The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Irata]

I only read negative reviews. I find them to be more useful to find out if a game is worth my time. But I also won't bother with a game that isn't at least very or mostly positive (whatever comes below OVERWHELMINGLY on Steam).

 

[Viata]

I don't even read reviews. I play the pirate version, if I like it, I may buy it one day. Sometimes I play the pirate version until the end and sometimes I want to buy the game and then finish it. Playing the game is way better than reading reviews for me.

 

[Spectacle]

I don't even read reviews. I play the pirate version, if I like it, I may buy it one day. Sometimes I play the pirate version until the end and sometimes I want to buy the game and then finish it. Playing the game is way better than reading reviews for me.

There are thousands of games out there, how do you decide which ones are worth pirating?

 

[Viata]

I don't even read reviews. I play the pirate version, if I like it, I may buy it one day. Sometimes I play the pirate version until the end and sometimes I want to buy the game and then finish it. Playing the game is way better than reading reviews for me.

There are thousands of games out there, how do you decide which ones are worth pirating?

None of them are worth pirating.
If the game is good, I should feel bad for pirating it(not that I care). If the game is bad, I shouldn't play it. So, as you can see, there is no game worth pirating.
But I look at some threads on Codex and when I see some game with nice pics, I decide to pirate it. Simple as that.

 

[Viata]

 

[Gerrard]

What developers think of Steam reviews

Indeed, one of the quirks of Steam reviews that nearly all developers find baffling, is reviewers who play the game in question for hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours, and then leave a negative review. “NOBODY is so cash-poor and time-rich that 100 hours of entertainment for $20 is a bad deal. It just looks totally silly,” says Harris. Newman agrees. “You gave us $20 and we entertained you for over 1000 hours. What else do we have to do?” Bak, however, thinks there may be more value to these reviews than is initially apparent. “Those reviews are often the most interesting, and I think a player who has sunk that much time might have a lot of valuable stuff to say. Often the thumbs-down rants give me more reasons to purchase a game than the positive reviews.”

I'll admit that I have reviewed a game on Steam where I have sunk 200+ hours into it, and yet left a negative review.

My reasoning was this: It's a small online multiplayer game that's still in Early Access, meaning there's still work left to be done. And like pretty much every online multiplayer game, it has asshats coming out of the woodworks, but there are no in-game tools available to control or dispose of them. No vote-kicking or banning is possible. This singular reason is slowly bleeding the game of its playerbase, I'd say by about 50% since I started playing, and that's before we get to the dozen or so other problems that plague this game. What are the devs doing about it? Once they finished adding content, they immediately got to work on... controller integration, with the idea of porting the game to consoles.

As the forums were riddled with spam, I left the negative review as a warning to the developer, as a means of telling him that his priorities were wrong and there are serious issues with his game that need to be addressed before he should even consider a console release. That was months ago. Obviously nothing has changed, except that I've learned that the Steam Review System is a pile of reeking crap.

That's the difference between a fanboy who thinks the devs can do no wrong and someone who sees how much better a game could be and wishes it was. Warframe comes to mind.

Other games (e.g: overwatch) drown their characters in cosmetics, too, but at least they deliver actual content updates and players are more interested in the actual game than character skins.

Except Overwatch is also bleeding players because the only content that has been added to the game since launch enforces chokepoint control. Everything else is secondary.

Uprising was the best thing they did.

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top sellers based on revenues (microtransactions do not count).

Not only Japanese boy band, even the tide of vermin couldn't do the job:

#10 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - zzzzzzzz
#9 - Kingdom Come: Deliverance - This is probably the last week we see this before first discount.
#8 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Collector's Edition - The hype. The hype makes people buy the edition comes with silly digital vanities.
#7 - Hearts of Iron IV: Waking the Tiger - Of China, for China.
#6 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION - This probably is a few days of pre-order sales last week.
#5 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Year 3 Pass - This 2-year-old game is breaking its concurrent players record at the moment.
#4 - NieR:Automata - This anniversary sale is very long, eh?
#3 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION - I wonder if the sales are above their expectation. They said they hope to sell 2 millions on PC.
#2 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Then again, it's interesting to see how they made a very successful sequel.
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Last week's top seller list (based on revenues, microtransactions do not count) shows multiplayer is the king:

#10 - Far Cry 5
#9 - Surviving Mars
#8 - Kingdom Come: Deliverance
#7 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#6 - NieR:Automata
#5 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Collector's Edition
#4 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#3 - Surviving Mars
#2 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Hey at least Kingdom Come is still hang in there.

 

[Jarmaro]

#10 - Far Cry 5
#9 - Surviving Mars
#8 - Kingdom Come: Deliverance
#7 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#6 - NieR:Automata
#5 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Collector's Edition
#4 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#3 - Surviving Mars
#2 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Surviving Mars so good they released it once more?
Btw that game is broken. Just lost 50% of colonists beceause they decided to randomly to the edge of the map and die. No reason.

 

[Gerrard]

Great new Steam client uses 30+% CPU when scrolling the game list in your library on a 3570 3,7GHz.

:russiastronk:

 

[LESS T_T]

Changelog, it supposed to reduce CPU usage : http://store.steampowered.com/news/38412/

A new steam client has been released and is being automatically downloaded.

General

• Reduced CPU usage of Steam when redrawing the UI, such as when the mouse is moved back and forth over part of the Library view
  
• Improved behavior when re-installing from retail discs or backup files, preferring to avoid downloads whenever possible
  
• Fixed an issue where corrupt workshop items could be re-downloaded endlessly
  
• Fix for new Steam Workshop item requests not being downloaded due to the “Only Allow Auto-Updates During Specific Hours” feature being enabled
  
• Fixed an issue where the in-game overlay could crash or become unresponsive in some Vulkan-based games
  
• Improved some cases where chat text was incorrectly treated as a clickable URL when it should not have been
  
• Fixed an issue where games could no longer be launched in offline mode if Steam had previously started or scheduled an update

Windows

• Added high-DPI monitor support when running under Windows 10 with the 2017 Creators Update
  
• Added window transition animations when opening, closing, or minimizing Steam windows
  
• Improved taskbar handling of Steam windows on multi-monitor systems
  
• Added detection and support for exFAT-formatted drives

macOS

• Added support for turning off or restarting the system from Big Picture mode
  
• Improved native OS integration of Steam client windows. For example, Steam windows can now be dragged up past the menu bar to trigger the Spaces UI.
  
• Improved reliability of the Steam Input and Streaming Audio drivers for macOS
  
• Added a custom kernel driver for Sony DS4 controllers which allows use with Steam Input when connected over Bluetooth
  
• Improved checks for case-sensitive APFS file systems. The Steam client only supports case-insensitive file systems on macOS, and will continue to warn users when running with an incompatible file system

Linux

• Added a 2X-scaling mode with high-res text and graphics when running the Steam client in desktop mode on 4k-resolution monitors. You can also force 2X scaling with the "GDK_SCALE=2" environment variable, or disable it with "GDK_SCALE=1".
  
• Improved window-resizing interactions with the window manager
  
• Fixed an issue where the Steam client could prevent some desktop sessions from shutting down

Big Picture

• Fixed a browser hang when a web page transitions to or from full-screen mode

Steam Input

• Added "Exit Application" controller action. When this action is used within a game, it will prompt the user if they actually want to quit and if confirmed will immediately close the application.
  
• Added Chorded Press Activator. The Chorded Press Activator requires another input to be active for it to fire. This can be combined with other activators and either interrupt them or not based on those activators settings. So a regular press can optionally fire or not based on the chorded state, while a long press can optionally interrupt both for example. Chords require the chord button to be pressed first to activate (like shift or control would on a keyboard).
  
• Added the ability to unique-ify configurations across Xbox and generic controllers. While the actual hardware cannot be differentiated, we treat them as unique controllers based on connection order. So if they elect to use unique configurations, configurations will be applied based on first, second, third, etc. identical controller.
  
• Added hardware Joystick Calibration section in Controller Settings. This allows customizing the controller joystick deadzone on a per-controller, per joystick basis. There is an auto-calibration system that attempts to determine the ideal deadzone, as well as manual sliders for overriding those values. As Xbox controllers can’t be differentiated beyond type, they will only rely on controller order. Different device types, such as an Xbox One vs and Xbox One S controller, will be differentiated.
  
• Made previewing state much more obvious when previewing a configuration.
  
• Opted-In 3rd party controllers will now detect launchers and use a launcher specific configuration that is the same as opted-out controllers.
  
• Improved compatibility with PS4 controller remapping programs – controllers no longer need to be reconnected when starting/exiting those programs. Also users will get a warning dialog if they are launching a game which is using the Steam Input API to support PS4 controllers while a remapper is running.
  
• Fixed a bug where non-Steam games would use a desktop configuration when streaming if the controller wasn’t opted into Steam Input support.
  
• Fixed using non-tracked gamepads in SteamVR’s Big Picture Mode overlay
  
• Fixed Big Picture Mode’s Disk Management screen to accept gamepad/keyboard input on the disk selection dropdown
  
• Fixed stuttering in some games due to excessive rumble updates
  
• Fixed non-Steam games not being able to take screenshots from the controller
  
• Fixed several layer bugs related to change layer bindings
  
• Added a mouse movement threshold when determining if the Guide button is being used for a chord or to hold down the button to bring up the Big Picture menu
  
• Fixed various On-Screen Keyboard issues including Non-Steam Controller dual cursor mode, improved language accent and modifier key support, and input immediately upon invocation
  
• Made Controller Options always visible in the Big Picture Mode library page, even when no controller is currently active; users will be prompted to connect a controller if none can be found.
  
• Fixed navigating multiple action sets via the bumper buttons when previewing a controller configuration
  
• Fixed a case where the Big Picture Mode overlay could receive input when not active

In-Home Streaming

• Fixed AMD hardware capture support on R9 200/300 cards

 

[Latelistener]

Reduced CPU usage of Steam when redrawing the UI, such as when the mouse is moved back and forth over part of the Library view

Great new Steam client uses 30+% CPU when scrolling the game list in your library on a 3570 3,7GHz.

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gdcs-realistic-talk-about-game-sales-on-steam-paints-a-grim-picture/

GDC's 'realistic' talk about game sales on Steam paints a grim picture
By Wes Fenlon 35 minutes ago

"Being on Steam means nothing" by itself anymore: it's no guarantee a game's going to sell.

"So here's the thing. In February, around 850 games launched on Steam, which is about 40 a day," said Mike Rose, the indie publisher behind downhill biking game Descenders. "About 82 percent of those didn't even make minimum wage ... by this I mean, the money that came out of 82 percent of the games that came out on Steam would not support a singular person on American minimum wage, which I had to Google."

That's a sobering way to begin a talk, but it's something Rose has done before. Earlier this year he gave a similar talk, "It's time to be realistic about PC sales figures," with slides you can look at here. His talk at GDC includes slightly updated data but essentially the same conclusion: the average game on Steam simply doesn't sell anymore, and the quantity of games being released has made the platform more like Apple's app store, where it's increasingly difficult to stand out.

This isn't the first time we've heard things are rough on Steam. It's something we've written about before, between covering the more than 6,000 games that came out on Steam last year and publishing a developer survey of thoughts and concerns about Steam. Rose's talk and depressing number after depressing number don't really apply to the "big" games that land on Steam, whether those games are breakouts from indie creators or huge franchises from huge companies. But they do paint a grim picture for indies hoping to break onto the scene.

"I don't know why you're here. This is going to be horrible," Rose joked. "A lot of people are coming to me saying things like 'our game's a bit like Limbo, and Limbo sold millions of copies.' Oh god, that's not how it works. I get that weekly, people talking about games that came out two years ago. Even games that came out one year ago, you can't even use them for comparison anymore. A lot has happened in the last year."

According to Rose's estimates of sales on Steam, once he removes "the crap"—games he thinks never had a chance of selling at all—the average game on Steam will sell about 2000 copies and make $12,500 in revenue in its first month. The average game will make $30,000 in its first year.

Not the kind of numbers indie devs want to see.

The biggest change to the Steam landscape comes from Steam Direct, which has dramatically increased the number of games landing on Steam. Some have criticized Valve, asking for more curation or a higher barrier to entry on Steam, though Rose points out there's really no winning there.

"It's funny, isn't it, because when Steam was closed we complained all the time that it was closed. It's a walled garden, argh! And when they let everybody in we were like, 'NO! Keep them out! GREENLIGHT!' We hate them whatever they do. It's not Valve's fault. It's just a horrible situation. But it's also a lovely situation, because more people can make games. I do think in the next couple years there's gotta be space for [another platform]."

The takeaway from Rose's talk was simple: have a plan for the worst-case scenario. Don't expect a game to sell enough on Steam to make its money back. And know that as bad as his estimates look, it could be even worse.

"A lot of it's optimistic. I didn't want to depress you too much," Rose said during the Q&A, when a developer asked about how sales discounts could actually mean even lower revenue numbers.

"I already have a game launched, so..." the developer said, before leaving the mic.

 

[Gerrard]

>GDC
Who gives a fuck, it's nothing but SJW indie garbage devs.

 

[Sentinel]

said some no-name indie game dev

maybe try not polluting the store with shovelware you faggot

 

[Irata]

Shouldn't most indie game makers be doing this on the side? Or are indie devs the 21st century starving artists? Working away in their Paris lofts and getting no critical respect until they die a tragic death?

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news..._2017_was_Valves_most_profitable_year_yet.php

SteamSpy creator says 2017 was Valve's most profitable year yet

2017 was Steam’s most profitable year yet, claims Sergey Galyonkin and the creator of SteamSpy, a website that, since 2015, has provided estimates on the number of game sales on the titular digital game store.

The digital store made revenues of $4.3 billion in 2017, a large proportion of which, he claims, was facilitated by the popularity of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, the unrivaled hit of last year. There are now 291 million Steam accounts, 63 million of which were created last year.

Speaking at GDC 2018, Galyonkin revealed a slew of statistics that show the yawning gap between the winners and losers on the service.

“Half of all the money is made by a small subset of games,” he said. In fact, of the 21,406 games currently on Steam (7,696 of which were released in 2017) those that manage to break into the top 100 make the majority of the money.

PUBG has sold, Galyonkin said, close to 28 million copies, generating $600 million in revenue. This is followed by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, with 12.5 million sales, and revenues of $120 million.

A game must make $22 million in gross revenue to break into Steam’s top 20, a figure which has remained the same. “Hits like these are what make money for Valve.”

This data has been harvested by Galyonkin’s SteamSpy, which works by monitoring around 800,000 user profiles each day, using a three-day sample to estimate the basic statistic’s via on Steam API. Galyonkin prefaced his talk by saying that Steam Spy does not work in real time -- it takes four days to “catch-up”, he said -- and is “not precise” and “very inaccurate” for small games.

The technology only tracks owners and players, not sales, is unable to distinguish between games sold on Steam, sold elsewhere, and given away for free, and currently does not track refunds.

Nevertheless, Galyonkin is confident in stating that Steam “is not slowing down”. 57 million players were active in the past two weeks, he said. 25 percent of all Steam account holders have played a game in the past two weeks, he said.

“It’s not all great through,” said Galyonkin. The median user owns only two games, while the mean average is 10.8 games, numbers which have fallen in recent years.

While the service is not as saturated at the App Store, Galyonkin said, "discoverability" is becoming a major issue on the platform; around 30 games launch each day, more than one per hour.

“We have too many games,” he said. “It’s not only impossible for a user to buy them all; it’s impossible for a user to even scroll through them.”

While China is the largest market, the most represented nationality on Steam is American. “13.9 percent of active players are American, said Galyonkin. "And the average American use buys six times more games on Steam than an average user from China.”

The number of Steam accounts has risen sharply in 2017, said Galyonkin. This is because Cybercafes in China are “installing Steam so their clients can play PUBG,” said Galyonkin. The average Chinese player spends more than twice as much time playing PUBG than the average American.

The fastest growing game tag on Steam in the past five years is “dinosaurs, ” followed by “conspiracy.” The number of games tagged “Team-based” and “PVE” have fallen the greatest in the same period.

As well as running Steam Spy, Galyonkin also works as director of publishing strategy at Epic Games. “Our publishing strategy at Epic Games,” he quipped, “is to not put our games on Steam.”

 

[Country_Gravy]

Valve will do what makes them the most money. They already have the high end. Increase profits by letting any jackass with a few hundred bucks pretend to be a video game creator.

It's business...strictly business.

 

[Dexter]

Valve will do what makes them the most money. They already have the high end. Increase profits by letting any jackass with a few hundred bucks pretend to be a video game creator.

It's business...strictly business.

I don't think what they're doing is "the best way to make the most money". Letting tons of shit on the platform dilutes the platform and its reputation and quality long-term. Nobody wants to rummage through tons of shit to find "the one good thing" among it. Imagine it in a physical store, normally supermarkets and similar put a limited amount of popular products for sale that people would usually be interested in, have proven themselves in the past and they'd actually buy. Now imagine if they just flooded stores with all sorts of shit nobody was interested in and made them look more like flea markets with even unfinished or dangerous products than an actual store and the customer would just have to go through all of it and "figure it out". Over time it would get the reputation of selling shit and many people would likely stop going, at least if they didn't delimit the actual store from the shit. If they don't do anything about limiting pure shit put on their store that hinders discoverability for some of the good stuff, and bugged "Early Access" releases that are simply abandoned after a while without any recourse, this won't have a good end for Steam. Even Microsoft knew to delimit the actual games and their store from the shit that anyone could just Upload up there, and they still had more quality control than Steam does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Indie_Games


And in the end they just decided that it's not worth the effort to bother and shut it down: http://xboxforums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/113350.aspx

It's just not sustainable, damages their reputation and most of this stuff doesn't really make any money as the article above pointed out, most of the revenue comes from the games that enter the Top20 and there's a large amount of games that either don't sell at all and just clutter up the Store for everyone (both customers and serious developers that might develop a break-out hit if it had visibility). They will either have to stop this at some point, delimit the shit from the normal stuff or there'll be long-term consequences as even more shit, asset-flips, unfinished games and outright scams get on there.

 

[Latelistener]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta#announcements

Steam Client Beta Update - March 22

General

• Fixed a crash that could occur when logging out or shutting down

Windows

• Fixed inability to launch games from some older versions of Windows

Steam Client Beta Update - March 23

Updated - this patch was was released again this afternoon with the additional performance fix.

Windows

• Added a new option to disable DPI scaling under Settings - Interface (Windows 10 only)

General

• Improved the CPU performance of scrolling through your library games in list view, for real this time, we promise.

 

[LESS T_T]

Last week's top seller list (based on revenues, microtransactions do not count) shows multiplayer is the king:

#10 - Far Cry 5
#9 - Surviving Mars
#8 - Kingdom Come: Deliverance
#7 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#6 - NieR:Automata
#5 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Collector's Edition
#4 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#3 - Surviving Mars
#2 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Hey at least Kingdom Come is still hang in there.

Last week's top seller list (based on revenues, microtransactions do not count).

JRPG, multiplayer, or popamole, pick your poison! Oh btw we have doubled Ubisoft.

#10 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#9 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#8 - Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
#7 - Assassin's Creed Origins
#6 - Far Cry 5
#5 - Assassin's Creed Origins
#4 - Far Cry 5
#3 - Grand Theft Auto V
#2 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[Infinitron]

What if Skynet was a Counterstrike anti-cheat algorithm: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/

Valve has 1,700 CPUs working non-stop to bust CS:GO cheaters
Meet VACnet, the deep learning system Valve used to smash CS:GO's hacking problem.

All popular multiplayer games fight never-ending battles against cheaters. But as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive rose in 2014 to become the most-played FPS in the world, a few things made it particularly susceptible to hacking.

As the 10th game released on Source (and the third mainline CS), there were already piles of knowledge on how to tamper with Valve's engine. Hacks built for ancient stuff like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch could, with a few minutes' tweaking, perhaps function in CS:GO (although Valve says they'd be trivial to detect). Design-wise, the traits that make CS:GO a skillful game of angles and accuracy also make cheats more effective. Weapons are highly lethal, so putting those guns in the hands of aimbots makes them even more devastating. And CS:GO's focus on information and stealth means that knowing the location of your opponent is invaluable—fertile ground for wallhacks.

CS:GO's fight against hackers is "important, valuable work" according to Valve, but if you've played the FPS, you may have noticed a couple years ago that things were beginning to get dramatically better. Not only did Reddit complaints and frustrated replay clips of cheaters seem to circulate less frequently, but the perception of cheating—as hazardous as anything to a competitive game's health—seemed to dissipate. We published stories of high-profile bans, along with news of thousands of cheaters getting banned in single waves. How was Valve purging most of these jerks?

In one of the only in-depth moments of transparency on this topic, Valve programmer John McDonald spoke at the Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco about how he and Valve used deep learning techniques to address CS:GO's cheating problem. This approach has been so effective that Valve is now using deep learning on "a bunch of problems," from anti-fraud to aspects of Dota 2, and Valve is actively looking for other studios to work with on implementing their deep learning anti-cheat solution in other games on Steam.

Solving CS:GO's cheating problem
While between projects sometime in 2016, McDonald noticed that "The only thing the community was talking about was cheating," based on online discussion and a private email address that received mail from CS:GO pros. "It was this, just, deafening conversation," he says. The uptick in VAC bans around this period, McDonald says, supported what Valve was hearing.

To combat the issue, Valve and McDonald looked to deep learning, a solution that had the potential to operate and adapt over time to new cheating techniques—attractive traits to Valve, which has historically elected to automate aspects of Steam rather than hire hundreds of new employees to tackle issues like curation. What Valve created is known as VACnet, a project that represents about a year of work.

VACnet works alongside Overwatch, CS:GO's player-operated replay tool for evaluating players who have been reported for bad behavior. VACnet isn't a new form of VAC, the client and server-side tech that Valve's used for years to identify, say, when someone's running a malicious program alongside a game. VACnet is a new, additional system that uses deep learning to analyze players' in-game behavior, learn what cheats look like, and then spot and ban hackers based on a dynamic criteria.

McDonald says that "subtle" cheats remain difficult to solve, but in building VACnet, Valve decided to target aimbots first because they present themselves at specific, easily-definable points during rounds of CS:GO: when you're shooting. This allowed Valve to build a system that captured the changes in pitch (Y-axis) and yaw (X-axis)—degree measurements in a player's perspective—a half a second before a shot, and a quarter second after. This data, along with other pieces of information like what weapon the player is using, their distance, the result of the shot (hit, miss, headshot?) are the individual 'data particles' that together form what Valve calls "atoms," essentially a data package that describes each shot.

VACnet can't necessarily spot a cheater based on one atom, though. "We need a sequence of them, what we actually want is 140 of them, or at least that's what the model uses right now … We just take the 140 out of an eight round window and we stuff those into the model, and we're like, 'Hey, if you were to present this sequence of 140 shots to a [human] juror, what is the likelihood you would get a conviction?'"

Pretty good, as it turns out. Both players and VACnet report players for judgment in Overwatch. But when VACnet reports a suspected cheater, they're almost always a cheater.

"When a human submits a case to Overwatch, the likelihood that they get a conviction is only 15-30 percent, and that varies on a bunch of factors, like the time of the year, is the game on sale, is it spring break. There's a bunch of things but the point is human convictions are very low," says McDonald.

That doesn't mean Valve plans to phase out its cheater theater, Overwatch. Both systems work together: VACnet learns detection techniques from Overwatch, McDonald says. "Because we're using Overwatch and we didn't actually replace all player reports, we just supplemented them, that means that the learner [VACnet] is getting the opportunity to evolve along with human jurors. So as human jurors identify new cheating behaviour, the learner has the opportunity to do the same thing."

McDonald adds that when VACnet has been recently retrained with player data to spot a new cheat, the conviction rate might be nearly 100 percent for a short period before cheaters adapt to it. When Valve quietly rolled out VACnet to CS:GO's 2v2 competitive mode earlier this month, McDonald says "the conviction rate for that mode was 99 percent for a while, it was great. Cheaters didn't get the memo we were doing it, and players were super happy and we were just busting cheaters left and right. It felt so good."

Large Hacker Collider
To bring VACnet to life, a server farm had to be built that could handle CS:GO's millions of players, loads of data, and grow as CS:GO grew. Right now there are about 600,000 5v5 CS:GO matches per day, and to evaluate all players in those matches Valve needed about four minutes of computation, amounting to 2.4 million minutes of CPU effort per day. You need about 1,700 CPUs to do that daily work.

So Valve bought 1,700 CPUs. And 1,700 more, "so we'll have room to expand," McDonald says, hinting at Valve's intention to bring VACnet to other games. Conservatively, Valve had to have spent at least a few million dollars on that hardware: 64 server blades with 54 CPU cores each and 128GB of RAM per blade. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $120M CS:GO brought in off of game copy sales alone in 2017, but it probably represents one of the beefiest anti-cheating farms built for a single game.

The work continues, but from McDonald's perspective, VACnet is kicking ass, and has potential application not only in non-Valve games, but in other stuff on Steam. "Deep learning is this sea-change technology for evolutionary behaviour," says McDonald. "We think that it is really helping us get developers off of the treadmill without impacting our customers in any way. Our customers are seeing fewer cheaters today than they have been, and the conversation around cheating has died down tremendously compared to where it was before we started this work."

Early December 2017 brought a new milestone for the system: VACnet started producing more convictions than non-convictions in Overwatch. "The system works great," says McDonald.

 

[Sentinel]

I have a cool way to solve the cheating problem. I realize this might be a bit too avant garde for our time but hear me out:

Community-run dedicated servers. Server admin logs on periodically and is part of that server's community. If one guy is hacking, he gets banned almost instantly.

I won't charge for this tip Valve, but you can contact me for more multiplayer anti-cheating FPS expertise!

 

[Alienman]

Can't let people run independent servers when there is so much money invested in skins and such.

 

[Latelistener]

I have a cool way to solve the cheating problem. I realize this might be a bit too avant garde for our time but hear me out:

Community-run dedicated servers. Server admin logs on periodically and is part of that server's community. If one guy is hacking, he gets banned almost instantly.

I won't charge for this tip Valve, but you can contact me for more multiplayer anti-cheating FPS expertise!

Can't let people run independent servers when there is so much money invested in skins and such.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_Offensive_Dedicated_Servershttps://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_Offensive_Dedicated_Servers

 

[Sentinel]

I have a cool way to solve the cheating problem. I realize this might be a bit too avant garde for our time but hear me out:

Community-run dedicated servers. Server admin logs on periodically and is part of that server's community. If one guy is hacking, he gets banned almost instantly.

I won't charge for this tip Valve, but you can contact me for more multiplayer anti-cheating FPS expertise!

Can't let people run independent servers when there is so much money invested in skins and such.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Counter-Strike:_Global_Offensive_Dedicated_Servers

Valve killed their community servers in both TF2 and CSGO.