The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Dexter]

This is bs, no way PAYDAY 2 has the highest amount of players or finds itself over CS:GO, just looking at the Player Statistics Steam offers would make this obvious: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Achievement Stats is also generally highly inaccurate, especially if you care about the number of people that bought a game, not the number of people that actually played it.

Anyway, this has been going around regarding SteamSpy:

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/valve-is-working-on-tools-steam-spy-developers-1202861535/

Valve has new tools in the works which will provide “more accurate and more useful data” than Steam Spy, the company revealed in a Q&A session at a games industry conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

At the White Nights 18 event, Valve’s Jan-Peter Ewert held a Q&A session, parts of which were tweeted from Oleg Chumakov’s Twitter account.

At one point in the panel, the question of what Valve should be working on was raised. Game developer Michael Kuzmin asked how many in the audience use the Steam Spy tool, demonstrating that many developers use the tool to better understand the marketplace, before asking Ewert if they have any plans to provide game developers with similar tools to help them determine key information about Steam, such as what kind of games are in demand.

Ewert acquiesced that Valve is not offering the “amount of tools that we should” but noted that the community generally steps in to provide needed tools via Steam’s public application programming interfaces (APIs). This is where tools like Steam Spy come in, to fill the void that official means have left untouched.

Ewert noted that Steam Spy has a “broad variance” in how accurate the information is for various titles, and explained that developers need a more reliable predictor of game sales performance.

“The only that way we can make money is if [game developers] make good decisions in bringing the right games to the platform and finding your audience,” Ewert said. “So, yes, we are very much working on new tools and new ways of getting data out of Steam, and we hope that data can be more accurate and more useful than what Steam Spy previously offered you.”

Steam Spy is developed by Sergey Galyonkin, who notes on the About page that the tool is “designed to be helpful for indie developers, journalists, students, and all parties interested in PC gaming and its current state of affairs.” Steam Spy is currently funded by Patreon.

 

[LESS T_T]

This is bs, no way PAYDAY 2 has the highest amount of players or finds itself over CS:GO, just looking at the Player Statistics Steam offers would make this obvious: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

barter.vg just doesn't list CS:GO (or Terraria or PUBG) there. From the article I linked:

So I got it working, with a simple brute force. Checked every possible whole number of sales up to a cap, and multiplied it by the achievement percentages. None of them exactly hit a whole number, so I had to set a threshold for what counts as a “whole number”. It worked for most games with less than a million sales, spitting out results that matched with what was reported on barter.vg. But any large selling games like Terraria or PUBG just gave garbage results, and looking at barter.vg they also didn’t report stats for those games. I set out to try and improve it further and get it working on huge games as well.

[...]

So I went and made a new brute force checker that “goes in reverse”, it tries to find pairs of numbers that give the stats reported by the steam API when divided in this way. This removes floating point error from the equation entirely, because whatever error is involved gets canceled out since both sides of it are doing the “same calculation”. This was EXTREMELY accurate, and even worked for games like PUBG and TF2 which have more players than can be accurately represented with a float.

So if you look up Steamspy that is using this revised method, it looks quite right:

CS:GO Players (experimental): 46,306,000
Payday 2 Players (experimental): 18,644,000

 

[LESS T_T]

Summer Sale brings usual popamoles back, in other words.... PLAYERUNKNOWN'S Grand World Evolved: Wild Link WINDOWS EDITION - Game of the Year Edition - Event Pass:

#10 - Steam Link
#9 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition
#8 - Jurassic World Evolution
#7 - Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition
#6 - ARK: Survival Evolved
#5 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#4 - Jurassic World Evolution
#3 - Grand Theft Auto V
#2 - Event Pass: Sanhok (PUBG cosmetic item pack)
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

Fun fact: this chart has all three most popamole-ular open world RPGs from America, Europe, and Asia, and they all are some kind of edition.

Top sellers from the second week of Summer Sale, a.k.a. Larian in the Big League Edition:

#10 - DARK SOULS III - The Fire Fades Edition
#9 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
#8 - The Forest
#7 - Divinity: Original Sin 2
#6 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition
#5 - Jurassic World Evolution
#4 - FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION
#3 - Event Pass: Sanhok
#2 - Grand Theft Auto V
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

It really is.

 

[Gerrard]

 

[Latelistener]

sometimes even if you try to go straight to a particular game's store page the search bar finds no results, only when you F5 it once or twice it shows

That's because of the damn sale.

 

[Dexter]

Spoiler

 

[gaussgunner]

Is this.... incline?

edit: buried in the decline though

 

[Black]

This is what Tim Cain was talking about.

 

[unfairlight]

That doesn't make much sense.

 

[sullynathan]

The Chinese have won

 

[unfairlight]

get used to it gweilo xixixixixixixi

 

[Gerrard]

The days Chinks have left on international Steam are numbered.

 

[Dexter]

Top Selling Games of 2018: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/2018_so_far_top_sellers/

Spoiler

Top Selling VR Games of 2018: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/2018_so_far_top_vr_titles/

Spoiler

Most Played Games in 2018: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/2018_so_far_top_played/

Spoiler

Top New Releases in 2018 (by month): https://store.steampowered.com/sale/2018_so_far_top_new_releases/

 

[Heretic]

Kingdom Come just about Platinum.

 

[LESS T_T]

Just spotted this:

Explanation by the one who provided source code to Steam Spy: https://medium.com/@tglaiel/using-achievement-stats-to-estimate-sales-on-steam-d18b4b635d23

Caveat:

The only caveat here is that this measures… whatever stat valve is collecting with their achievement data. It’s not quite “owners” and its not quite “players”, It doesn’t quite match up with the stat we have called “players” or “downloads” on our sales reports, it overestimates it by various amounts. I’m unsure if its collecting data for pirated copies or family sharing or whatever. The stat is still close enough to be basically just as useful as old SteamSpy was, possibly moreso since players is more useful than owners anyway when trying to figure out what people like.

The source code: https://github.com/TylerGlaiel/steamsalesestimator

So much for GDPR excuse :

UPDATE (7/4): Looks like valve is rounding numbers on the API now so this method no longer works.

Giving extra doubts to Valve's supposed official tool.

edit:



"making [someone] guess what they will and wont allow"

Steam policy in a nutshell.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Is Kingdom Come Deliverance good? I was going to buy it on release but heard of some glitches and questionable optimization. I assume by now a majority of that has been ironed out. What's the Codexian verdict?

 

[Gunnar]

Is Kingdom Come Deliverance good? I was going to buy it on release but heard of some glitches and questionable optimization. I assume by now a majority of that has been ironed out. What's the Codexian verdict?

Utter and complete shit.

 

[Tigranes]

Is Kingdom Come Deliverance good? I was going to buy it on release but heard of some glitches and questionable optimization. I assume by now a majority of that has been ironed out. What's the Codexian verdict?

Quite very good.

 

[unfairlight]

KCD is gud. Game is sort of like Oblivion but in a realistic and historical setting. Combat is realistic and punchy but pretty broken with features that don't work (which are taught to you by instructors) such as combos (always parried and henceforth canceled) or faking an attack from one side and then attacking from another, which will always get parried or master stroked (very very stupid dumb feature, when you perfect parry someone you have a chance of counterattacking them) by high level enemies. This basically means that your primary strategy for combat should be to just push up against them, force them in a clutch, spam M1, M2 or space which forces their defense down and then get as many free hits as your stamina allows.
game is pretty simulated and the quests are pretty good. It's not godlike 10/10 gotyay best game ever since witcher 3 codex approved INCLINE by virtue of many or most game features being pretty underdeveloped or just broken, or entire massive features having huge oversights that will make other features pointless. Primarily alchemy, Savior Schnapps are expensive as fuck in stores and you won't have enough gold to buy them for most of the game, but the ingredients are worth fucking pennies and if you grind out alch for 20m you can start brewing that shit by the gallon and you have virtually unlimited saves.

 

[Belegarsson]

I'm legit sad to see no sign of PoE2 in those pages.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm legit sad to see no sign of PoE2 in those pages.

Which pages? It's under Bronze in the image Dexter posted.

 

[Belegarsson]

I'm legit sad to see no sign of PoE2 in those pages.

Which pages? It's under Bronze in the image Dexter posted.

...

I'm , knew there was something wrong when I saw Ni No Kuni 2 but no PoE2, turn out it was just buried among other entries and my brain decided to fart. Nothing to see here, gentlemen

 

[Markman]

Bug in teh system revealed games with most players.
Only games with cheevos in the list and started atleast once by the player. So if the game is never played it doesnt count.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...-precise-player-count-for-thousands-of-games/

A snippet

Team Fortress 2 50,191,347
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive 46,305,966
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS 36,604,134
Unturned 27,381,399
Left 4 Dead 2 23,143,723
PAYDAY 2 18,643,807
Garry's Mod 18,576,379
Warframe 16,332,217
Counter-Strike: Source 15,001,876
Paladins 14,371,946
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 13,235,488

 

[markec]

No POE 2 on the list

 

[unfairlight]

PoE2 is at #1123.