The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Don Peste]

Old games, countless times heavily discounted and bundled, even given away, and probably niche. I don't believe they expect to keep selling more or even the same every year.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

“In 2018 we made about $100,000 with ONE game during the summer sale,” the developer said in an email. “In 2019 we made about $65,000 with TWO games during the summer sale. But it isn’t just the summer sale. It seems that for many devs, 2019 is the year of the lowest traffic and therefore least sales made yet.”

Good heavens, only $65,000 over the course of two weeks? It's no wonder the game industry is dying.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

“In 2018 we made about $100,000 with ONE game during the summer sale,” the developer said in an email. “In 2019 we made about $65,000 with TWO games during the summer sale. But it isn’t just the summer sale. It seems that for many devs, 2019 is the year of the lowest traffic and therefore least sales made yet.”

Good heavens, only $65,000 over the course of two weeks? It's no wonder the game industry is dying.

Its Its probably a significant chunk of their yearly income. Takingvtaxes into account (and whether or not valve tax is already included) they may only see like 30% of that sum. And considering they have to cover with that money not only the current year, but also the time they worked for free/for credit money this sum may not be economically feesible. Especially if they planned their spendings (additional contractors and etc) for similar revenue as their first game, but got only 25% of it per game.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Its Its probably a significant chunk of their yearly income. Takingvtaxes into account (and whether or not valve tax is already included) they may only see like 30% of that sum. And considering they have to cover with that money not only the current year, but also the time they worked for free/for credit money this sum may not be economically feesible. Especially if they planned their spendings (additional contractors and etc) for similar revenue as their first game, but got only 25% of it per game.

That is completely true, but I was still being snarky and shitty about it regardless because most of the time it's really small indie devs who bitch about this sort of thing, and if $65,000 during one of two major banner sales of the year isn't viable for game developing out of your garage then they probably should take a note from Vogel and work on scaling back. I'd also guess that Valve's cut is already factored in, if not actual taxes, since "We made about X" implies that's their actual takeaway.

 

[J_C]

Developers of shit games are upset people don't want to but their products.

Developers are chalking this up not just to wishlist issues, but also changes in the way Steam recommends games, as well as changes to the structure of the sale itself. Nepenthe and To The Dark Tower developer Yitz p

Anytime there's complaints about steam this fuck shows up. Every. Single. Time.
Hurrr my retarded crayon rpgmaker game sold poorly I demand more money

What? WHAT???? You can have children drawings in your game and still sell a lot? Why the fuck am I struggling with putting together some acceptable art, if you can get away with this?

 

[DalekFlay]

I think a lot of indie games remember the days when getting a half-decent game on Steam meant success, but that hasn't been true in a long time.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm starting to think Steam is putting things on my wishlist, because it's stuff I know I never added and don't really have any interest in. Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-2-hat-economy-crashes-due-to-crate-bug

Team Fortress 2 hat economy wrecked by crate glitch

Hats. Team Fortress 2 players are obsessed with them. While the game itself hasn't received a huge amount of attention from Valve in recent years, the TF2 hat economy has remained a core part of the community, with many players seeking to trade their way to rare "Unusual" hats with pretty particle effects - the mark of a truly elite TF2 player.

They look like this, fyi.

Normally, the most basic of these could cost you around £20 via the Steam community marketplace, with the alternatives being to trade your way there with materials, or chancing it via opening hundreds of crates. But thanks to a new glitch, many of TF2's crates have shifted their Unusual drop rate from one per cent to 100 per cent, making the items rather more attainable and completely upending the TF2 social hierarchy. How will I know who to pocket medic now?

The problem began following TF2's latest summer update, which introduced a number of new cosmetic items and, seemingly, the Unusual drop rate glitch. The bug seems to apply to certain lines in the Mann Co. Supply Munition Series, with prices for Unusuals from said crates dropping, and the price of the crates themselves soaring. I tested this out, and indeed found myself opening four Unusuals in a row. One hat I received, which cost £18.26 before the crash, is now being sold for £4.95. Equally, the crates I bought cost £0.03 a few days ago (with only one sold per day), but have been sold 3418 times today at around £2.04.

Crate prices go up...

...Unusuals go down.

It's a full-scale economic disaster, and it seems to be causing a fair bit of panic amongst those in the trading community. "What is going to happen? Should I unbox crates? Can I get banned?? OH MY GOD!!!!", reads one post on Reddit.

According to a post currently at the top of the Team Fortress 2 subreddit, third-party trading site Scrap.TF has closed its doors until the glitch has been fixed, while the moderators have warned players to avoid trading TF2 items until Valve has introduced a hotfix. Many players are speculating that Valve will simply prevent item trading until the issue is resolved. Now all these items are out in the wild, however, it's unclear how Valve will provide a more long-term solution.

Some tin foil hat-wearing cynics believe Valve changed the drop rate to sell more keys, although given the damage this incident has done to the market (and the fact Valve takes commission for each item sold), this seems rather unlikely.

Of course, because this is Team Fortress 2, the memes have started rolling in - ranging from a fake newspaper headline to creative sketches and comparisons to the 1929 stock market crash. Truly, the bug has been a great leveller, and possibly one of the most dramatic events to ever hit the TF2 community.

Hat traders and collectors can at least be comforted by the news that the Dancing Doe hat - based on the truly ancient Ricardo Milos meme - has been introduced via the new summer 2019 pack. Unless the glitch expands to that one, at least.

UPDATE 7.58pm: As the shadow of hatmageddon continues to loom over Team Fortress 2's trading economy, Valve has taken early steps to prevent players from securing more rare head adornments using the game's current loot box glitch.

In a bid to stop further Unusuals from flooding the market, Valve has now (as detailed by TF2 reddit mod wickedplayer494) disabled the display of Team Fortress 2 inventories on the Steam Community, preventing trades and listings on the Community Market. Player items can, however, still be used in-game.

Valve has yet to issue an official statement on the glitch - or indeed what, if anything, it plans to do to restore order to the TF2 trading economy - but at least the community will be impeccably attired while the whole thing sinks into the mud.

 

[DalekFlay]

At some point it'll be all the rage to accuse these companies of pimping out the autistic.

 

[Rahdulan]

Yeah, I read these rage posts online about people being unable to pay their rents now because of this.

 

[LESS T_T]

They're adding little things to Interactive Recommender. You can now exclude games you don't want it to count.

I was wondering why I get lots of shmup recommendations, apparently it's combination of old shooters (Doom, Quake, Half-life) and Japanese action games (Sonic, Megaman-like, indies)?

 

[Perkel]

Aaaaaaaaand he's wearing Flip Flops of course.

Much easier to clean when you shit under yourself.

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-2-hat-economy-crashes-due-to-crate-bug

Valve killed TF2 with the hats crap then shit on its grave when it became F2P .

 

[racofer]

 

[Perkel]

Amazing !!

 

[Abu Antar]

My Steam Discovery Queue won't let me ignore games. This is the second day that I have had this problem.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Makabb]

They are probably 12-20 year olds that were born into 'free to play' games

 

[LESS T_T]

Steam finally supports localized game title per language. Now publishers don't have to name their games like "Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online | 四女神オンライン CYBER DIMENSION NEPTUNE | 四女神ONLINE 幻次元遊戲戰機少女".

 

[Jigawatt]

Now publishers don't have to name their games like "Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online | 四女神オンライン CYBER DIMENSION NEPTUNE | 四女神ONLINE 幻次元遊戲戰機少女".

But they will because that's what attracts the weebs

 

[LESS T_T]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs#announcements/detail/1600386073102256667

Steam Labs Update



Since launching Steam Labs, Community feedback on our initial Store discovery experiments has lead us to create a number of new features and improvements we're excited to share.

What we've learned

We've received really positive feedback since launching the Interactive Recommender. We've heard from many of you that the Interactive Recommender is helping you find interesting games, and we also see this reflected in our early data. One way we study what’s interesting to users is to look at how frequently a visit to a store page turns into a positive action like adding the item to a wishlist, or purchasing it. That frequency varies depending on how users arrived at the store page. We also look at how frequently people choose to visit a store page via the recommender.

Our initial data show the Interactive Recommender is performing very well by those measures. We do of course take these signs with grain of salt, given the novelty and promotion of our experiment likely make for an unfair comparison. Next up, we will work to evaluate the recommender in ways that eliminate this potential bias.

Furthermore, we're especially pleased to see that users are being exposed to a broad range of titles. In fact, nearly 10,000 different games have been added to wishlists from the Interactive Recommender page so far. So yeah, initial signs indicate the Interactive Recommender experiment is working!

Episode 1 of the Automatic Show, a half-hour algorithmically-generated video about Steam games, was received by the Community with a more mixed response. While much of the feedback we received has indicated that the show's utility and format have promise, we did hear from many users that 30 minutes is... a lot of minutes. If this rings true for you, we now offer three new short variations of the initial half-hour experience that we hope you'll enjoy.

If you're in search of your next favorite game, you can give the Interactive Recommender a try for yourself at https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/ and watch the new short n' sweet Automatic Shows at https://store.steampowered.com/labs/automaticshow.

What's new

The Interactive Recommender

New "exclude" feature

You can now tell the interactive recommender to exclude some of your recently played games when generating recommendations for you. By default, the set of games that are excluded in this way is taken from your global Steam ignore list here. If you've chosen to ignore a game via its store page, we won't use it to generate recommendations for you, but you can now interactively toggle excluded games on and off to see the effect that has on your recommendations. (Toggling the exclusion state of games via the interactive recommender in this way will not affect those Steam-wide ignore settings.) If you want to ignore a particular game across all of Steam, you can set that on the store page for that game. Let us know how this feature works for you!

User interface improvements

Your feedback has also informed a few minor improvements to the interface. For example, hovering over a played game in the left-hand column now displays the title of the game, which is useful when the thumbnail art itself is not so legible, and clicking a game in the played list now navigates to its store page, as one might expect.

Always training

The interactive recommender model adapts in two ways. First, it adapts right away to an individual user's behavior; as you play new games, or revisit old ones, the model uses that data to give you updated recommendations. The second way the model adapts is by periodically re-training itself to take into account global changes, staying up-to-date with the latest releases and the gradually changing patterns of player behavior. This re-training process is an intensive operation that crunches billions of data points and can take a whole day to complete. We've been doing some behind-the-scenes cleanup work to make the re-training process smoother and more automated, which will enable us to use the technology in new contexts, like other Labs experiments or the Store itself.

The Automatic Show

New short shows

• Top Releases for June, covering 21 titles from our monthly roundup in a tight 2 minutes 34 seconds.
  
• The 3-Minute VR Show, which covers some of the latest VR titles across all genres.
  
• Rapid! Fire! Horror! In the first two shows, each game clip is 8 seconds long. This show experiments with 3-second clips. Can you handle it?

We hope you'll check out our new shows, then let us know what you think in the discussions.

What's next

We've heard your requests for more dynamic tag selection tools to help guide the Interactive Recommender's results, and we hope to build these soon. We will also continue to monitor and improve the Interactive Recommender's success connecting users with compelling content. The strong performance we're seeing so far may be due in part to the novelty of the feature, so we're continuing to monitor results and conduct additional tests to confirm our initial findings. Meanwhile, given your positive feedback, we're exploring ways to offer the Interactive Recommender's features in other parts of the Store.

As we're looking at next steps for each of our fledgling experiments, we are also embarking on a fourth, which we're excited to share with you soon.

Keep in touch

These experiments are guided in large part by the Steam community of players and game developers. We love to hear what you think of them in the Steam Labs community forum at https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs/discussions/

-The Steam Team

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/2957094910196249305

Proton 4.11 released, kernel packages available for testing
Jul 30 @ 6:39pm - Pierre-Loup
Today we are releasing the first build of Proton 4.11, based on Wine 4.11. Among the usual variety of functional fixes[github.com], as well as a new Vulkan-based D3D9 implementation, it also includes a significant amount of work on reducing CPU overhead for multithreaded games. We observed the following performance gains when forcing a CPU-bound scenario on a high-end machine by reducing graphics details to a minimum:



We expect such gains to be reproducible on more realistic settings with a lower-end machine.

It also includes an experimental replacement for esync[github.com]. Last year, as we were ramping up Proton development, we identified several blocking performance issues with multithreaded games. CodeWeavers then worked on developing the esync patchset to address them. While we think that was very successful, there's certain tradeoffs associated with it: because it relies on the kernel's eventfd() functionality, esync needs special setup and can cause file descriptor exhaustion problems in event-hungry applications. We think it also results in extraneous spinning in the kernel, compared to what an optimal implementation would be.

As such, we're proposing changes to the Linux kernel[lkml.org] to extend the futex() system call to expose what we think is the needed extra bit of core functionality needed to support optimal thread pool synchronization. Proton 4.11 includes the fsync patchset, which will leverage this new Linux kernel functionality to replace esync when supported. For more technical details, refer to the link to the proposed kernel changes above.

We are also posting proof-of-concept glibc patches[github.com] for upstream review and discussion; these patches expose the corresponding kernel functionality as part of the pthread library. We think that if this feature (or an equivalent) was adopted upstream, we would achieve efficiency gains by adopting it in native massively-threaded applications such as Steam and the Source 2 engine.

As usual, testing our theories and uncovering the last few bugs will involve a lot of testing; we have prepared packages for Ubuntu and Arch containing the necessary kernel patches to test fsync with Proton 4.11; for more information, please see this forum thread.

Valve is the best

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-release-date-coming-soon

Seems Valve is cracking down on abuse of Steam’s ‘Upcoming Releases’ section

It looks like Valve has made a significant change to the way studios manage games’ release dates on Steam. A Reddit user by the name of HeadlessIvan has posted a screenshot of a message received on Steam indicating that changes to a title’s release date now need to be approved by Valve, and that developers need to have a solid idea of when their games will actually launch.

Reached for comment, HeadlessIvan told us that they work in publishing at an indie label, and received the message “while updating the release date for one of our titles.” The message gives the game’s current launch date and says “if you need to make changes to this date, please contact Valve here with the reason for your new release date and what date you’d like to set it as.”

It adds, “you should be pretty certain that your new date is the date you will release.” As HeadlessIvan explains in the comments, this means developers can no longer alter the release dates of their games without Valve’s approval.

We’ve reached out to Valve for further confirmation of the change and its reasons for making it. One such reason could be to prevent studios from moving their release dates multiple times. HeadlessIvan suggests that the change is “a good thing because lots of people used it to appear in Coming Soon section without releasing a game.”

Earlier this year Mike Rose of indie studio No More Robots raised some questions (via GamesIndustry.biz) about how developers manage their games’ release dates on Steam, saying on Twitter that the platform’s Popular Upcoming list was “unfortunately […] a (sometimes accidentally) manipulated mess.” Rose added, “you can set *any* date for your game’s release in the Steam backend, and it means nothing. You can set a date, and let it go by. Then you can set another date, and let it go by again,” with the effect being that it would appear in the Upcoming list.

At the time, Tom Giardino at Valve responded saying that it was a “big topic of discussion” and that “it frustrates us for the same reasons it frustrates you.” However, the company acknowledged that it was “super important that devs get to control their own release timing so we don’t want to mess with that.” Giardino said that Valve was “trying to fix it” in a way that balanced making Upcoming Releases valuable with devs sometimes needing to “shift” their release dates.

We’ll update this story with any new information we receive from Valve.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That explains why I can't properly sort my wishlist by release date, the fucking assholes.

 

[J_C]

While Epic has its thumb up in their ass, doing nothing, Valve is constantly improving Steam. Babysteps, but still improving.