The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[evdk]

Will Codex be a registered outlet on Steam?

It should definitely be registered somewhere.

 

[Bruticis]

Will Codex be a registered outlet on Steam?

It should definitely be registered somewhere.

I did my part already https://www.splcenter.org/reporthate

 

[Anthedon]

Being able to turn off PC Gamer/RPS et al. is fantastic news.

 

[evdk]

Will Codex be a registered outlet on Steam?

It should definitely be registered somewhere.

I did my part already https://www.splcenter.org/reporthate

Aren't "southern" and "poverty" synonyms?

 

[Bruticis]

Being able to turn off PC Gamer/RPS et al. is fantastic news.

You can already do that using the superior GoG 2.0 launcher.

 

[Infinitron]

I just noticed that the "Recent Updates" interface on game's store pages has changed. Must be in preparation for the new event-based activity feed.

 

[LESS T_T]

New search features are live, https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs/announcements/detail/1593633841009864847

Steam Labs Update: A new Search experiment, Micro trailers by tag, and more

Sept 5, 2019 – Recent experimentation in Steam Labs takes shape in the form of both updated and new experiments, plus an upcoming experiment we're excited to announce is in the works.

Experiment 001: Micro Trailers – Now Available for Every Game

We’ve been delighted to work with indie game developer Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games to bring his enthusiasm for game discovery to our experiments in Steam Labs. Ichiro first began experimenting with ways to explore the Steam catalog with his 2015 website, http://www.whatsonsteam.com/ and his 2016 Twitter bot, @MicroTrailers. His experience provides us with an informed perspective on content discovery design and tools that serve both developers and customers. Steam Labs is a result of our collaboration, and together we look forward to seeing where your feedback leads us.

Ichiro created two of Labs' first experiments, 001: Micro Trailers and 003: Automatic Show. These experiments offer 6-second quick-cuts of game trailers to give viewers a way to soak in a week's worth of new titles over the course of a lunch break. The initial experiment covered a few hundred games across 15 categories. We now bring this experiment to its logical next step: a micro trailer for every game on the Steam Store, categorized into nearly 400 tags. You can now browse all your favorite titles by tag, from games with Tanks to Twin Stick Shooters, and get an eyeful of the latest launches for each.



Introducing Experiment 004: Search

Today’s Lab Update includes a new Experiment 004: Search, now available to help you discover titles on Steam. When enabled, it will place your browser into in Labs Mode, allowing you to access the experimental features whenever you search on Steam. Labs Mode is remembered on a per-browser basis. As a reminder of the mode, these views feature a banner which includes links to provide feedback, or to return to standard search mode on Steam.

Experimental search features include price and sale filters, enabling people to narrow Steam Store search results to titles below a specific price, or those which are currently available at a discount. We’ve also introduced filters which enable Steam users to exclude owned, wished-for, or ignored items from displayed results once logged in.

Narrowing by tag has also received an update, with additional correlated tags listed in order of frequency. The inclusion of result counts makes it easier to see the effect of tag filters in advance of selecting them. Additionally, searching by tag now uses an updated algorithm which weights the value of chosen tags more heavily when sorting by relevance.



And last but not least, our Search experiment offers infinite scroll when displaying search results! No more clicking tiny page numbers; you can now use your mouse wheel to breeze through your search results. Independent of Steam Labs, infinite scroll has also been added to DLC, Curator, and Franchise views on Steam.

Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

As always, we hope you’ll check out these latest and upcoming additions to Steam Labs and let us know what you think in the discussions. Your feedback shapes our experimentation and informs the ideas which become a part Steam for keeps.

 

[J_C]

All the constant new features on Steam make the Epic Store more and more pathetic.

 

[Dexter]

All the constant new features on Steam make the Epic Store more and more pathetic.

Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[JarlFrank]

All the constant new features on Steam make the Epic Store more and more pathetic.

Coming Soon – Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’re excited to share that we’re also working with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype[www.fortressofdoors.com] to Steam Labs, where it will directly leverage the underlying APIs that fuel its recommendations and related game information. The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.

To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.

Games have the "similar games" list on their store page, but that never shows more than 9 games even if there are over a dozen similar ones around...

Always annoyed me because that's my favorite way to discover new games in genres I like.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Seems they updated the recommendation experiment, I have a bunch of new games in there now.
Time go to through them all again

 

[J_C]

I don't know if this has been confirmed by Valve, but it seems there is a new distribution agreement for Steam.

This can mean that if you release a game commercially, you have to release on Steam at the exact same date as you release it on other stores. Or if your game has been already released before you create a store page on Steam, you have 30 days to release it on Valve's platform. This can bite the leeches from the Epic Store in the ass, but sadly it can also bite small indies, who plan to releaes on places like itch.io first.

 

[Hirato]

Seems pretty generous to me.

But basically it's saying that when you've signed the agreement, or made a store page, with the intent of putting a specific game on steam,
You've a 30 day window within which to get your shit in order, after which you're expected to support the steam platform as a first class citizen.

So if you want to release on epic or itch or gog or whatever first, that's fine,
Just don't make a page on the steam store until your exclusivity contract is about to expire, or you're ready to release it on steam.
Because you'll either be in violation of either the steam agreement, or your exclusivity deal.


For example, if some no name indie released on Epic with a 12month exclusivity deal, and just after 15 months made a steam page, the game will have to be available on steam as the the exclusivity period expires and steam's deadline starts looming a bit too close for comfort.

As a second example, consider Metro Exodus, they're holding to the agreement, as they technically are providing the customers who preordered with patches and a playable game.
But they're not really adhering to the spirit of it...

As a tertiary example, consider The Outer Worlds, I'm uncertain if they ever allowed any pre-orders on steam...
if they did, they'll probably be fine as long as they respect and support those.
However if they never did, they'd be in violation of this agreement the moment the game is released on Epic and the Windows store - as the page has been up for months.



That wording does actually suggest they technically be fine as long as they upload a valid build on the release day - even if no one can access it for the entire exclusivity period.
It's a technicality that utterly violates the spirit of the agreement though...


Obligatory: IANAL

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Obligatory: IANAL

Gay

 

[evdk]

To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.

I could have sworn Steam had that for ages as well and the indies were bitching about it promoting other competing games on their game pages. But I can't find it, so it might have been just some alcohol fueled delusion on my part.

 

[Abu Antar]

There is usually a section called "More like this" section on a game page. Just tried it on my phone and it's there for me.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

To be honest, this shouldn't have been some sort of "experiment", but should have been a feature for the past 5 years already. Amazon has had the "People who have looked at this also bought..." for ages, sites like IMDb had "More Like This" below a film for quite a while, even aniDB and the likes had "Similar Anime". It's fucking retarded and a missed opportunity that they didn't have something like this so far for instance when you're in the mood for Turnbased RPGs it shows you similar games and a percentage for semblance or similar.

I could have sworn Steam had that for ages as well and the indies were bitching about it promoting other competing games on their game pages. But I can't find it, so it might have been just some alcohol fueled delusion on my part.

Wouldn't be surprised, Indies bitch about everything

 

[Infinitron]

Steam sales data analysis: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A3QrdN/view

 

[Steamboat Willie]

If you see a developer taking an Epic Exclusive deal, leave them the *fuck* alone.

In terms of purchasing their product, that is exactly what I do.

 

[Abu Antar]

If they take Epic's money, they don't need mine! I'll move on to something else. I've said from day one that I understand why someone would take the money, I don't have to like it as a consumer, but no hate from me.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

He mentions how he trimmed the bottom 80% of games and trimmed AAA banner games, then trimmed the top and bottom 5% to reduce outliers. Wouldn't that mean that supply is outpacing demand and a lot of the "Missing money" is going into people buying those 80% of "Trash" games he removed? Like he says the bottom 80% are making hardly any money at all, and his numbers were exclusively coming from one month (July to August) and he's extrapolating a year of sales over the course of a month of just 170 of the 900 games released in that one month span. So not only is he glossing over the massive supply of new games (Since there's only a finite amount of cash people will dump on videogames globally), he's then estimating yearly sales numbers on Steam, a platform with roughly 30,000 games using just 170 out of 900 released in a month. He then ends with telling people to stop bullying Epic.

I don't know about you fellers but this seems like it's on the level to me. If you look at Epic Game Store's sales per individual game I bet they look a lot better too. They're up to what, 30 games now?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

His numbers are way too low. Some basic math can easily show he's far off. Either he's excluding a lot more titles than what he refers to as "AAA" or he's just using bullshit data.
Steam had $4.3bn in sales in 2017, which was up from $3.5bn in 2016. Extrapolating the data he used, it would account for about …0.54% of Steam's 2019 sales assuming Steam sales increased at the same rate since 2017(I'm too lazy to check if they have)

 

[LESS T_T]

Tag-based recommendations now less dependent on popularity, shows "more relevant to individual customers": https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1591381408652851752

Store Discovery Update

Today's Steam Store update features several algorithmic changes and bug fixes in an effort to be more precise and more diverse in how Steam presents games via tags in the Recommendation Feed, as well as the "More Like This" and the "Recommended for You" sections of the store.

Previously, when customers would look for games by browsing the recommendation feed at the bottom of the homepage or the "More Like This" sections, they weren't seeing as many different games as we would've liked. Furthermore, we were receiving lots of feedback that "Recommended for You," felt too biased towards only the most popular games and didn't feel very personalized. We wanted to determine how to respond to this feedback, so we went in search of bugs and decided to run an experiment.

We found some bugs, such as the "Similar by Tags" section of the Recommendation Feed, which had a bug that top-rated games (a category that doesn't change very often) were driving too much of what players saw. We changed that. We also found that in some places our timescale used to calculate popularity was too narrow, resulting in unpredictable visibility for some games. So we expanded the time period we use in those calculations.

In changing these areas, we wanted to ensure that we were showing customers a diverse set of games while keeping the games relevant to them. Would they engage with those recommendations? In other words, would they click through? Would they wishlist these games? Would they buy them? To answer these questions, we made some changes to how we show customers games in the places on the store that are driven by recommendation code, bundled that up with our bug fixes, and shipped it to 5% of customers to test for the past few weeks.

In these changes, "Recommended for You" became less biased towards popular games, and showed games that are more relevant to individual customers. As it turned out, customers in the experiment group were more likely to click on the games shown in the recommendations section, at a rate almost 15% higher than the control group. The increased personalization means there is an even greater variety of games being shown in this section, and customer impressions are more evenly distributed among them.

To get a feel for the breadth of titles that were being visited, we measured how many games members of the experiment group visited via the "Recommended For You" section compared to a sample of customers who were not in the experiment for a few days. The results were very promising: we saw a 75% increase in the number of unique games visited, and a 48% increase in the average visits per game.

Store areas driven by Tags, such as "More Like This," saw increases in purchase and wishlisting across a broader set of games. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but by increasing qualitative specificity and showing a wider range of titles, more customers found things they didn't know they wanted.

We're encouraged by these results and have now rolled them out to everyone. We continue to make changes and run experiments like this in order to improve Steam's existing features, while we also explore entirely different ways for customers to find games they love. If you head over to Steam Labs you can use one of these new methods: the Steam Interactive Recommender experiment. With a few clicks, we're confident you're going to find or rediscover a game that interests you.

As we keep working on discoverability, we encourage your feedback on these store-wide changes as well as The Interactive Recommender. It's immensely valuable and helps guide our continued work.

Case in point, it's still not the best matches now it's showing more indie-er games than big sellers.

Random post:

For no particular reason, I was looking at the store page of Heroine's Quest (https://store.steampowered.com/app/283880/Heroines_Quest_The_Herald_of_Ragnarok/).

At the bottom, there is a list of recommended games (same genre). Among them:
The Witcher 3, GTA 5, Spyro Trilogy, The Elder Scrolls Online, FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, Fallout 4.

Riiiiight.

With tags like Point & click, Free, Indie, Retro, Pixel art, 2D, you totally nailed it, Steam, you nailed it...

 

[Morgoth]

Perhaps some people might find this interesting:



Kerry Davis from Valve talks at Digipen about some serious VR challenges that Valve is trying to overcome. More specifically, how to deal with doors, and door knobs!

Nothing specific about the next major VR title, other than "I'm dying" for the eventual announcement.