The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Sentinel]

“OldSpend” is the amount of money you spent before the Limited User Account restrictions were put in place in 2015. (restrict access to certain community features until an account has spent at least $5.00 USD in Steam.)
“PWSpend” refers to the money you’ve spent on games run by Perfect World Entertainment, a Steam partner which helps run CS:GO and DOTA 2 in China.

 

[Abu Antar]

For that spent money thing, do you add totalspend and oldspend?

If so, I have spent around $1725 in 9 years.

 

[unfairlight]

300 usd 7 years

 

[Sentinel]

Steam for Linux client adds support for Linux namespaces
The Steam client for Linux now supports using namespaces (a.k.a containers) to run game titles.

• This feature is available in the latest Steam client beta, and can be used for all native Linux titles in your Steam library.

• In order to run a title in a container, open the game's properties dialog, go to the general tab and select 'Steam Linux Runtime' under the 'Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool' drop down.

This new feature offers several advantages:

• Titles are better isolated from the host system, improving a host of potential problems and enabling new features such as home isolation.
  
• This feature improves Valve's ability to support older titles on newer distributions moving forward.
  
• For developers, making sure your title runs in the container environment ensures better compatibility across multiple distributions, reducing your QA load.
  
• For developers, Steam will be able to support newer runtimes via containers, which will include newer compilers and libraries.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1638675549018366706/

 

[groundhog]

My total spend on Steam in 7 years is a grand total of $34.

Don't spend it all at once Gabe!

 

[Abu Antar]

My total spend on Steam in 7 years is a grand total of $34.

Don't spend it all at once Gabe!

 

[Curratum]

That SteamSpend thing can't be real.

TotalSpend 2019-11-06 06:55:17.803 $2,510.69

I'm fairly sure I've spent more than that, unless I underestimate the contribution of bundles and 3rd party keys to my account inflation.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Codeweavers, the company that gets paid by other companies to work on wine, is hiring a new graphics programmer due to increased demand

[About the position]
CodeWeavers continues to grow its porting and consulting services particularly in the video game market. Recently we partnered with Valve Software to integrate Wine into the Steam for Linux client as a part of the Steam Play (Proton) initiative. This along with many other clients in the video game industry has increased our demand for developers with strong graphics development experience.

You would be would be working on Wine's Direct3D implementation—covering everything from early DirectDraw up until modern Direct3D 12, as well as other graphics APIs like Wine's Vulkan, OpenGL and Direct2D implementations. Underlying API includes Vulkan and OpenGL on both Linux and macOS across different hardware configurations. There may be some compiler work on vkd3d-shader and/or d3dcompiler.

https://www.codeweavers.com/about/jobs

 

[Anthedon]

Small mode is back:

Library

• Brought back Small Mode library view and updated to work with Steam Collections and the new Steam Library
  
• Added a library setting to hide game icons in the Steam Library’s left column game list
  
• Fixed download progress bar and status wrapping to a second line on game pages on smaller windows
  
• Compressed game page links bar to one line on smaller Steam windows
  
• Post-game summary, game review reminder and other dynamic content on game pages will now fill only one column on wider Steam windows
  
• Fix playtime not updating in play bar on game exit
  
• Fix incorrect number of achievements sometimes being displayed in achievements section
  
• Fixed occasional crashes caused when uninstalling games
  
• Fixed Steam client crash after exiting some AutoCloud-enabled games
  
• Fixed a case where game icons would sometimes not properly be downloaded and used for the game's desktop shortcut when installing a game. For for previously installed games affected by the problem, validating game contents and recreating the shortcuts should fix the issue.

General

• Installation support for STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order™
  
• Fixed a cause of black library/store/friends windows in the client or overlay
  
• Fixed intermittent client crash on startup
  
• Fixed intermittent steamwebhelper crash
  
• Fixed web based views in the client rendering with artifacts if you have the latest NVIDIA drivers and have turned on Global Image Sharpening

Windows

• Removed auto-creation of Documents/Downloads directory.

Linux

• Updated vaapi decoding to libva2 compatibility
  
• Fixes to free disk space checks to address issues with some NFS mounts
  
• Fixed Steam Input F12 binding
  
• Fix "Help > System Information" not producing container runtime information in some cases

Remote Play

• Fixed game audio being silent when reconnecting to a running game
  
• Fixed rare crash when the stream stops

Steam Input
Fix issue where adding an action set would prevent creating an action set layer until selecting a new action set

https://store.steampowered.com/news/56092/

 

[Unkillable Cat]

So I checked my library again and saw that MRY got the library image for Primordia updated, so many thanks for that.

Yume Nikki had also had its image updated, so that left five, of which I manually updated the three I doubt the devs will ever bother with. That leaves Croteam and the Lakeview Cabin dev in the proverbial doghouse.

I then took a brief look at my 'Hidden' games - oh gods. So much , such lazy, very wow.

 

[LESS T_T]

Looks like the infamous serial canceler is at it again: https://www.pcgamer.com/firewatch-fans-are-worried-that-in-the-valley-of-gods-has-been-canceled/

Firewatch fans are worried that In the Valley of Gods has been canceled
Twitter bios of lead developers have removed any reference to the game, and the announcement trailer is gone too.


In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo's follow-up to the excellent Firewatch, was unveiled at The Game Awards in late 2017. In April 2018 we got a closer look at the game and spoke in detail with the studio about the relationships in the game and its many inspirations, from silent films to 1920s archaeology, all in service of capturing the feeling of what it might really be like to run your thumb across an ancient, inscripted wall.

Since then, there's been nothing. That silence isn't out of character for Valve, which acquired Campo Santo right around the time of that preview, but recent changes in the Twitter bios of three of its lead developers—Firewatch producer and 3D environment artist Jane Ng, art director Claire Hummel, and Campo Santo co-founder Jake Rodkin—has some followers worried that the game has been canceled.

A check of the Internet Archive confirms that the changes were made relatively recently. The Twitter bios of Ng and Hummel both indicated that they were working on In the Valley of Gods as recently as October 2019, while Rodkin's bio made the same reference up to September. All three now indicate simply that they are employed by Valve.



One person responding to McVicker's tweet suggested that the change could be a simple matter of developer turnover, but that doesn't strike me as very likely given the leading roles that all three played at Campo Santo. It's also possible that Valve is simply "all hands on deck" for its big VR thing, which I think would be a tragic waste, or that it simply doesn't like its developers talking about what they're doing before it's ready for an official reveal. That certainly wouldn't be out of character.

It's a strange situation, and not necessarily indicative of anything more than a shift in focus for these particular developers. Valve famously allows employees to work on any project they choose.

The website for In the Valley of Gods is still up, and so is the Steam page. But the announcement trailer on the Campo Santo YouTube channel has been set to private (you can still see it via The Game Awards), and in response to a recent tweet bemoaning the game's purported cancellation, Ng said that she was glad the poster connected with Firewatch (despite some low-key rudeness) but made no mention of In the Valley of Gods' status one way or the other.

Taken altogether, it seems a bit odd at the very least, and not at all reassuring for anyone eager for Campo Santo's next thing. I've reached out to Valve for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

 

[Tehdagah]

Evil Valve destroy indie devs while Epic supports them.

 

[Sentinel]

I don't think this surprises anyone.

 

[Rahdulan]

It's like they keep publishing new updates for Steam every day or something. At least the process is brief.

 

[Morgoth]

I really wonder if they kept Alyx's VA, and if G-Man or Dr. Klein will make an appearance. Their VAs are so old now I'm very curious to hear what they'd sound like back in character.

More likely they will just keep Alyx mute.

Would be a nice gag though to have Merle Dandridge make a snarky comment when you stare down on your/her boobs.

 

[Sentinel]

Steam Client Beta - November 18, 2019
19 NOV @ 1:06AM - PHILIPLA
The Steam Client Beta has been updated with the following changes:

Library

• Added a filter option to split family shared games in the game list into sections by owner
  
• Fixed non-Steam game shortcut icons not displaying when set from an .exe file
  
• Fixed status in playbar showing "downloading" while unpacking a preloaded game

General

• Fixed possible client crash when there are more pending gifts than installed games
  
• Fixed an issue where the language drop down in the per-game settings page could be blank for uninstalled games.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...me-keeps-showing-in-steams-most-played-games/

Spacewar! Why a hidden, ancient game keeps showing in Steam's most-played games

Click here if you have Steam. What’s downloading is a true space oddity. Spacewar! was one of the first multiplayer games ever made. It was made before we landed on the moon, in 1962, and it ran on the PDP-1, MIT’s supercomputer.

It’s a space shooter with two ships firing at each other. There’s a black hole in the middle, adding some gravitational trouble to the game. It’s very basic, but it’s also one of the most played games on Steam. It started out as an example for developers using Steam’s SDK, but it has ended up with a far more nefarious purpose.

It isn’t really meant to be played. If you search for it on Steam, you can’t find it. You have to know it’s there to install it. It’s used as a sample to demonstrate various aspects of Valve’s Steamworks API, such as achievements. Despite this, it regularly appears on Steam’s top 100 most played games. In fact, as I’m writing this it’s at 4398, above other space games such as Eve Online and Space Engineers. I loaded it up and saw a host of lobbies, but no-one listed in them is playing the game. They’re just sitting there.

It’s not on Steam’s Top 100 because people are playing it, but because they aren’t. Spacewar is a Trojan horse that pirated games use to get onto Steam. It’s quite a neat little scam. Pirated games that require Steam use Spacewar’s appid to sneak their way onto the service. Steam thinks they’re using the SDK, but really the players are sneakily playing a new game in Spacewar’s clothing.

This is what Spacewar’s screenshot page looked like in 2013, but there’s no community page for it now.



It makes me sad that the community page is gone, because it was a self-promoted wall of shame for every brazen pirate out there. I used to enjoy loading it up and to see a patchwork of piracy. Valve didn’t stop people from using Spacewar to sneak onto Steam, they just stopped people bragging about it.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/together

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/together

this is discrimination against people without friends

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Despite this, it regularly appears on Steam’s top 100 most played games. In fact, as I’m writing this it’s at 4398, above other space games such as Eve Online and <snip>

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

does the steam client run like total shit for anyone else? loading store pages takes forever, client keeps crashing when trying to do anything outside of the library, wishlist barely works, etc..

I've actually been using the website instead of the actual client to browse

 

[J_C]

does the steam client run like total shit for anyone else? loading store pages takes forever, client keeps crashing when trying to do anything outside of the library, wishlist barely works, etc..

I've actually been using the website instead of the actual client to browse

Yes. I never had too much problem with the client, but in the last couple of weeks it is slow and crashes a lot. Dunno why, probably the new library update.

 

[HoboForEternity]

not front store page, but sometimes the activity page and specific game store page dont load properly

 

[Latelistener]

I'm using Parsec for this for quite some time. Would be interesting to compare.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/deleted-games

Steam just deleted hundreds of games from the store

The Christmas period is a good time to give your house a bit of a deep clean in lieu of decorations and having guests over. Valve appears to be taking this sentiment to heart this year, as it’s begun a clear-out of Steam’s archives.

Spotted by Reddit user thomasthe1st, according to the banned list on madjoki.com’s Steam tracker, Valve is in the midst of a huge dumping of games and projects that are clogging up the storefront’s digital shelf-space. Starting with Bloodbath Kavkaz, hundreds and hundreds of games have been banned from the service, more coming almost every second. The additions are almost uniformly cheap indie projects, many of which are hard to find information on beyond their now deleted Steam pages. At time of writing the overall amount deleted is at just over 2550, having jumped up several hundred within the last two hours.

Before this purge, there was a steady drip of deletions, as evidenced by going back through madjoki’s records. Most happened in small clumps, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, but nothing anywhere near this scale. There’s been pressure on Valve for years to increase moderation on Steam, to have more stringent guidelines for what’s acceptable on the service and what isn’t, from bigoted content to asset flips and so on. This certainly looks like it might be a step in that direction.

This isn’t the only piece of surprising behaviour from Valve. After years of silence on the Half-Life series, the studio revealed a new game in the iconic series. Coming out March 2020, Half-Life: Alyx is a VR project set in-between the first and second Half-Life. Though it’s not the fabled Half-Life 3, to see any new Half-Life at all after 12 years is still something.

Talking Steam specifically, Destiny 2 shot to the top of the charts in its first month on the platform, dominating the charts for October. After eight years apart, EA returned to Steam with EA Access, its own subscription service on the Steam store, of which Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was the first release.

If nothing else, looks like Steam’s getting the place tidy for the Black Friday sale, which starts November 26.

https://www.pcgamer.com/1000-games-were-just-removed-from-steam-and-we-dont-know-why/

Valve removed 1000 games from Steam because publishers were 'abusing' Steamworks
Multiple publisher catalogs have been wiped out.

Update: Shortly after our story went up, developer Alexandra Frock noted on Twitter that "a good chunk" of the removed games were linked to a single Russian publisher, Dagestan Technology, that appeared to be operating under a large number of different names. Selecting "related apps" for individual listings of banned games reveals how they're connected: Sly Pigs, for instance, is five steps removed from Running Sausage, but only two from BattleStar Mazay.

It's a bit like a Steam version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: Some of the connections in the "related games" lists aren't immediately obvious, but the steps do lead from one point to the next, and Frock appears to be onto something. A cached version of the Dagestan Technology Steam Curator page lists 48 games and 4 DLCs, but the live page is now empty.

Valve didn't reveal any specifics on involved companies or their transgressions, but it did indirectly confirm that Dagestan wasn't the only publisher involved, saying that the removals were the result of bad behavior on the part of multiple publishers. "We recently discovered a handful of partners that were abusing some Steamworks tools," a rep explained. "We emailed all the affected partners."

Original story:

Something strange appears to be happening on Steam, where, as chronicled by Steam Tools, roughly 1000 games have been suddenly removed from the system. Some of the "banned" games look a little sketchy but others seem like fairly normal games (for Steam at least), and have been on the platform for months or years.

Glasswinged Ascension, for instance, has been on Steam since mid-2017, and is still listed on IndieDB, while Mind Trap has been around for about the same length of time. Electric Highways had more than 1300 very positive user reviews before it was removed (we also included it in a 2018 Free Games of the Week roundup) and Masha Rescues Grandma, a casual puzzle-adventure released in 2016 and removed a couple of hours ago, actually has a walkthrough video on YouTube with nearly 49,000 views.

None of the removed games are mainstream by any means, and there's a lot of garbage to sift through, but that's Steam in a nutshell. And given its anything goes approach to new releases, there's nothing in the list that leaps out as being especially out of line.

By my count, 982 games have been removed from the service over the past four hours. It's very odd and we're not sure why it's happening, but we've reached out to Valve for more information and we'll update when we figure it out.

Thanks, PCGamesN.