The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Alienman]

Yeah, I'm stumped. The weird thing Lands of Lore, the only other GoG game I have installed currently works with no problem at all. Only changed the target, and renderer to OpenGL. The overlay don't work, but I can take screenshots, while Albion just totally craps out. Weird as hell, but oh well, appreciate the help.

 

[LESS T_T]

Devil vs. Ninja.

Also Factory Town is another indie hit.

#10 - Conan Exiles
#9 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Year 4 Pass
#8 - Factory Town
#7 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition
#6 - Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
#5 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#4 - Grand Theft Auto V
#3 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#2 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
#1 - Devil May Cry 5

Totally predictable week.

#10 - Frostpunk
#9 - Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
#8 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#7 - Far Cry New Dawn
#6 - Two Point Hospital
#5 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#4 - Grand Theft Auto V
#3 - Devil May Cry 5
#2 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#1 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

 

[LESS T_T]

Some interesting things about top wishlists: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularwishlist&os=win

• Bloodlines 2 at the top. With all that livestreams and front page banner, looks like it's generating more "engagements" on Steam than The Outer Worlds.
• I noticed some people doing un-wishlist campaign for games that turned into Epic exclusives, The Sinking City and Industries of Titan for example. But as far as I can tell, both games has climbed up the list since and it's not just because of some games there are released.

 

[Infinitron]

Some interesting things about top wishlists: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularwishlist&os=win

• Bloodlines 2 at the top. With all that livestreams and front page banner, looks like it's generating more "engagements" on Steam than The Outer Worlds.

Purchasable game vs non-purchasable game seems like it should matter here. There's more reason to wishlist a game you can buy.

 

[Sentinel]

Valve continues to fix various games for full Linux compatibility through Proton.

Available in Proton 4.2:
4.2-1:

• Rebased Proton patches on top of Wine 4.2. There are more than 2,400 improvements to Wine between those versions. 166 patches from Proton 3.16 have been upstreamed or are no longer needed.
• Update DXVK to 1.0.1.
• Update FAudio to 19.03-13-gd07f69f.
• Mouse cursor behavior improvements for games including Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry 5.
• Fixes for networking in NBA 2K19 and NBA 2K18.
• Fixed controller duplication in RiME and other games that use SDL2.
• Improvements to CJK locales and font support.
• Wine's Vulkan now supports version 1.1.104 and advertises support for version 1.1 to applications.
• Proton's fullscreen hack now works for GDI-based games.
• Better support for games that use IVRInput for controller input in VR.
• Further improvements and new features in the "easy path" build system. Run "make help" in the Proton directory for documentation.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog

 

[Melcar]

Going to test it this weekend. Redout is all but unplayable.

 

[aeroaeko]

Once steam dies I'm done with video games. I am super autistic and need the hours to be counted on my profile or else I can't play. It's the main reason I haven't played Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[Konjad]

Once steam dies I'm done with video games. I am super autistic and need the hours to be counted on my profile or else I can't play. It's the main reason I haven't played Mask of the Betrayer.

Yeah, I miss Xfire too.

 

[LESS T_T]

Some interesting things about top wishlists: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularwishlist&os=win

• Bloodlines 2 at the top. With all that livestreams and front page banner, looks like it's generating more "engagements" on Steam than The Outer Worlds.
• I noticed some people doing un-wishlist campaign for games that turned into Epic exclusives, The Sinking City and Industries of Titan for example. But as far as I can tell, both games has climbed up the list since and it's not just because of some games there are released.

Apparently it does not show up in the list if a game has no release date data set. Now that Halo: The Master Chief Collection has one ("Coming Soon"), it reveals Halo is the most wanted game by Steam users!

 

[Black]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399254001159

When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase

Steam continues to amaze.

 

[Sentinel]

4 MAY, 2017

 

[Alienman]

Interesting. They will probably lose out on this, there is a lot of gifting going on, and all that money will just disappear.

4 MAY, 2017

Hmmm. Recent responses on it though.

 

[Sentinel]

You can find recent comments on pretty much any Valve blog update for some reason.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399251160549
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1328973169870947116
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265922321514182595

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399254001159

When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase

Steam continues to amaze.

really old
they did it because people were just buying and reselling russian versions to make money

 

[Black]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399254001159

When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase

Steam continues to amaze.

really old
they did it because people were just buying and reselling russian versions to make money

Those people paid attention in school, they should be rewarded.
Also I didn't see the date :D

 

[Alienman]

Angry pitch fork rage rejected.

 

[Sentinel]

The next cancer to hit Steam teased
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/valve_index/

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-vr-headset-is-called-index-and-its-coming-soon/

Valve's VR headset is called Index, and it's coming soon
There are virtually no details outside of a picture of it.

Without any sort of announcement, a teaser for the Valve Index has appeared on Steam. It is clearly Valve's VR headset.

The only text in the teaser reads "Upgrade your experience" and "May 2019," so presumably that's when the Index will go on sale, given that the word "sale" is in the URL.

The headset has been rumored for a while, and became just about a sure thing when convincing-looking images leaked last November. Before that, in March of last year, Gabe Newell said he was jealous of Nintendo's ability to produce both hardware and games, which was a strong hint. Valve also announced in 2017 that it's developing three new VR games, and presumably one or more will be tied to the Index's release.

Despite the leak, I'm a little surprised we're seeing Valve's headset so soon. Over the past several years, Valve seemed to be flirting with the idea of becoming a hardware company, but not fully committing. With its own headset, it's taking a big step toward those Nintendo dreams. (Also, the "upgrade your experience" line is bold. I like it. Wonder how HTC feels, though?)

And yeah, we are aware that it's almost the First of April, the most dreaded day on this job, but announcing a nice-looking VR headset doesn't exactly seem like something you'd do for a laugh (plus it looks like those leaked images). I have asked Valve for more information and will update this story as we learn more.

 

[LESS T_T]

Video of the GDC talk:

 

[vonAchdorf]

Are the current VR headsets even successful? Sure, Valve should have numbers from HTC, but I don't really see much excitement about them. What's worse in today's market: They, I assume, aren't good for streamers (or are there streamers using VR)?

 

[Dexter]

Are the current VR headsets even successful? Sure, Valve should have numbers from HTC, but I don't really see much excitement about them. What's worse in today's market: They, I assume, aren't good for streamers (or are there streamers using VR)?

https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on-steam-have-grown-exponentially-analysis/

(I think their exact numbers might be wrong by a lot since they're making some wrong assumptions, but the general trend seems obvious, it broke the total amount of users using Linux somewhere mid last year and it's well on the way to 1% userbase in the next few months with gradual growth).

https://uploadvr.com/sony-4-point-2-million-sold/


Also see the VR thread: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rift-vive-vr-general.109448/page-5

Wonder what Valve releasing Half Life VR will do, and LOLStreamers.

 

[Sentinel]

Valve has released their Network Library https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets/releases/tag/1.0.0
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets/blob/master/README.md

Why do I see "Steam" everywhere?
The main interface class is named SteamNetworkingSockets, and many files have "steam" in their name. But Steam is not needed. If you don't make games or aren't on Steam, feel free to use this code for whatever purpose you want.

The reason for "Steam" in the names is that this provides a subset of the functionality of the API with the same name in the Steamworks SDK. Our main reason for releasing this code is so that developers won't have any hesitation coding to the API in the Steamworks SDK. On Steam, you will link against the Steamworks version, and you can get the additional features there (access to the relay network). And on other platforms, you can use this version, which has the same names for everything, the same semantics, the same behavioural quirks. We want you to take maximum advantage of the features in the Steamworks version, and that won't happen if the Steam code is a weird "wart" that's hidden behind #ifdef STEAM.

The desire to match the Steamworks SDK also explains a somewhat anachronistic coding style and weird directory layout. This project is kept in sync with the Steam code here at Valve. When we extracted the code from the much larger codebase, we had to do some relatively gross hackery. The files in folders named tier0, tier1, vstdlib, common, etc have especially suffered trauma. Also if you see code that appears to have unnecessary layers of abstraction, it's probably because those layers are needed to support relayed connection types or some part of the Steamworks SDK.

The library got mentioned in this GDC talk, the presenter talks about it (I added the timestamp) but tl;dr is that writing network code for games is hard so Valve released their own library which is free to use and not dependent on anything, you can use it outside of Steam and even outside of games for other applications.
I recommend watching the whole video as it shows what Valve is actually doing with their 30% cut.

 

[Infinitron]

PlayTracker Insight, a new Steam stalking website: https://playtracker.net/insight/

It appears to use the old SteamSpy method to determine number of owners from accounts that made their list of games public (which is a non-representative sample and therefore inaccurate, but still good to have)

 

[LESS T_T]

PlayTracker Insight, a new Steam stalking website: https://playtracker.net/insight/

https://playtracker.net/insight/game.php?game=34321

Vampire: The Masquerade® - Bloodlines™ 2

~72K
estimated owners

Anyway, last week's top sellers:

Totally predictable week.

#10 - Frostpunk
#9 - Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
#8 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#7 - Far Cry New Dawn
#6 - Two Point Hospital
#5 - Total War: WARHAMMER II
#4 - Grand Theft Auto V
#3 - Devil May Cry 5
#2 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#1 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Fresh ones and returning ones. Cool to see some smaller games are doing better than cookie cutter industry productions.

#10 - No Man's Sky
#9 - Grand Theft Auto V
#8 - Generation Zero
#7 - Tropico 6
#6 - Grim Dawn - Forgotten Gods Expansion
#5 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#4 - Outward Day One
#3 - Survivor Pass 3: Wild Card (PUBG thing)
#2 - Risk of Rain 2
#1 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

 

[DalekFlay]

Grand Theft Auto 5 still selling on PC, yet no announced Red Dead ports yet. Ridiculous.