The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Latelistener]

I wonder how much money has Bethesda made out of Skyrim alone so far.

I beth not enough to make a new engine.

 

[Junmarko]

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/high-court-dismisses-valve’s-special-leave-to-appeal-application

High Court dismisses Valve’s special leave to appeal application
20 April 2018


The High Court of Australia has dismissed a special leave application by one of the world’s largest online gaming companies, US-based Valve Corporation (Valve), which operates the Steam game distribution platform.

Valve had sought special leave to appeal from the decision of the Full Federal Court in December 2017, which upheld the trial judge’s ruling that Valve had breached the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) when selling to Australia users, and that it pay a $3 million penalty.

In 2016, the trial judge had found that Valve was had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations to Australian customers about their rights under consumer guarantees.

As a result of the High Court’s refusal of special leave, the Full Federal Court’s decision that Valve is bound by the ACL in its dealings with Australian customers, despite being based overseas, is the final decision on this issue.

“This important precedent confirms the ACCC’s view that overseas-based companies selling to Australian consumers must abide by our laws. If customers buy a product online that is faulty, they are entitled to the same right to a repair, replacement or refund as if they’d walked in to a store,” ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said.

Background

Valve Corporation is based in Washington State and operates the Steam game distribution platform. Valve has 2.2 million Australian subscriber accounts on its Steam platform.

The ACCC commenced legal action against Valve in August 2014.

Spoiler

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-relea...misleading-consumer-guarantee-representations
Full steam ahead: ACCC institutes proceedings against Valve for making alleged misleading consumer guarantee representations
29 August 2014


The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has instituted proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia against Valve Corporation (Valve) alleging that Valve made false or misleading representations regarding the application of the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL).

Valve is an entertainment software and technology company located in the United States of America. Valve owns and operates an online computer game distribution platform known as ‘Steam’ that has over 65 million users worldwide. Valve sells computer games through Steam to Australian consumers, but does not have a physical presence in Australia.

The ACCC alleges that Valve made false or misleading representations to Australian customers of Steam that:

• consumers were not entitled to a refund for any games sold by Valve via Steam in any circumstances;
• Valve had excluded, restricted or modified statutory guarantees and/or warranties that goods would be of acceptable quality;
• Valve was not under any obligation to repair, replace or provide a refund for a game where the consumer had not contacted and attempted to resolve the problem with the computer game developer; and
• the statutory consumer guarantees did not apply to games sold by Valve.

“The Australian Consumer Law applies to any business providing goods or services within Australia. Valve may be an American based company with no physical presence in Australia, but it is carrying on business in Australia by selling to Australian consumers, who are protected by the Australian Consumer Law,” ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said.

“It is a breach of the Australian Consumer Law for businesses to state that they do not give refunds under any circumstances, including for gifts and during sales. Under the Australian Consumer Law, consumers can insist on a refund or replacement at their option if a product has a major fault.”

“The consumer guarantees provided under the Australian Consumer Law cannot be excluded, restricted or modified,” Mr Sims said.

The ACCC is seeking declarations, injunctions, pecuniary penalties, disclosure orders, adverse publicity orders, non-party consumer redress, a compliance program order and costs.

The matter has been filed in the Federal Court’s Sydney Registry. A date for the first directions hearing is set for 7 October 2014 at the Federal Court in Sydney before Justice Jagot.

The Australian Consumer Law provides consumers with rights to certain remedies from retailers and manufacturers, when goods fail to comply with the consumer guarantee provisions of the ACL, including that the goods are of acceptable quality and fit for the purpose for which they were sold. That is, if a good is not, for example, of acceptable quality, consumers may be entitled to a refund or a replacement item. These rights cannot be excluded, restricted or modified.

In 2016, the Federal Court found that Valve had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations.

Valve appealed the findings and on 22 December 2017 the Full Federal Court dismissed Valve’s appeal on jurisdiction and the ACCC’s cross appeal on penalty.

:australia:

 

[LESS T_T]

In an unexpected turn of event, Valve acquired Firewatch developer Campo Santo: http://blog.camposanto.com/post/173170027579/campo-santo-news

SAN FRANCISCO–LOS ANGELES–LONDON–SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ENGLAND—The twelve of us at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, In the Valley of Gods.

If you’re the type of person who gives two flips about this news, we can elaborate a little bit on this big decision. First, we really like making video games. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment. From the day-to-day production of our last game, Firewatch, to the way we run the company, make merchandise, meet players at expos and shows, send out a quarterly literary journal, throw open-to-the-public game demos in the middle of an artificial forest—all of it is geared towards surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers who have shared in our success.

In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match.

Second, while visiting IGN’s headquarters in early 2015 to talk about Firewatch, we came across an undelivered 2011 Game of the Year Award for Portal 2. It happened to be engraved on an unopened bottle of champagne. Never ones to pass up free alcohol, we stole it and drank it to celebrate the launch of Firewatch a year later. So in some sense, this is a return home for us. Well, for that bottle of champagne.

Third, and last, we had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible. Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in. They asked us if we’d all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes.

Yes, we’re still making In the Valley of Gods (as a Valve game!); yes, we’ll still support Firewatch; and yes, we’ll still produce The Quarterly Review and our regular blog content. Thanks so much for your interest in our games and we’ll see you in Washington. Cheers.

—Campo Santo

 

[Sentinel]

lol, just to think that In The Valley Of Gods will ship as "Developed by Valve"... wtf. Serious damage to their brand imo.

 

[LESS T_T]

Damage to the brand known for not releasing anything, by releasing a thing.

 

[Dexter]

Campo Santo is heavily concentrated cancer. I really hope they're not going to infect Valve too much.

 

[Sentinel]

Artifact - 2018
Dota 2 - 2013
CS:GO - 2012
Portal 2 - 2011
Left 4 Dead - 2009
Left 4 Dead - 2008
Team Fortess 2 - 2007
Portal - 2007
Half-Life 2: Episode Two - 2007
Half-Life 2: Episode One - 2006
Half-Life 2 - 2004
Counter-Strike: Source - 2004
...

Pretty weird list of games for a company known for not releasing anything.

 

[Vorark]

You know your creative ways are done for when you start buying 3rd party devs.

 

[Sentinel]

They've been buying 3rd party devs since forever though. CS, Day of Defeat, Portal, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead (IIRC) were all done by people who got brought along because they had shown good projects at conventions/modding scene.

 

[Sentinel]

The guys are total cucks.

 

[Tancred]

Campo Santo is heavily concentrated cancer. I really hope they're not going to infect Valve too much.

Those SJW's didn't hire themselves. Someone at Valve thinks employing them and producing their diverse walking simulator with a side of fake history is a good business decision.

Valve is already infected.

 

[Dexter]

The guys are total cucks.

They're the stereotypical "San Francisco Indie studio", 3 members of Campo Santo are in this video, can you find them?


I really don't get the commercial sense of hiring them though. They were bound to end up where "Fullbright", "The Chinese Room", "Tale of Tales", "Blendo Games" and similar did before them. They lucked out with a lot of Hype from Garme Journalists and Streamers and the likes with a short linear "Walking Sim" (like some of the other studios did before) and sold nearly a million copies, but they aren't exactly bound to repeat said several times in today's market without any big help, this was the "Reveal Trailer" of their next game:


I'd get them trying to go after PUBG Corporation, Digital Extremes, Bohemia Interactive, Facepunch Studios or similar to grow Steam, but these guys don't really make sense.

Only explanations that come to mind: 1) They want to turn it into a "flagship VR title", in that case likely expect more buyouts; 2) They have fanboys inside Valve; 3) "Muh Diversity", although they could have just hired Jane Ng to make art in that case since she's the only one that's not a horrible white oppressor working for the company and you're as likely to get "diverse perspectives" from any of them as you are from a swarm of bees

 

[Don Peste]

 

[jfrisby]

I was glad Campo Santo mentioned Dagger of Amon Ra in this interview piece (and used the proper aspect ratio in their screenshots).
Still better to play the original.

 

[Latelistener]

They're the stereotypical "San Francisco Indie studio", 3 members of Campo Santo are in this video, can you find them?

But how can I know if I'm right?

 

[Dexter]

They're the stereotypical "San Francisco Indie studio", 3 members of Campo Santo are in this video, can you find them?

But how can I know if I'm right?

Spoiler

 

[Infinitron]

What people fear will happen: Valve will be taken over by an SJW clique and start banning people from Steam for transphobia

What will probably happen: This puny little studio's culture is going to be dissolved into nothing within a year, and the survivors will end up alongside the likes of Kim Swift and the Old Man Murray guys after serving their sentence in the hat microtransaction telemetry mines

 

[Latelistener]

If it will be the latter, they choose that for themselves.

 

[lophiaspis]

What people fear will happen: Valve will be taken over by an SJW clique and start banning people from Steam for transphobia

What will probably happen: This puny little studio's culture is going to be dissolved into nothing within a year, and the survivors will end up alongside the likes of Kim Swift and the Old Man Murray guys after serving their sentence in the hat microtransaction telemetry mines

I'm going to sound a more positive note: I think that Valve has finally understood the lesson of the so-called 'walking simulators' and is planning to release quite a few of them since they know that this format is the best fit for VR, and hopefully they will even realize that it's the best fit for any narrative videogame including Half-Life. Valve may have seemed to have completely forgotten their single-player narrative roots amid the disparaging orgy of Koreanization - but this hiring could suggest that they really do understand that the medium is splitting into DOTA style pure gameplay on the one hand and Edith Finch style pure narrative interaction on the other, with the AAA narrative-game kitchen sink stuck in the middle getting ripped to shreds. In that sense, it might even sound a hope - however faint - for HL3.

The main flaw of HL2, like so many narrative focused games, is that it's based around gameplay instead of degamified narrative and world interactivity. This means that after the excellent intro level, HL2's quality as an interactive sci-fi story drops sharply as it becomes just another reskinned Space Invaders clone like every other FPS, losing all the players that can't or are not interested in the one-note 'click this enemy fast enough or you fail and have to start over' mode of interactivity. (You see the same problem in, say, The Last Of Us, which had a very compelling degamified intro level which as usual was ruined by the switch to banal and boring gameplay for the 'meat' of the game.) The only way HL3 could be compelling enough to justify the hype is if it's the first degamified first person shooter - on top of being the breakthrough VR exclusive. This would mean the liberation of 'walking simulator' or 'notgame' or 'narrative simulation' design from the tyranny of San Francisco quirky arthouse content and its application to hardcore sci-fi action storytelling. They would have to figure out how to make gunplay interesting without challenge - gunplay as interactivity rather than as gameplay - but if anyone can do that, it's Valve. In this way HL3 can finally be as emotionally compelling as any classic action film without being hampered by the absurd gamified world structure that is nothing but a useless arcade legacy. The experience would simply be based on interacting with the world in meaningful ways, including highly compelling acts of degamified violence, rather than getting stuck solving meaningless puzzles and the endless 'spank the monkey! Too slow, start over!' of so-called 'FPS action'.

Gameplay chauvinists will complain of Firewatch or Edith Finch that 'there's no interactivity in this game!', thereby merely displaying their foolish biases, when in reality, Edith Finch has ten times more interactivity than, say, Deus Ex, let alone Half-Life or Portal. In truth, this 'genre' which reactionaries have contemptuously called 'walking simulators' is nothing less than the videogame medium itself, and what we have thus far been conditioned to consider 'videogames' is but a tiny subset of that medium, namely gamified videogames, game simulations, virtual worlds twisted into the bizarre form of a Rubik's cube or a banal game of Space Invaders. In a gamified world, the world is nothing but fluff for the gameplay, and thereby loses most of its narrative potential.

The whole history of videogame design has been based on the false assumption that videogames are an extension of boardgames or sports into the digital space, instead of the first holistic medium, based on the presence in and interactivity with that virtual space itself, interactivity which does not have to be gamified at all, and which is in fact regularly kept from its narrative, emotional and even market potential by gamification. Gamification is what's keeping videogames from becoming a mass medium, along with control complexity and nerd bias in the content (Mario Kart, Tetris and Farmville are not narrative works, and even the most popular narrative videogame, GTA, is nowhere near the popularity of film and TV). It would be really great if Valve came to understand this and became the first studio to put out market-exploding popcorn blockbuster 'notgames'. Fingers crossed.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Sentinel]

The main flaw of HL2, like so many narrative focused games, is that it's based around gameplay

what
you know it's a videogame right?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

That last paragraph.

 

[Tom Selleck]

I'm a storyfag literally as much as the next guy (often I godmode my way through games because I stink) but that dude got me like *spinning what the fuck am I reading.gif*

 

[McPlusle]

What people fear will happen: Valve will be taken over by an SJW clique and start banning people from Steam for transphobia

What will probably happen: This puny little studio's culture is going to be dissolved into nothing within a year, and the survivors will end up alongside the likes of Kim Swift and the Old Man Murray guys after serving their sentence in the hat microtransaction telemetry mines

I'm going to sound a more positive note: I think that Valve has finally understood the lesson of the so-called 'walking simulators' and is planning to release quite a few of them since they know that this format is the best fit for VR, and hopefully they will even realize that it's the best fit for any narrative videogame including Half-Life. Valve may have seemed to have completely forgotten their single-player narrative roots amid the disparaging orgy of Koreanization - but this hiring could suggest that they really do understand that the medium is splitting into DOTA style pure gameplay on the one hand and Edith Finch style pure narrative interaction on the other, with the AAA narrative-game kitchen sink stuck in the middle getting ripped to shreds. In that sense, it might even sound a hope - however faint - for HL3.

The main flaw of HL2, like so many narrative focused games, is that it's based around gameplay instead of degamified narrative and world interactivity. This means that after the excellent intro level, HL2's quality as an interactive sci-fi story drops sharply as it becomes just another reskinned Space Invaders clone like every other FPS, losing all the players that can't or are not interested in the one-note 'click this enemy fast enough or you fail and have to start over' mode of interactivity. (You see the same problem in, say, The Last Of Us, which had a very compelling degamified intro level which as usual was ruined by the switch to banal and boring gameplay for the 'meat' of the game.) The only way HL3 could be compelling enough to justify the hype is if it's the first degamified first person shooter - on top of being the breakthrough VR exclusive. This would mean the liberation of 'walking simulator' or 'notgame' or 'narrative simulation' design from the tyranny of San Francisco quirky arthouse content and its application to hardcore sci-fi action storytelling. They would have to figure out how to make gunplay interesting without challenge - gunplay as interactivity rather than as gameplay - but if anyone can do that, it's Valve. In this way HL3 can finally be as emotionally compelling as any classic action film without being hampered by the absurd gamified world structure that is nothing but a useless arcade legacy. The experience would simply be based on interacting with the world in meaningful ways, including highly compelling acts of degamified violence, rather than getting stuck solving meaningless puzzles and the endless 'spank the monkey! Too slow, start over!' of so-called 'FPS action'.

Gameplay chauvinists will complain of Firewatch or Edith Finch that 'there's no interactivity in this game!', thereby merely displaying their foolish biases, when in reality, Edith Finch has ten times more interactivity than, say, Deus Ex, let alone Half-Life or Portal. In truth, this 'genre' which reactionaries have contemptuously called 'walking simulators' is nothing less than the videogame medium itself, and what we have thus far been conditioned to consider 'videogames' is but a tiny subset of that medium, namely gamified videogames, game simulations, virtual worlds twisted into the bizarre form of a Rubik's cube or a banal game of Space Invaders. In a gamified world, the world is nothing but fluff for the gameplay, and thereby loses most of its narrative potential.

The whole history of videogame design has been based on the false assumption that videogames are an extension of boardgames or sports into the digital space, instead of the first holistic medium, based on the presence in and interactivity with that virtual space itself, interactivity which does not have to be gamified at all, and which is in fact regularly kept from its narrative, emotional and even market potential by gamification. Gamification is what's keeping videogames from becoming a mass medium, along with control complexity and nerd bias in the content (Mario Kart, Tetris and Farmville are not narrative works, and even the most popular narrative videogame, GTA, is nowhere near the popularity of film and TV). It would be really great if Valve came to understand this and became the first studio to put out market-exploding popcorn blockbuster 'notgames'. Fingers crossed.

Hey man, I think you got the wrong gym. Polygon is three blocks down.

 

[LESS T_T]

Weekly top sellers list (based on revenues, microtransactions do not count) What is an RPG? Edition:

#10 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
#9 - Warhammer: Vermintide 2
#8 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
#7 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#6 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#5 - Far Cry 5
#4 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#3 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition
#2 - Far Cry 5
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Weekly top sellers list (based on revenues, microtransactions do not count) Is It an RPG Though? Edition:

#10 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#9 - Darkest Dungeon
#7 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#6 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#5 - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands
#4 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
#3 - Far Cry 5
#2 - Dying Light Enhanced Edition
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS