no idea how big retail is compared to steam these days, but total PC sales of GTA V are at least a bit higher than that, possibly a lot higher.

 

[Turjan]

That's only the revenue on Steam though, retail copies and copies sold on other download stores are activated with Rockstar Social Club so they don't appear in the steam charts. I have no idea how big retail is compared to steam these days, but total PC sales of GTA V are at least a bit higher than that, possibly a lot higher.

It was very popular to buy GTA V on Nuuvem shortly after release of the PC version, as that was much cheaper, and the Rockstar Social Club keys had no region lock.

 

[pippin]

GTA features real world songs though, and a large chunk of the money generally goes to licensing that kind of stuff.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

GTA features real world songs though, and a large chunk of the money generally goes to licensing that kind of stuff.

I heard that in the end Rockstar made three fiddy in profits.

 

[racofer]

GTA V netted more or less $1 billion in revenue and only 161 mil of these where PC sales. Console market is very very big indeed.

Also, GTA V costed 266 million. Even being a PC best-seller, it could not have been profitable being a PC exclusive. Interesting.

Nice logic,if it was only for PC there would be more sales due to exclusivity and smaller budget due to less platforms.

And besides, GTA V was release for PC what, a year after the consoles?

 

[moraes]

Nice logic,if it was only for PC there would be more sales due to exclusivity and smaller budget due to less platforms.

That depends on the cost of porting. The current generation of consoles is very similar to computers (same architecture and graphics chips) so I dont think that it was a substantial amount, besides, GTA V was initially developed for Xbox 360 and PS3, so a port for the x86 architecture was inevitable. All in all, cost of development would not have changed that much. Licensing costs and marketing costs would remain the same. You have a point about more sales, and we dont know how much it sold outside Steam, but I doubt it would be possible as a PC exclusive.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Marc Laidlaw has left Valve:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/3zzmi2/sent_an_email_to_marc_laidlaw_about_hl3_he/

 

[Metro]

RIP

 

[vonAchdorf]

SteamSpy blogs a bit about the Winter Sale:

At least 46 million copies of games found their new owners during Steam Winter Sale. And that only includes games that sold over 1,000 copies, because smaller changes are barely detectable by Steam Spy. That’s 50% more compared to Steam Summer Sale.

If we assume that all of those games were sold on Steam (it’s probably not the case because of bundles and third-party stores) and account for regional pricing, we can conclude that Steam Winter Sale brought at least $270M in revenue.

That’s almost twice as much as Steam Summer Sale did.

One of the reasons here is that both Fallout 4 and Grand Theft Auto V were discounted (unlike the last time, when GTA V was force-bundled and then “discounted” to $59.99). Fallout 4 and GTA V are the biggest games on Steam this year in terms of revenue, so both obviously helped.

The most popular discounts are 75% and 50% off. The most lucrative are 75%, 66% and 50% off.

https://medium.com/steam-spy/about-steam-winter-sale-76a75abe152a#.fpf7rq3xe

 

[Metro]

So, basically, casual tards still bought games in droves despite the sale being shit. Reinforces their decision not to have good promos so we can expect another shitty sale this summer.

 

[LESS T_T]

Valve agrees: https://steamdb.info/forum/790/

This was initially posted in the private Steamworks group, but the SteamVR page showed this post for no apparent reason. Below is a direct copy paste of Valve's post, as is.

---

In short: More customers bought more games across more of the Steam catalog.

As you already know, the format of discounts in this year’s Winter sale was a little different from past years. This year’s sale was centered around discounts that ran for the full length of the sale, rather than changing from day to day for featured titles. Our hypothesis was that this new format would be a better way to serve customers that may only be able to visit Steam once or twice during the 13-day event. We also saw this change as an opportunity to showcase a deeper variety of titles to customers each day, while having confidence that any game being highlighted would be at its lowest discount.


More products viewed
As a result of this format change, we were able to encourage customers to browse through their Discovery Queue, thereby surfacing a string of personalized recommendations including titles that aren’t otherwise highlighted on the home page. By dropping users a free Steam Trading Card for browsing through their personalized Discovery Queue (up to three times each day) many customers were exposed to 36 different product pages every day for each of the 13 days of the event.

This resulted in three times as many views of product pages as in past sales events.

Not just views, but action
One of our concerns going into the Winter Sale was that extrinsically motivating customers with a trading card might encourage people to just click through their Discovery Queue and not actually pay attention to the games being presented. It turned out that customers found a lot of value in using the Discovery Queue, resulting in a huge up-tick in sales and wishlist additions. Looking back over wishlist data, we typically see only a slight increase in the rate of customers adding items to their wishlist during sales versus during non-sale time periods. However, this year we saw a 197% increase in the rate of wishlist additions during the sale. Some of these additions were then subsequently purchased during the sale while others remain on customer wishlists as indications of future interest in those games.

Revenue impacts
As the Steam catalog expands, we continue looking for new ways to help customers discover more interesting titles deeper on Steam. Major sale events provide great opportunities for us to test out new ways of organizing offers and features to serve these goals. In terms of revenue, the discount strategy and Discovery Queue usage resulted in a resounding success.

As with past years, popular hits continue to sell well during major sales events. But what about the thousands of other titles on Steam? We looked at performance of the group of games outside of the Top 500 in revenue terms. This group collected 35% of product page traffic during the sale, which is over 4x their share of traffic from the previous winter sale. And these weren’t just idle views--we also saw 45% growth in the revenue generated by this group of games as compared with the last winter sale.

The number of games on Steam continues to increase. But the Winter Sale’s visibility and revenue growth is a great indicator that customers are taking advantage of Steam features and tools to find games they want to play, and shopping beyond the front page. As always, we'll keep working on new ways to serve customers and we welcome any feedback from partners. Thanks!

 

[Metro]

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Well they basically gave 20c a day just to browse the discovery queue ,no shit it will generate traffic.As with all bad sequels results show next time.