The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Lutte]

"steam sales don't exist anymore lalala"
>/me looks into the prices of various favorites (which I already own and bought at full price because good games are worth it)
>DS2 are at 10 euros, DS3 15 euros
>Dragon's Dogma for 9 euros
>Monster Hunter World for 30 euros (very recent AAA that still has a pending expansion pack to be released)
>Hollow Knight, Rabi Ribi for 9 euros

WTF more do you want you fucking cuntholes? the sales prices are still strong on many really good games. What, you want them to be available for less than the base electronic transaction fees?
So some indie decided to discount his game a bit less because his base price (Stardew Valley) was already fucking low and he understood he shouldn't sell himself too short when his game is in higher demand than many AAA and we should take this as a generalization that PC gaming is now expensive?

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Console ports and indie trash, more than 5$ is a robbery.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Console ports and indie trash

Thus is the current state of PC gaming.

 

[J_C]

"steam sales don't exist anymore lalala"
>/me looks into the prices of various favorites (which I already own and bought at full price because good games are worth it)
>DS2 are at 10 euros, DS3 15 euros
>Dragon's Dogma for 9 euros
>Monster Hunter World for 30 euros (very recent AAA that still has a pending expansion pack to be released)
>Hollow Knight, Rabi Ribi for 9 euros

WTF more do you want you fucking cuntholes? the sales prices are still strong on many really good games. What, you want them to be available for less than the base electronic transaction fees?
So some indie decided to discount his game a bit less because his base price (Stardew Valley) was already fucking low and he understood he shouldn't sell himself too short when his game is in higher demand than many AAA and we should take this as a generalization that PC gaming is now expensive?

Sometimes I wonder why do these people even pretend to be paying customers? It's obvious that they want the games for basically free, they might as well just pirate it.

 

[DalekFlay]

WTF more do you want you fucking cuntholes? the sales prices are still strong on many really good games. What, you want them to be available for less than the base electronic transaction fees?
So some indie decided to discount his game a bit less because his base price (Stardew Valley) was already fucking low and he understood he shouldn't sell himself too short when his game is in higher demand than many AAA and we should take this as a generalization that PC gaming is now expensive?

From my experience, I think games are going on sale as fast as they ever did, but the discounts aren't as deep. Publishers seem to treat $20 as a minimum for "big" games now, so while they'll quickly do sales at $40 or $30 and over time $20 they seem much more hesitant to go down further even years later. When the Steam Sale phenomenon started one thing that got a lot of buzz was seeing "big" games for $5 and shit like that, and I think the perspective that happens less often, or nowhere near as quickly, is what makes people complain.

I'm not a poor potato farmer so I think $20 is a fine "few years old" price, but once you get people used to something they complain when they perceive they're getting less of it.

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

I bought 50 games during the sale and still have 1166 games on my wishlist

The wishlist is where any game that looks remotely interesting goes in. It's unlikely I'll ever buy all of them.

Could you post the link to your wishlist please? There might be games I wanted to get at some point too, but completely forgot about them.

 

[JarlFrank]

I bought 50 games during the sale and still have 1166 games on my wishlist

The wishlist is where any game that looks remotely interesting goes in. It's unlikely I'll ever buy all of them.

Could you post the link to your wishlist please? There might be games I wanted to get at some point too, but completely forgot about them.

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561197987089584/

 

[Mustawd]

I bought 50 games during the sale and still have 1166 games on my wishlist

The wishlist is where any game that looks remotely interesting goes in. It's unlikely I'll ever buy all of them.

Could you post the link to your wishlist please? There might be games I wanted to get at some point too, but completely forgot about them.

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561197987089584/

Games: 836

 

[Rahdulan]

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561197987089584/

Why do you have free games wishlisted?

 

[JarlFrank]

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561197987089584/

Why do you have free games wishlisted?

Cause you can't add them to your account properly - if you uninstall them they're no longer in your library, which is retarded. And I don't want to constantly keep them installed.

 

[J_C]

I bought 50 games during the sale and still have 1166 games on my wishlist

The wishlist is where any game that looks remotely interesting goes in. It's unlikely I'll ever buy all of them.

Could you post the link to your wishlist please? There might be games I wanted to get at some point too, but completely forgot about them.

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561197987089584/

Fallout 4. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

 

[DalekFlay]

Angel of Darkness is the only Tomb Raider I don't own, but I'd get it for $1 just to experience the fail. Gonna wait and do it on GOG though someday.

 

[Infinitron]

Steam Labs: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/labs

Steam can now “magically generate a show about the latest and greatest games”

There are too many Steam games for anyone to keep track of, including Valve, and the company has spent the past few years working on ways to offload the curation and discovery process to a mysterious set of algorithms. Valve now plans to get its store experiments into players’ hand much sooner – so you can now try out another new set of features as we get closer to the Steam Library redesign.

Steam Labs is now live, and currently hosts three different ‘experiments.’ The first is a collection of micro-trailers, similar to the social media bots that post six-second clips of Steam trailers. These Micro Trailers can play as you hover over games, automatically as you scroll, or as grids of footage from a given game.

Perhaps the strangest of these experiments is the Automatic Show, which will procedurally build a 30-minute broadcast of footage from new and popular games, and present it all to you in a digest format. Valve wants to have text-to-speech voiceover for the show sourced from store descriptions, but says that the early voices have been a little too robotic.

The Interactive Recommender is basically another store algorithm, but it’s one that builds from your play history and allows you to customise it. You can set a range for how recent you want your recommended games, adjust how the engine weights popularity, or limit game genres by tags.

Steam’s usual recommendations are based largely on genre and tags, but this recommender is different. “Instead,” Valve says, “it looks at what games you play and what games other people play, then makes informed suggestions based on the decisions of other people playing games on Steam.”

Valve has taken a fair amount of heat in the recent past over player-focused store changes that have had poor consequences for developers. There was the discoverability bug last year, and more recently the Summer Sale’s confusing promotional tactics had players deleting indie games from their wishlists en masse.

Hopefully a more experimental rollout of new features will mitigate those problems in the future, and Valve says in a blog post that developers will have tools to see how the new recommender is driving traffic to their games.

As all these features are being explicitly labeled as ‘experiments,’ they’re all subject to change. Valve is soliciting feedback on all of them for further improvements.

 

[Mustawd]

Nice. I really like the 30 minute trailer idea.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Valve has taken a fair amount of heat in the recent past over player-focused store changes that have had poor consequences for developers.

And this is why people like Valve.

 

[Melcar]

Why all of a sudden it's about the developers now? These guys should be coding their games from their parent's garage, like in the good old days.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

Why all of a sudden it's about the developers now?

Because of the incestuous relationship between gaming "journalists" and the industry. Imagine if Chevrolet launched a new vehicle that everyone hated and sold like shit, and the press decided to blame customers and painted GM as the poor victim of toxic motorist culture. It would be ridiculous, but the same thing.

 

[Sentinel]

That's some pretty cool shit. I never would've thought of that.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

VALVE and STEAM promoting close-minded and insular game tastes. That's a bad thing, and here's why.

Valve has released the latest in their never-ending attacks on the gaming industry today, in the form of the "Interactive Recommender", an application that offers a list of game recommendations based on a user's tastes as determined by their play time of games on Steam. It sounds perfectly innocent, doesn't it? But do not be fooled, smart and discerning gaming public, this is a tool designed to cement Valve's death-grip on the gaming industry, throttling the life and money right out of it. First, the recommendations are based on a person's STEAM GAME TIME, meaning that charming indie game about pregnant teens with cancer you just played? Doesn't count as a game to the eyes of Valve. Further, the recommendations are limited only to Steam users, one could even say EXCLUSIVELY available to them. Finally and most damning of all, the recommendations are based on a user's previously played games, promoting an echo-chamber of tastes rather than broadening users' horizons like with the recommendations offered by this very publication.

Remember, you have options. The newly opened Epic Game Store offers a wide range of highly exciting titles without the manipulative practices put in place by Valve, and offering a daring revenue split with the developers who make the games we all love. You can be a gamer and be proud, make the right choice.

 

[Paper]

fucking drama queen, just buy games you wanna play, don't just buy whatever steam recommends? sheep will sheep regardless of this thing

 

[Sentinel]

VALVE and STEAM promoting close-minded and insular game tastes. That's a bad thing, and here's why.

Valve has released the latest in their never-ending attacks on the gaming industry today, in the form of the "Interactive Recommender", an application that offers a list of game recommendations based on a user's tastes as determined by their play time of games on Steam. It sounds perfectly innocent, doesn't it? But do not be fooled, smart and discerning gaming public, this is a tool designed to cement Valve's death-grip on the gaming industry, throttling the life and money right out of it. First, the recommendations are based on a person's STEAM GAME TIME, meaning that charming indie game about pregnant teens with cancer you just played? Doesn't count as a game to the eyes of Valve. Further, the recommendations are limited only to Steam users, one could even say EXCLUSIVELY available to them. Finally and most damning of all, the recommendations are based on a user's previously played games, promoting an echo-chamber of tastes rather than broadening users' horizons like with the recommendations offered by this very publication.

Remember, you have options. The newly opened Epic Game Store offers a wide range of highly exciting titles without the manipulative practices put in place by Valve, and offering a daring revenue split with the developers who make the games we all love. You can be a gamer and be proud, make the right choice.

that's actually pretty good. made me google the headline

 

[MicoSelva]

Six-second trailers? Seriously, attention span for "gamers" is at this level now.

 

[Plaguecrafter]

how about single frame trailers. we could call them ‘screenshots’

I think you might be onto something here.

 

[Curratum]

Six-second trailers? Seriously, attention span for "gamers" is at this level now.

I don't know about attention span but if I want to sift through the 130 games that came out on Steam last week, I'd rather have those 6-second vignettes. 6 seconds is enough for me to sift through the crap and find the one or two games you might like.

 

[DalekFlay]

If you play all kinds of different games I could see a montage service as useful. Something catches your eye, then you look more into it. As someone who really only plays three genres though (RPG, FPS, Adventure) it's pretty easy for me sort by genre and quickly see what's new that I'm interested in.