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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
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
Vault Dweller

http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-killed-my-sales/

Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales



Firstly I want to be clear that I have had some measure of success on Steam and I’ve enjoyed going to Steam Dev Days and other events and talking to their reps who seem to be genuinely interested supporting indie developers. So this blog post is not about me hating on Steam, rather it’s to discuss a recent issue that has impacted my sales and the sales of many other indies too.

Here’s a huge Steamworks forum post about the issue (you have to be logged on as a developer to read it).

The October Discovery Bug

In early October Valve changed something in their discovery algorithm and introduced a bad bug which meant that Steam was only recommending some big name games instead of relevant games, oops!

Ongoing Discovery Issues

Valve fixed the October discovery bug quickly (within a week I think) but since then many indies have seen a big dip in their traffic from “Other Product Pages” and “Home Page”. Other product pages includes a sub-category of “Discovery Queue” and traffic from that source appears to have decreased significantly for me if I compare before and after the October bug.

Here’s a good week (click to enlarge the image):


And here’s a bad week (click to enlarge the image):


You can see that Other Product Pages has gone from being my top traffic source with 305 visits to a mediocre traffic source with only 91 visits.

This effect can also be seen on the traffic graphs in Steamworks (click image below to enlarge it). The orange line is “Other Product Pages”. I ran a weeklong sale at the start of Oct but straight after the sale finished the traffic from other product pages dropped and stayed low. The other two peaks are the Steam Halloween and Thanksgiving sales.



I can see the same drop in traffic for two of my other games and some devs have showed me charts with an even more severe drop.
Impact on Sales



I compared full price sales before and after the October bug (being careful to avoid weeklong sales and Steam sales) and my total units sold have halved. Revenue has dipped even more because our most expensive game has dropped to 36% of previous unit sales.

I’m not sure if this issue also affects traffic during a) discount sales and b) game launches because those are a lot harder to analyse like for like, but based on some data I’ve seen from other developers I’m suspicious that those things may also be impacted.

Has this issue affected all indies?

I’ve heard in private that some games are either not affected by this issue or have actually benefited from it with increased traffic! It stands to reason that if many devs are losing traffic, then that traffic must be going elsewhere. That said, a huge number of smaller indies have been hit hard by this issue, harder than me, with traffic and sales dropping to near zero in many cases.

Have I told Valve about it?

Like many indies who added games to Steam since Steam Greenlight I don’t have an official rep. However I did email a couple of reps who I got business cards from and they said they would look into it, but I haven’t heard from them since then.

Admittedly I should chase them up but I was waiting to see if the problem resolved itself, but it’s been ongoing for two months now. Other indies I know have emailed their reps but I haven’t heard anything positive yet.

Here’s the data I sent to Valve (click to enlarge) along with screenshots of the traffic graphs.



Theories

Fellow indie dev Danny Day has suggested that the discovery algorithm may have a historical data component to it and after the initial October bug the historical data got trashed and so the algorithm is not giving the same results as before.

October/November is also AAA release season and includes two Steam sales so it’s possible that our sales are impacted slightly, but that doesn’t explain the sudden huge drop off in discovery traffic that many indies are seeing.

Another possibility is just that Valve changed the algorithm to highlight different games and some devs have benefited and others have not.

It’s even possible that Valve shifted some kind of slider from “show a variety of indie games” further towards “show popular games that earn more money”. They are a corporation after all and corporations like to make money and they don’t have any real obligation to help out smaller indie teams. This particular point seems evident when taking into account the recent news that games grossing over $10M will receive a greater share of the revenue but struggling indies will not.

Also I’ve heard Valve say multiple times that they put the customer first (understandably) and so they probably believe whatever changes they make improve the experience for customers.

But I must stress that the above points are just theories, we haven’t heard anything official from Valve yet.

Selling Direct and Itch.io

So, should I double down on selling direct or use itch.io?

Well I’ve been selling direct since 2006, but sadly my direct sales are about 1% of my total revenue. I need distributors like Steam to survive. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is.

Btw, you can buy all my games direct from me here. I get 100% of the revenue minus a small processing fee, so it’s amazing and the best way you can support indies is to buy direct.

The second best way is to buy through itch.io because they only take a small fee (in fact developers can set it at a rate they think is fair). I haven’t put my games on itch.io yet because I’ve heard that sales on there are very low and I’ve been busy with potentially higher value tasks. However, I will try out Regency Solitaire on there soon and see how it gets on as I’d like to support the platform now more than ever.

More discussion

Check out these Twitter threads for more discussion with other devs who have also shared their data.

Conclusion

In the past I have felt positive about Steam, but these discovery changes and the recent revenue share changes that are only relevant to hugely successful games don’t make me feel particularly positive about the future of selling games on Steam. In fact I’d go as far as to say I’m worried.

Making indie games is my full time job and I’d really like it to continue for many years. I’ve had to adapt a lot over the years and it feels like another phase of adaption is fast approaching…

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697191267955776539

About Store Traffic to Games in October
5 DECEMBER - TOMB

We wanted to address some concerns we've heard from a few developers about store traffic to their games in October. Back then, after some developers let us know about the issue, we did some investigation, found a bug in one widget, and pushed out a fix a few days later (along with making some tweaks to the algorithm for that widget).

Here's the history of what happened:

On October 5th, we deployed some code to Steam that changed the defaults for our search queries to factor in sales and wishlist activity more than before. This change was meant to fix an issue where customers would search for a game, but that game would be much lower in the search results than other less relevant games.

This change had the unintended side-effect of de-boosting tags in the “More Like This” section on a game's store page. What that meant was that instead of seeing products similar to the game, you saw games that shared just one tag in common, but were effectively the most popular games on Steam. This isn't how we wanted that feature to work.

On October 9th, to fix the issue, we changed the algorithm for the "More Like This" section to increase the boost on tag similarity. However, we still kept a part of the change that factored in sales and wishlist popularity. On October 30th, we increased the weighting of tag-similarity again based on the results we were seeing.

To compound matters, from October 10-17, we were also running an experiment in the same "More Like This" section to test out a new algorithm which we hoped would be more effective in showing customers games that we think they would be interested in. This experiment ended up showing fewer products to a subset of customers, which led to a decrease in overall impressions in that area.

As a result, overall impressions and views for the "More Like This" section did show a substantial decrease for about two weeks after the initial bug. But traffic recovered around October 19th, and has stabilized since.

In general, we’re always trying to show games to customers that we think they will enjoy, no matter who made them, what the budget was, when they came out, etc. We're constantly exploring ideas and trying new things to try to figure out the best ways to do this. The fact is, traffic is going to shift whenever we do this work; it may go up or it may go down for any individual product. However, not all impressions and views are equal – in the end, what matters is that we show customers games that they find interesting.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-killed-my-sales/
Didn't notice any drops so maybe it affected their genre (solitaires, match-3, and such) more than the others.

Our stats:
Untitled.png
 

Solid Snail

Learned
Joined
Oct 31, 2018
Messages
328




A couple of giveaways. To enter you need to be part of the RPG Codex Steam Group, you can enter it without invite. They will both end in six hours.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
DotA 2 already was about chasing the fad, wasn't it?

(Ah, I was fabulously optimistic enough to think they will make Half-Life 3 a Deus Ex-like immersive sim when they brought Doug Church. Oh well.)
 

Sentinel

Arcane
Joined
Nov 18, 2015
Messages
6,633
Location
Ommadawn
Valve devs do whatever the fuck they want so it's not surprising that they want to create their own versions of games they play and think are lacking. Valve can be accused of chasing fads, but at least their games have way more complex mechanics and interactions than the competitors.

What's more shocking is that single-player projects seem to evaporate. What the fuck happened to that Valley of the Gods project? The devs went dead silent after being acquired. Either it's dead or they're completely rebuilding it like they did with the original Portal project.
 

Hoaxmetal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
It's not even a proper BR. It's a small 16 player map and it doesn't have any interesting features.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
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
Here we go again:

Steam Is Banning Sex Games With Young-Looking Characters [Update]

xjjpz4dmqnw8azjjmgto.jpg


These days, anything goes on Steam, but not anything anything. If games are “illegal, or straight up trolling,” Valve says it’ll send them packing. In the past, that’s meant low-effort games with titles like Big Dick and MILF, achievement spam, and certain sex games.

Now, according to some developers, Valve is going after games that feature themes of “child exploitation,” which it seems to define, at least in part, as games with sex scenes or nudity where the characters are in high school.

Over the past few weeks, the company has removed the store pages of several visual novels, including cross-dressing yaoi romance Cross Love, catholic school visual novel Hello Goodbye, “story about the love between siblings” (yuck) Imolicious, and cat girl game MaoMao Discovery Team. The developers of these games all claim to have received similar emails stating that their games could not be released on Steam.

“While we can ship most titles on Steam, we found that this one does feature themes of child exploitation,” read the email received by Top Hat Studios, makers of Cross Love. “Because of that, the app has been banned and cannot be reused.”

There are a couple ties that bind the games in question: 1) Cross Love, Hello Goodbye, and Imolicious feature school settings, and 2) all four of the aforementioned games contain adult elements and center around anime-styled characters who appear young—in some cases uncomfortably so [Update - 11:00 PM, 12/07/18: A rep from Hello Goodbye’s publisher has informed Kotaku that the game’s Steam version was to be censored and would not have contained adult content]. However, their developers have taken to protesting the bans on social media, saying that their games have been misunderstood. They all claim they’ve reached out to Valve since receiving their bans, only to be met with silence.

Cross Love’s developers say they’ve taken great pains to ensure that their game demonstrates, on multiple occasions, that its students are of age. This includes scenes where they peruse 18+ manga and are ID-ed before being allowed into an adult bookstore.

“These scenes aren’t there to be artificially shoehorned in, and while they do exist as further proof of characters’ ages (beyond the disclaimer in the beginning that explicitly states them as being 18), the real reason they’re there is to further many of the themes in the story,” said developer Top Hat to Kotaku in a Twitter DM, pointing out that it’s tried to contact Valve with this information six separate times, to no avail. “A large chunk of the story is about accepting who you are, being comfortable with yourself, and altogether similar themes within a type of coming of age-style love story, which isn’t really seen in most yaoi games.”

In reference to people deliberately seeking out childlike characters, Top Hat also said that its game was not “made in any way to appeal to that type of audience or deliver that form of content.”

Other games are more questionable. Imolicious’ developer claims there aren’t “any children” in the game, but it revolves around school girls. When I pointed out that most school girls are, by definition, children, developer Yume Creations replied in a DM: “High school students aren’t children, they are teenagers.” Most teenagers in high school are still minors, so that rationale doesn’t really hold water. The developer also noted, however, that “in [the] case of Imolicious, I added a disclaimer that all characters [are] over 18 like you can see in most visual novels.”

They’re not wrong: This is a trend among visual novels featuring adult material—and more broadly among “loli” anime, which tends to feature suspiciously young-looking women who are said to be over 18. But while some take these declarations at face value, others view them as obvious (and creepy) fig leaves.

“Having a disclaimer stating that a drawing is of consensual age or not is a ridiculous thing to rely upon,” said one user in a Steam forum thread discussing MaoMao Discovery Team’s legality. “At the end of the day, it is a fictional drawing that does not have an age. If you think they look too young, then they are too young. A bit of text saying ‘this person is 20' changes nothing.”

Which brings us to the heart of the matter: It’s Valve’s store, and what it says goes. If someone at Valve decides characters look too young, then they’re too young. Top Hat, however, believes its characters are well above board and that, on top of that, there’s a double standard at play here, not unlike the one some developers felt they’d fallen victim to before Valve officially allowed uncensored sex games on Steam. Games that feature overtly young-looking characters, school settings, and romantic/sexual themes, like Nekopara Extra, Sakura Sakura, A Piece Of Wish Upon The Stars, and Material Girl, are all still on Steam, Top Hat pointed out. The studio feels it’s unfair that these potentially more egregious games get to stick around while its game gets lumped in with others that cross Valve’s invisible line.

Kotaku reached out to Valve to ask about the rationale behind banning certain games, but has yet to hear back.

Imolicious developer Yume Creations says it’s given up on trying to get the game on Steam, opting instead to release an uncensored version on internet hentai capital Fakku. In a Steam post, MaoMao’s developers made it sound like they, too, are throwing in the towel. But while Top Hat has put Cross Love up on other stores like Itch.io and Nutaku, it’s still giving Steam the old hopefully-at-least-college-age try.

“Steam is a major service, and we had hundreds of players looking forward to buying the game there upon release,” Top Hat said. “The game had wishlists in the thousands, and the community group had several hundred people in it. This is a very large userbase to lose out on, and it hurts us pretty bad. It’s not world ending, but it is quite the end of the year blow.”

[Update - 11:00 PM, 12/07/18: We’ve updated the story to clarify Top Hat’s stance on Cross Love in relation to the other games that got banned.]
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
27,089
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Valve should release an adults-only digital distribution platform called Moist.

Problem solved.

Bucks keep rolling in.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,105
It's anime, though. So "young-looking" means everyone who's not sporting an obvious beard or isn't voiced by Norio Wakamoto.
 

Sentinel

Arcane
Joined
Nov 18, 2015
Messages
6,633
Location
Ommadawn
new game ARG?



4 rooms, room 3 locked off. Can only be accessed by secret passage from room 2.
Chairs outside all pointing towards a sinking ship on the horizon.
Inside the room there's monitors, female chatter & what seems like some code coming from the speakers. Decrypted code translates to "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS", the first line in the "Still Alive" Portal song.


spooky

PS:
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/3/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/4/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/8/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/9/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/11/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/13/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/16/
http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/151/

the plot thickens

https://twitter.com/csgo_dev
Twitter banner changed to a pic of lab rats. There are multiple references to lab rats on the new map, MP5 skins, and in the Portal comics (it's the title of the first comic - http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/). Players are thanked for "participating in the experiement" at the end of a CSGO BR match.
 
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Grauken

Gourd vibes only
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2013
Messages
12,787
Alternate Reality Game, basically larping that use the real world as a background to tell a more fantastic story, often involving conspiracies
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Well, that explains nothing and leaves me with more questions.

As best as I can find reading the awfully written wikipedia article its just random bullshit meant to market dumb shit to the kind of person who will play a stupid phone game because it relates to a movie/tv show/real game or something?

wikipedia said:
There is a great deal of debate surrounding the characteristics by which the term "alternate reality game" should be defined. Sean Stacey, founder of the website Unfiction, has suggested that the best way to define the genre was not to define it
Yeah, bullshit.
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,975
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
the best way to define the genre was not to define it

Oh, just like RPGs then. :M

Here's an example

https://wiki.gamedetectives.net/index.php?title=Rasputin_ARG

https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-puzzle-leads-players-to-actual-treasure-in-ne-1825978852

edit: another example in the comments

Pretty cool. I love it when companies do things like this! It reminds me of the Bill Cipher statue (and box of ‘treasure’) that the Gravity Falls crew hid for fans to find in a scavenger hunt that kicked off with clues in the finale episode (that took the fandom almost two weeks to track down): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.da...y-falls-bill-statue-located-reedsport-oregon/
 
Last edited:

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
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
Butthurt indie dev survey: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-developer-survey

An annual survey suggests developers are losing confidence in Valve

Small developers are losing confidence that Valve is earning its 30% of Steam sales, according to a new survey. In 2017, 39% of developers agreed that Valve had earned its share, but that number has dropped to 11% in this year’s survey. Lars Doucet, who has run this survey for three years, is quick to note that these results are not scientific – but they do put numbers to issues developers have lately been in heated discussions over.

Questions include things like whether Valve “has interests positively aligned with mine,” “answers my questions and meets my needs,” or “is earning their 30%.” In each of those three cases, developer responses are less than half as positive as they were a year ago.

Doucet calls this survey ‘Operation Tell Valve All the Things,’ and it’s worth noting that Valve does often respond directly to the results. In fact, he estimates that nearly half of the issues developers have brought up in previous surveys have been resolved with specific Steam updates from Valve. But with the Steam discoverability bug, controversial revenue split changes, and new competition from the Epic Games Store, there’s still a lot to be done.

The biggest thing developers are concerned with this year is “not getting screwed by ‘the algorithm.’” These days, Steam selects games for promotion primarily through data analysis that has never been entirely clear to developers or players. Valve asserts that the secrecy is to keep the system from being abused, while developers worry that quiet alterations to the system have dramatic, unpredictable effects on their sales.

Other top issues include desire for a fairer revenue share and more extensive curation, and while developers at different revenue tiers tend to emphasise those issues to different degrees, they all rank them the same.

You can read the full survey for yourself here. Doucet is chatting with the folks at Valve about these issues today – hopefully these criticisms will lead to an improved store for developers and players alike.

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/operation-tell-valve-all-the-things-3-0/
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
the best way to define the genre was not to define it

Oh, just like RPGs then. :M

Here's an example

https://wiki.gamedetectives.net/index.php?title=Rasputin_ARG

https://kotaku.com/destiny-2-puzzle-leads-players-to-actual-treasure-in-ne-1825978852

edit: another example in the comments

Pretty cool. I love it when companies do things like this! It reminds me of the Bill Cipher statue (and box of ‘treasure’) that the Gravity Falls crew hid for fans to find in a scavenger hunt that kicked off with clues in the finale episode (that took the fandom almost two weeks to track down): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.da...y-falls-bill-statue-located-reedsport-oregon/

Yeah, we used to just call these scavenger hunts. I guess that's not cool enough for the new "hip" marketing drones though. Now its on the internet and mobile and cool.
 

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