Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Bruticis

Novice
Patron
Joined
Aug 18, 2019
Messages
28
The often delayed Steam layout overhaul is supposedly coming in a few weeks.

The open beta for the new Steam Library will launch on Sept. 17 while a new centralized tool for announcements, Steam Events, will be released on Sept. 4. An update for the Steam Labs micro trailer experiment and a new search tool, both new experiments in Steam Labs, will launch on Sept. 5. All players will be able to opt into the beta.

EDIT: Official Steam link https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/

steam_library_screenshot.png


https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/4/20849185/steam-library-events-labs-updates
 
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
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...our-steam-library-looks-and-its-long-overdue/

Valve are changing how your Steam library looks, and it's long overdue

90

Valve are introducing a set of long overdue new features to Steam over the next month. The first of these updates gives developers a new tool called Steam Events and will be released to developers today. New updates and additions to the Steam Labs experiments launched in July are due to follow tomorrow, and then sweeping changes to the software’s game library launch into open beta on September 17th. Speaking at an event held in Seattle last week, Alden Kroll from the Steam development team said that the changes would help players “find what to play next.”

If you’re a user of Steam, the most interesting of these is the library update, which overhauls how you browse and organise the games you already own. For starters, there’s now a library homepage which highlights particular games. At the top, a section called “What’s New” highlights games that have had recent updates or community events. Below that, it shows a mixture of games you have bought or played recently, and then games your friends have played recently.



The games themselves are depicted via attractive cover art, and there’s some logic behind the way it chooses to show the games your friends are playing. For example, it won’t show you again and again that your friend who plays Dota 2 every day is still playing Dota 2 every day, unless they’re suddenly playing it more than normal.

Beneath these, the homepage shows user created game collections, which Steam previously called categories. You can create and title a collection and then drag-and-drop games from your list of owned games, which still runs down the left-hand side of the screen. You can then display these in rows on the library homepage. If you’ve already set up categories in your Steam client, these will auto-convert to collections.



More interesting are the new ‘dynamic collections’. The box to search games in your library now lets you filter by Steam store tags or particular game features. For example, you can search for any game in your list tagged ‘role-playing game’ which also has controller support, then click a button to turn that search filter into a dynamic collection which appears on your homepage. It’s auto-populated with relevant games you own, and any game you buy in future that meets the criteria will be automatically added.

Most of these features have likely been present in any media library software you’ve used over the past 5-10 years, yet they seem a gross improvement on what Steam offers currently. Regular bundles and Steam sales mean that people often own many games they’ve never played, and have perhaps forgotten they own. Speaking personally, I regularly open up the Steam interface and simply stare, blank faced and paralysed over indecision about what to play. I welcome anything that nudges me towards this or that.

If you click on a game in your library, you now get a more attractive and detailed page with details of the game. If you’ve played the game recently, your achievements and screenshots are shown at the top as a ‘post-game summary’. Further down you’ll find information on your friends, and highlights from the community content surrounding the game, including Workshop items and guides. The ‘recent news’ section, which currently displays a mixture of developer-created stories and those from websites such as RPS, has been removed.


Steam Events function as a semi-replacement to this newsfeed. The feature, which rolls out today, is a richer editor for developers to use when sharing news about their game. Valve define an event as anything about a game that a developer would want to share: a patch or update, a community challenge or tournament, a developer Q&A, a new game announcement, release or beta, and so on. The editor for creating events allows you to embed information from Steam Workshop items and game store pages, and will allow developers to upload text in multiple languages to be served to readers based on their location.

Once the library update is live, these events will then appear in more places throughout the Steam client. Developers can post and schedule them to appear with bespoke art at the top of their game’s community hub, store page, and the library pages. It’s these Steam Events that appear in the ‘What’s New’ area at the top of the new library homepage. Clicking the event in any of these locations will cause the attached blog post with event details to appear as a scrollable overlay, so the user is not fully pulled away from whatever they were doing. Developers will also eventually be able to choose to have the event news emailed to players of their game (and players are able to opt in or out of receiving said emails).



Lastly, Kroll spoke about Steam Labs, the set of experimental tools that Valve launched in July. “It’s designed to be this place where we can experiment with new features without having to develop them into a full, scalable product, and it gives us the opportunity to gather feedback from developers and customers that helps us influence what direction we take those features,” said Kroll. The first three experiments launched in July, and Valve say “millions of users” have interacted with them since.

Tomorrow, September 5th, an update is coming to the micro trailers experiment, which offers 6-second-long auto-generated montages cut from existing game trailers. The update makes the micro trailers available for every game on the Steam store, with new montages generated automatically as new games release. Previously the Steam Labs experiment page only offered trailers for a limited selection of games released before July 11th.

Kroll said that, if the micro trailers proved popular enough that Valve wanted to roll them out across the site, they’ll first ask developers for permission to cut up their trailers in that way, and give them the tools to upload their own bespoke 6-second montages.

On the same day, a brand new search page experiment will launch, offering options to search the Steam store using price and sale filters, store tags, and with infinite scrolling.

Kroll also briefly spoke about another experiment they’re working on with the game developer Lars Doucet. In July, shortly after the launch of Steam Labs, Doucet outlined and launched a prototype for his own self-made experiment called Steam Diving Bell. It’s an effort to address Steam’s problems with discoverability, and Doucet compares it to a “Wikipedia binge.” You give it a starting game, it offers 8 other games that are similar according to different parameters, you click on one of those suggestions and are presented with 8 more and so on. Valve are working with Doucet to create a better version of the prototype, with access to the Steam database proper.

Every one of the Steam changes outlined by Valve at the event seemed for the better. The game library in its current state looks ancient, with most of the screen taken up by poorly presented information that I hardly glance at. Likewise, giving developers tools like Events which reflect the modern nature of games as services seems long overdue.



These changes do not address Steam’s most urgent problems, however. A feature like Steam Events most benefits games that are constantly updated, which are in most instances going to be already popular multiplayer games. There were no changes, bar Steam Labs experiments with uncertain futures, that are likely to benefit smaller games, indie games, games struggling with discoverability. There were also no changes designed to help the store’s (rather than the library’s) problems with curation, or the Steam community’s problems with moderation. Kroll suggested that the library redesign would inform future changes to the store, but there was no stated timeline.

You’d also be hard pressed to call these changes a response to recent competition from the Epic Game Store, which launched in December 2018, which has a growing collection of games as time-limited exclusives, and which takes a 12% cut on sales versus Steam’s standard 30%. Steam already has a far richer feature set for both developers and customers when compared with the Epic Games Store, and a few new tools and a design refresh is unlikely to draw back developers tempted by Epic’s deep pockets.

What does feel different is the nature of how we found out about these changes. Previous updates to Steam have tended to be discovered when a game developer stumbled upon them and wrote a post about it on Reddit. Kroll acknowledged that Valve are “not very good at talking about when we make little changes to Steam, so there’s a lot of things that we quietly ship and that don’t get a lot of notice.” This is speculation on my part, but that Valve decided to not only announce these Steam changes ahead of time and invited press to Seattle to do it perhaps indicates that they know they need to do more to highlight what developers get for that 30% of revenue.

Kroll said that – particularly with the Steam Labs work – their goal is to make the act of browsing, finding and organising games entertaining. I’m certainly looking forward to futzing around with the new experiments when they launch tomorrow, and having a more attractive library to use later this month. Still, I hope for bigger and bolder changes from Steam in the months ahead.
 

ultimanecat

Arcane
Joined
Mar 19, 2015
Messages
575
Things I want from Steam:

- Disable news sources from the "Recent News" section. I don't care that some wiener from RPS recently rediscovered a game in his library, and I really don't care if he thinks it's problematic.
- Let me get rid of the "VR" category. I don't have a VR setup, and if I ever do get one I'll set up my own category. Sticking categories in my library that I can't modify or delete is OCD-inducing.

If the new library browser fixes those then count me in.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
- Disable news sources from the "Recent News" section. I don't care that some wiener from RPS recently rediscovered a game in his library, and I really don't care if he thinks it's problematic.

Looks like this is going to be an opt-in (but more expanded) feature: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...ally-sort-your-gaming-backlog-coming-sept-17/

In related news, Valve has also announced plans to completely overhaul Steam's syndication of magazine and blog content. The company told Ars Technica:

"Any [press] outlet could show up to players who want to follow that outlet and receive that news. We need a system that can support any language. All six current outlets [in the existing Steam Library] only serve a particular audience, and they only speak English. Soon, any outlet can show up in there based on who's following them, and then we can support different languages."

Will Codex be a registered outlet on Steam? :cool:
 

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
I just noticed that the "Recent Updates" interface on game's store pages has changed. Must be in preparation for the new event-based activity feed.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
New search features are live, https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs/announcements/detail/1593633841009864847

Steam Labs Update: A new Search experiment, Micro trailers by tag, and more

2d5b093a49efa2419da15a2e7f2a0140def434db.png


Sept 5, 2019 – Recent experimentation in Steam Labs takes shape in the form of both updated and new experiments, plus an upcoming experiment we're excited to announce is in the works.

Experiment 001: Micro Trailers – Now Available for Every Game

We’ve been delighted to work with indie game developer Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games to bring his enthusiasm for game discovery to our experiments in Steam Labs. Ichiro first began experimenting with ways to explore the Steam catalog with his 2015 website, http://www.whatsonsteam.com/ and his 2016 Twitter bot, @MicroTrailers. His experience provides us with an informed perspective on content discovery design and tools that serve both developers and customers. Steam Labs is a result of our collaboration, and together we look forward to seeing where your feedback leads us.

Ichiro created two of Labs' first experiments, 001: Micro Trailers and 003: Automatic Show. These experiments offer 6-second quick-cuts of game trailers to give viewers a way to soak in a week's worth of new titles over the course of a lunch break. The initial experiment covered a few hundred games across 15 categories. We now bring this experiment to its logical next step: a micro trailer for every game on the Steam Store, categorized into nearly 400 tags. You can now browse all your favorite titles by tag, from games with Tanks to Twin Stick Shooters, and get an eyeful of the latest launches for each.



Introducing Experiment 004: Search

Today’s Lab Update includes a new Experiment 004: Search, now available to help you discover titles on Steam. When enabled, it will place your browser into in Labs Mode, allowing you to access the experimental features whenever you search on Steam. Labs Mode is remembered on a per-browser basis. As a reminder of the mode, these views feature a banner which includes links to provide feedback, or to return to standard search mode on Steam.

Experimental search features include price and sale filters, enabling people to narrow Steam Store search results to titles below a specific price, or those which are currently available at a discount. We’ve also introduced filters which enable Steam users to exclude owned, wished-for, or ignored items from displayed results once logged in.

Narrowing by tag has also received an update, with additional correlated tags listed in order of frequency. The inclusion of result counts makes it easier to see the effect of tag filters in advance of selecting them. Additionally, searching by tag now uses an updated algorithm which weights the value of chosen tags more heavily when sorting by relevance.



And last but not least, our Search experiment offers infinite scroll when displaying search results! No more clicking tiny page numbers; you can now use your mouse wheel to breeze through your search results. Independent of Steam Labs, infinite scroll has also been added to DLC, Curator, and Franchise views on Steam.

Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

59ef0b326ae60e3f69e960b1033618cdf9b3fecf.png


As always, we hope you’ll check out these latest and upcoming additions to Steam Labs and let us know what you think in the discussions. Your feedback shapes our experimentation and informs the ideas which become a part Steam for keeps.
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
All the constant new features on Steam make the Epic Store more and more pathetic.
Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

59ef0b326ae60e3f69e960b1033618cdf9b3fecf.png
To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
All the constant new features on Steam make the Epic Store more and more pathetic.
Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

59ef0b326ae60e3f69e960b1033618cdf9b3fecf.png
To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.

Games have the "similar games" list on their store page, but that never shows more than 9 games even if there are over a dozen similar ones around...

Always annoyed me because that's my favorite way to discover new games in genres I like.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Seems they updated the recommendation experiment, I have a bunch of new games in there now.
Time go to through them all again :M
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I don't know if this has been confirmed by Valve, but it seems there is a new distribution agreement for Steam.
Steam-Epic-Games-Store-09-08-2019.jpg

This can mean that if you release a game commercially, you have to release on Steam at the exact same date as you release it on other stores. Or if your game has been already released before you create a store page on Steam, you have 30 days to release it on Valve's platform. This can bite the leeches from the Epic Store in the ass, but sadly it can also bite small indies, who plan to releaes on places like itch.io first.
 

Hirato

Purse-Owner
Patron
Joined
Oct 16, 2010
Messages
3,935
Location
Australia
Codex 2012 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Seems pretty generous to me.

But basically it's saying that when you've signed the agreement, or made a store page, with the intent of putting a specific game on steam,
You've a 30 day window within which to get your shit in order, after which you're expected to support the steam platform as a first class citizen.

So if you want to release on epic or itch or gog or whatever first, that's fine,
Just don't make a page on the steam store until your exclusivity contract is about to expire, or you're ready to release it on steam.
Because you'll either be in violation of either the steam agreement, or your exclusivity deal.


For example, if some no name indie released on Epic with a 12month exclusivity deal, and just after 15 months made a steam page, the game will have to be available on steam as the the exclusivity period expires and steam's deadline starts looming a bit too close for comfort.

As a second example, consider Metro Exodus, they're holding to the agreement, as they technically are providing the customers who preordered with patches and a playable game.
But they're not really adhering to the spirit of it...

As a tertiary example, consider The Outer Worlds, I'm uncertain if they ever allowed any pre-orders on steam...
if they did, they'll probably be fine as long as they respect and support those.
However if they never did, they'd be in violation of this agreement the moment the game is released on Epic and the Windows store - as the page has been up for months.



That wording does actually suggest they technically be fine as long as they upload a valid build on the release day - even if no one can access it for the entire exclusivity period.
It's a technicality that utterly violates the spirit of the agreement though...


Obligatory: IANAL
 

evdk

comrade troglodyte :M
Patron
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
Messages
11,292
Location
Corona regni Bohemiae
Codex 2012 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.
I could have sworn Steam had that for ages as well and the indies were bitching about it promoting other competing games on their game pages. But I can't find it, so it might have been just some alcohol fueled delusion on my part.
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
Patron
Joined
Jan 19, 2014
Messages
13,514
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
There is usually a section called "More like this" section on a game page. Just tried it on my phone and it's there for me.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.
I could have sworn Steam had that for ages as well and the indies were bitching about it promoting other competing games on their game pages. But I can't find it, so it might have been just some alcohol fueled delusion on my part.
Wouldn't be surprised, Indies bitch about everything
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
Patron
Joined
Jan 19, 2014
Messages
13,514
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
If they take Epic's money, they don't need mine! I'll move on to something else. I've said from day one that I understand why someone would take the money, I don't have to like it as a consumer, but no hate from me.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom