The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Azalin]

In the last 5 years the God Emperor turned into a Chaos God. Thank you capitalism!

Gaben hasn't been the same since he lost weight

 

[Spectacle]

A $5K submission fee will probably do more than greenlight to keep garbage out, that's a lot off money for a typical unemployed indie dev.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In the last 5 years the God Emperor turned into a Chaos God. Thank you capitalism!

Gaben hasn't been the same since he lost weight

He lost weight? I always thought he was slowly transforming into a bearded greater demon of Nurgle.

 

[Thane Solus]

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.

Yeah its something, but will see how it will translate. I like the recoup feature. The thing is i would rather prefer to loose the submission money and those money to go to a official curation of the store, but that will be too much for Valve and co. Unfortunately the trash from the last 2 years it will still remain on the store, and you will compete with them for exposure on -sales days. Cause FUCK YOU! Capitalism! The market will fix herself, and other inane nonsense.

 

[Azalin]

In the last 5 years the God Emperor turned into a Chaos God. Thank you capitalism!

Gaben hasn't been the same since he lost weight

He lost weight? I always thought he was slowly transforming into a bearded greater demon of Nurgle.

Old Gaben

New Gaben

 

[Infinitron]

http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/13/g...sh-valve-employees-egg-on-half-life-3-rumors/

Gabe Newell admits ‘childish’ Valve employees egg on Half-Life 3 rumors

Above: Is that a Half-Life 3 logo? Probably not.

Half-Life 3 is a mythological beast. Most people know it’s not real, but you’ll never convince a handful of dedicated investigators who pour over every blurry photo and alleged Gabe Newell footprints found in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Above: I don’t know. Looks like Bigfoot to me.

Now, Valve is confirming that some of its employees enjoy perpetuating the occasional Half-Life 3 hoax. For instance, in the image above, you can see what looks like a Half-Life 3 logo on a Windows machine running a Vive demo. The logo has either “VR3” or “W3” as its label, and — as you would expect — this news drove some people in the Half-Life community wild. But when asked about this image and that logo, Valve had a predictable explanation.

“It’s news to us that the picture is out, but it’s also news that this icon is on the screen,” Valve communications specialist Greg Coomer told a roundtable of reporters last week. “Honestly, those icons have floated around this office for quite a while. None of us are going to be able to tell you what that is or why that’s there.”

But then Valve founder Gabe Newell added his own take on the situation.

“Some of the more childish members of our company have worn Half-Life 3 T-shirts to GDC,” Newell said.

Clearly, Newell also believes that the logo is another example of that childishness, but the company did stop short of saying that it wasn’t Half-Life 3.

Valve is making three VR games. These are not experiments, but the company did not mention any specifics about the projects. When asked about references to Half-Life 3 in code for the Source 2 engine, Valve stopped short of making any definitive claims.

“I’m not going to say anything about the three specific titles,” said Newell.

Take that as you will, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

 

[gaussgunner]

People want to know - what is Valve doing to stop shills from gaming the Steam rating/review system?

Fuck all, I assume.

 

[LESS T_T]

Following Marc Laidlaw, another writers, Eric Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton have left Valve:

 

[LESS T_T]

Well, Pinkerton is still at Valve.

 

[Black]

Well yeah, why would a digital store company need video game writers.

 

[CreamyBlood]

Gabe looks great with the beard but terrible with that old lady's hair, a good haircut would do more for his visual than a diet.

Haircuts are for girls and vain men. Plus why does that guy have so many chocolate bars? What do they eat there?

 

[gaussgunner]

He's really starting to look like Jerry Garcia.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...scusses_the_downsides_of_working_at_Valve.php

Gabe Newell discusses the downsides of working at Valve

Valve is a bit of an oddity in the game industry.

The company's inner workings have generated a lot of interest over the years, due to both its high-profile success in multiple areas (game design, commerce, VR) and the public sharing in 2012 of its employee handbook, which revealed the company has a mostly flat org chart.

Company chief Gabe Newell has spoken on multiple occasions about the benefits of this arrangement, which he says creates "an efficient market for people's time" and ensures that people are less likely to burn out because they're always working on what they think is most valuable to their customers.

"I think it's that fact that you're always voting with your time, you're always making a decision about how to spend your work product, that actually makes it easy for people to be fired up," Newell told Gamasutra and other outlets during a press briefing last week. "Because they're always working on stuff that to them seems significant. Nobody's working on yet another sequel. 'Oh, it's the fall, we have to come out with, you know, version 17.'"

"There are plenty of great developers for whom this is a terrible place to work"

That's all well and good -- but how does it go bad? Some folks have left Valve, and some have been asked to leave; according to Newell, the company's internal structure -- or lack thereof -- can actually be totally ruinous to someone who is unhappy or unproductive in an unstructured environemnt.

"That seems to be kind of a personality trait," Newell said. "Everybody thinks they want a lot of autonomy, and to be self-directed. Turns out that a lot of people don't. So, you can have really capable, successful developers who won't work well in this environment. And you really have to like customers, right."

"You have to be pretty egoless, too," interjected Erik Johnson, a longtime Valve staffer who was present alongside Newell during the brief. You have to be pretty egoless to just do what customers ask you to do, right. You have to admit you're wrong. Often."

What's notable here is not that people sometimes stop working at Valve, but that the folks at Valve acknowledge their idiosyncratic way of working is anathema to a lot of otherwise very skilled game developers.

"If you're not excited about making a mistake, right; if you don't see that as an opportunity for improvement, that can trip people up," Newell continued. "And there are plenty of great developers for whom this is a terrible place to work."

Back when Valve was working on games that actually had physical releases, adds Johnson, things were a bit different; the company had to be more regimented in order to accomplish tasks like squashing bugs before ship.

"When we were doing more retail-focused products that had a very strict end date -- like, you had to burn a CD and all those things -- that created some restraints," said Johnson.

"So we would go, like, at the end of Half-Life 2, we were pretty regimented around bug counts. 'Who owns bugs? You go fix these bugs, you go fix those bugs. Where's everybody's bug count?' It was pretty structured. And if you ask a bunch of people around here, it's actually kind of awesome to work where you come into work, somebody's just telling you the work that you have to do, and then you're done. And that's generally not how we work, but there's genuine comfort in that."

Now that comfort is pretty much gone, according to Newell.

"People at Valve have to get used to working without a safety net," he said. "There's nothing between you and a customer. You can come in that morning, and by two o' clock in the afternoon, you have fucked a million customers."

"And they are ALL emailing you," added Johnson, smiling and looking at Newell.

"They're all emailing me!" Newell continued. "And you probably should fix it, right. But nobody's looking over your shoulder. And for some people, that's liberating. And for some people it's terrifying."

 

[Spectacle]

If Valve couldn't leech 30% of most PC games sales revenue due to their entrenched market position, they'd be fucked with their hopelessly inefficient development process. I find it interesting that even though they are ostensibly a game developer that lets employees work on whatever they want to, none of them seem to want to make any games, at least not any games that are finished enough to release.

 

[stony3k]

If Valve couldn't leech 30% of most PC games sales revenue due to their entrenched market position, they'd be fucked with their hopelessly inefficient development process. I find it interesting that even though they are ostensibly a game developer that lets employees work on whatever they want to, none of them seem to want to make any games, at least not any games that are finished enough to release.

That's because (like most work) large parts of game development are boring and tedious. A company that attracts people who like "interesting" work, will never be able to finish a game properly. In fact, the best option for them would be to outsource the dull, tedious work.

 

[Country_Gravy]

Work at Valve and fuck a million customers by 2:00.

Seems like a great advertisement to attract on-screen talent.

 

[Farage]

If they set it up to 5k a fee, can you imagine how much value the current stream of garbage that was accepted there would get?
All these ideas sounds like absolute gargabe and won't fix any of the issues - they really just need to man up and do some human work as in review games patiently one by one and not sort it out with some shitty algorithm

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

 

[Dexter]

If Valve couldn't leech 30% of most PC games sales revenue due to their entrenched market position, they'd be fucked with their hopelessly inefficient development process. I find it interesting that even though they are ostensibly a game developer that lets employees work on whatever they want to, none of them seem to want to make any games, at least not any games that are finished enough to release.

This was true at some point, but right now they'd survive on proceeds from "Microtransactions" from Team Fortress 2/DOTA 2/Counter Strike: Global Offensive only. Even without Third-Party games they'd be like Blizzard, since there's a huge following for some of these games: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

 

[Villagkouras]

Financially, it would be a terrible move for Valve to leave all this shit out of store because these games generate income with their trading cards.

 

[Rahdulan]

Gabe demands more pink cookies! Well, not really. Give it a careful read.
http://www.vg247.com/2017/02/22/ste...new-zealand-india-switzerland-more-this-year/

Game prices on Steam may soon get a hike in certain countries. That’s because Steam will now start including sales tax in the prices displayed on the store in ten countries.

Valve revealed this in an email sent to developers (via Gamespot). The email also outlined all the countries included in this move, the percentage of tax to be added, as well as when we can expect to see the change.

March

• Switzerland 8%
• South Korea 10%
• Japan 8%
• New Zealand 15%
• Iceland 24%
• South Africa 14%
• India 15%

April

• Serbia 20%

May

• Taiwan 5%

July

• Australia 10%

The email does not outright state that prices will be increased, only that the advertised price will reflect the added tax, similar to how VAT is treated in the EU. “This means the customer will pay the price displayed on the storefront, and the tax will be separated out afterwards,” the email reads.

This does not mean prices will increase for all games, either, as publishers could still absorb the tax and decide against raising the price to the end user. It’s likely some of them at least will, which means certain games of the same calibre may see varying prices in these regions, depending on the publisher.

And I could grow wings tomorrow.

 

[Azalin]

 

[Melcar]

I read that it was just VAT. In some countries with VAT that tax is not being applied.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

• Iceland 24%

Hopefully this will shut up some of the local Steamtards that cannot stop praising Gaben.

As for me? I've as good as packed up my Steam activities anyway.

 

[Latelistener]

The aforementioned percents are taken by the respective governments. This has nothing to do with Valve. They take 30%, and nothing has changed.

Moreover, it's been 2 months since they introduced the 18% VAT in Russia on digital goods, but the only game that has changed the price is Cossacks 3 (probably because it was made in UA, if you know what I mean). So it's entirely up to developers, whether they will be paying VAT from their own pockets, or change prices so Steam users will be paying it instead.