The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Sentinel]

in what way does this bloat the software? the store literally runs on an integrated chrome browser. this addition is independent of the steam client.

 

[Dickie]

Steam is rolling out the playtest feature: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/2954884882167446258

I thought Steam already offered this feature.
It is called "Early Access".

This is free Early Access, though. Instead of people paying you to playtest your game, you let them do it for free.

 

[Mexi]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/2924487488167580236

Steam Input API Adds PS5 Controller Support

Full support for the LED, trackpad, rumble and gyro features are available now

Thanks to our most recent Steam client update, all games currently using the Steam Input API are now fully compatible with the new PS5 controller - with no developer updates required, it just works.

Full support for the LED, trackpad, rumble and gyro features are available for players to configure in games such as Death Stranding, No Man’s Sky, Horizon: Zero Dawn and more. This support is now available for players opted into the public beta Steam desktop client with platform wide support targeted to ship after further testing.

What is Steam Input API?
Here is an introduction to the Steam Input API for game developers: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/steam_controller/getting_started_for_devs

In short, Steam Input API offer gamers a significantly enhanced experience with a limited developer investment. These include:

• Seamless player experience with correct glyphs for all devices, including any remapping.
  
• Support for advanced features such as motion controls, trackpads, additional buttons.
  
• Updates just work. Without any additional work required of the developer, when new features and/or devices are added to the API, they will “just work” with these titles.

The PS5 controller joins over 200 input devices supported by the API, including PS4 controller, Switch Pro controller, fight sticks, race wheels, dance pads, and just about any other controller imaginable.

Do people really play PC games with controllers?
In the past two years, the number of daily average users playing a Steam game with a controller has more than doubled, with millions enjoying the growing catalog of controller-friendly titles everyday. In controller friendly games, the percentage of players for that game that use a controller can easily be 60% or higher. Some games, such as skateboarding games, have well over 90% of their players using controllers in game. The growth in controller usage has been even higher among players using PlayStation controllers, which has grown in the past two years from 10.9% of controller play sessions to 21.6% of all controller sessions across Steam.

What does this mean for you as a game developer?
If you are already using the Steam Input API in your game, you don’t have to do anything further to enable this support.

If you aren’t using the Steam Input API and have a game on Steam with some form of controller support, you can check and make sure that Steam Gamepad Emulation is enabled for PlayStation controllers by default (learn more about Steam Gamepad Emulation here).

Steam Gamepad Emulation is a Steam service that allows players to immediately configure a PS5 (and other controllers) to function in that game and can map the controller’s basic buttons to actions in the game. The level of customization and quality of experience provided to the player is limited in this mode, but it can be useful for older games that are no longer supported with development teams, as it can be enabled without any code changes.

We still recommend making use of the Steam Input API for a full integration, as it provides the best default experience for players with just about any kind of controller you can imagine.

Information on how to add the Steam Input API to your title is here:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/steam_controller/getting_started_for_devs

Information on how to enter the Steam Client Beta is located here:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7021-eiah-8669

Cheers!
-The Steam Team

Pretty cool thing I found on the Twatter. Might go out and get one. The XBOX 360 controller I have is full of that shitty Chinese garbage shit. It keeps disconnecting me randomly even though I'm using the native XBOX PC receiver. I say I might go out and get one, but I've not played a video game in forever. I also don't think I know of a game that is compatible with controller that I'll play in the future atm.

 

[Dexter]

The guys are total cucks.

Campo Santos or whatever. They were in another thing recently.

https://archive.vn/r5NFR

Player minijuanjohndoe posted on the Dota 2 subreddit, via Dot Esports, complaining that he had been sent to the game’s low-priority mode for an in-game disagreement, which serves as a temporary matchmaking ban. The poster and the Valve employee, Firewatch co-creator Sean Vanaman, were arguing about whether to rally around an objective or fall back and let it go. During the argument, minijuanjohndoe said Vanaman got tired of the argument, and asked “Do you know who you’re talking to? Check my profile, I’m a Steam employee.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/jyrnag/got_sent_to_low_priority_by_steam_employee_in/

 

[Alienman]

Like someone in the thread mention. Kinda makes you think how many have got unfairly demoted or banned.

 

[A horse of course]

Like someone in the thread mention. Kinda makes you think how many have got unfairly demoted or banned.

This is how he behaved in a public game where evidence was being recorded, and whilst acting in a professional capacity as an employee of a large corporation. Now imagine how these people act when they can get away with it or are in positions of power themselves.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

The guys are total cucks.

What exactly is he talking about? Sorry if I'm being stupid

 

[Sentinel]

The guys are total cucks.

What exactly is he talking about? Sorry if I'm being stupid

In September 2017, Sean Vanaman tweeted that he would be issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown against the streamer PewDiePie in response to him using a racist insult while streaming PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.[23] The move resulted in a backlash from the gaming community, and Firewatch was "review-bombed" on Steam.[24] Ars Technica noted that the company previously stated on their website that they gave open permission to stream and monetize videos made while playing the game.[25]

 

[Alienman]

Why did Valve hire these guys in the first place? Just seems out of place. Don't they usually hire after some mod or idea is showing great promise?

 

[Dexter]

Why did Valve hire these guys in the first place? Just seems out of place. Don't they usually hire after some mod or idea is showing great promise?

Welcome to 2018: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...discussion-thread.68581/page-178#post-5575744

 

[Sentinel]

Why did Valve hire these guys in the first place? Just seems out of place. Don't they usually hire after some mod or idea is showing great promise?

Valve has changed a lot as a consequence of the inner culture war between the older employees, who don't really care about these social issues, and the new hires, who are all zoomer snowflakes. A lot of older people retired and/or moved to other projects that have nothing to do with Steam or games (VR and hardware development namely).

 

[Syl]

All images are broken on Steam for me, the address https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/ is not responding.

Anyone else sees that?

 

[PulsatingBrain]

All images are broken on Steam for me, the address https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/ is not responding.

Anyone else sees that?

Steam is fine for me, but that page won't load

 

[Syl]

All images are broken on Steam for me, the address https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/ is not responding.

Anyone else sees that?

Steam is fine for me, but that page won't load

That's where all Steam images and videos are stored. So it was indeed down for a moment, but it's back online now.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[PulsatingBrain]

Multiplayer

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Multiplayer

He also said there's gonna be an actual story campaign with bots.

Question is only whether that game gets cancelled too or not.

 

[LESS T_T]

Revamped store navigation bar: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs/announcements/detail/2379537344925141078

Steam Labs Experiment 010: Browsing Steam
Introducing New Ways to Browse Steam

With this experiment, we aim to increase the surface area of the store by introducing a broader set of ways to browse Steam’s catalog of games from the outset—no login or complex searching required. Our new views provide greater exposure to the breadth of games available on Steam through new useful points of entry such as sub-genres, themes, and player modes. We hope you’ll opt into our Store Browse Experiment to give these new views a try, then let us know what you think in the discussions.

New & Noteworthy
Many users rely on our charts for quick snapshots of what’s new and popular on Steam. These are now accessible from one menu, New & Noteworthy, which also provides direct access to the biggest events currently running Steam—including game festivals, publisher sales, and other seasonal celebrations.

Categories
A basic list of genres, while easy to browse, falls a bit short given how large our catalog has grown. Our new Categories menu helps users quickly discover and dive into the breadth and depth of interesting games on Steam. This menu serves up dozens of new categories of games, which can then be explored further.

It’s not enough to simply offer good games on Steam—we also need to make sure they’re easy to discover. And to do that, we need to organize them in ways that make sense without being overwhelming. You might be able to fit the same amount of goods in an open-air bazaar as in a cramped warehouse, but you’re far more likely to find what you want in the former.

The first step in building such a system is to present meaningful entry points which reflect the various ways people typically want to browse a store full of games.

New Entry Points: Genres, Themes, and Player Modes

This experiment exposes entry points modeled after the three chief ways players tend to browse Steam—by genre, by theme, and by player modes. Each of these motivations broadly answers a different question:

Genres “What kind of game is this? What is it like to play?”
Strategy, RPG, 3D Platformer, Metroidvania, etc.

Themes “What is the game’s content like?”
Fantasy, Science Fiction, Cute, Relaxing, Anime, Horror, etc.

Player Modes “Who can I play the game with?”
Singleplayer, Multiplayer, MMO, Co-op, etc.

These player motivations can be organized and expressed using our existing tags and metadata. Categories grouped under the Genres and Themes entry points are defined by tags, whereas categories grouped under Player Modes are defined by metadata provided directly by the developer.

We arrived at these three top-level categories through a mix of formal research and intuition. But there’s also strong precedent for this scheme on Steam itself in the form of Steam Curators. We noticed many curators are building lists of specific types of games, almost all of which fall under one of the above three patterns: Gameplay and genre-based lists like City Builders, theme-based lists like Games with Dogs, or player mode-based lists like Games to Play with Your Significant Other.

Spoiler

New Browse Views

Among these three entry points we are currently surfacing 48 genre categories, 8 theme categories, and 7 player mode categories, for a total of 63 new categories. Clicking on any of these will take you to a dedicated content hub, a landing page dedicated to that kind of game.

Each of these destinations has its own URL, so you can bookmark them or share them with friends. Each features a carousel highlighting featured games, top sellers, and specials, as well as five specific tabs listing

• New & Trending
  
• Top Sellers
  
• What’s Being Played
  
• Top Rated
  
• Upcoming

Players can narrow by popular tags within these hubs as well. The left column of tags surfaces popular genre and sub-genre tags common to this category, and the right column surfaces other types of popular tags (such as mechanics, visuals, themes, and player modes).

Clicking on any of these will take you to a sub-view of the content hub. In the illustration above, we’re viewing Building & Automation Sims, but now we’re viewing only those which also include the Space Sim tag. Each of these sub-views gets its own unique URLs too.

Viewers can return to the parent category any time by toggling the filtering tag previously clicked, or by clicking another to display a different sub-view of the category.

Steam’s Special Sections

This experiment also moves some items previously found in their own top-level menus (such as Software and Hardware) into Special Sections under Categories. Now these and other potential points of entry are all consolidated in a single categorical browse menu.

Our Design Process
How can we be confident in our selection and definition of over 60 new categories? This is an experiment, and thankfully our process includes you. Your feedback on our decisions will help us refine our categorization. To date, our methodology has been a mixture of traditional Library Science and human intuition backed by numerical analysis, and is built leveraging previous Steam Labs experimentation.

1. We organized all of our user tags into meaningful Categories such as Genres, Visuals, Themes, and Features. These categories were first used in Deep Dive to help determine similarity between games.
   
   
2. We mapped out the semantic relationships between tags, so Steam could recognize that a Strategy RPG is both a Strategy game and also an RPG. This feature was first used in Query Expansion for Search.
   
   
3. We’ve made some efforts to improve the quality of Steam tags. We built an internal tool that analyzes the quality of the tags of every game on Steam, flagging games that have too few tags, or are missing crucial tags like genres and subgenres, and now surface these and other warnings to developers. We paired this tag quality inspector with a new developer tool, the Tag Wizard, that helps our partners improve the sets of tags associated with their games.
   
   
4. We identified a flexible hierarchy of genres using prior research in games classification, as well as statistical analysis of which tags appear most commonly alongside other tags on Steam.
   
   
5. We built a system for defining tag clusters to reveal higher-level concepts like Card & Board Games rather than a single tag like Card Game. Now, a tag cluster like Card & Board Games isn’t defined as simply Card Game plus Board Game. Instead, it also includes tags like Solitaire, Card Battler, Deckbuilder, Tabletop, and so on. And naturally, it uses Query Expansion to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
   
   
6. We gave each tag cluster its own permanent landing page as described above.
   
   
7. We built a tool that analyzes which games fall into which categories, across the entire catalog. This helps us gut-check our choices and identify and resolve situations like:
   • Narrow categories too small to stand on their own that might be better served when merged with a sibling or two. This is where hubs like City & Settlement and Grand Strategy & 4X came from.
     
   • Overly broad or redundant categories that overlap too much with adjacent genres. These should be broken down into smaller categories or removed altogether. A good example is Action-Adventure; although we have a tag for this, in practice the concept of Action-Adventure doesn’t meaningfully distinguish itself enough from either Action or Adventure alone.
     
   • Games that aren’t being surfaced by any of our proposed categories. This is a wake-up call that we need to add new categories. This check kept us from overlooking the need for categories like Experimental and Exploration & Open World.
   
   
   
8. And most recently, we launched this experiment in Steam Labs!

Now we want to hear from you! What’s missing? What seems redundant? What is most interesting, and what’s… just not? Share your feedback in the discussions and help us improve the Steam store through Labs.

 

[LESS T_T]

Also the beta client got a new design for the game properties dialog. They removed things (DLC manager, uninstall, links to manual and dev/pub sites) that can be accessed via library's game page.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/2918859890092727304

The Steam Client Beta has been updated with the following changes:

Library

• Added a new game properties dialog, which replaces the old dialog for all Steam games. Games added via shortcut will be supported in a future beta update.
  
• Fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game

Linux

• Improved performance of processing incremental Vulkan shader database updates
  
• Fixed several issues around skipped Vulkan shader processing continuing in the background after a game has started
  
• Disabled shader processing on NVIDIA while driver issues are being looked into

SteamNetworkingSockets

• P2P connections now may attempt to negotiate a direct connection (punch NAT), if needed, to prevent connections from having very high latency. Added an option in the In-Game settings panel to control when your IP address is shared.

I guess they're going to replace things in line with the new library design one by one.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-hits-new-highest-concurrent-user-count-247m/

Steam hits new concurrent user high at 24.7M
Amid new games, holidays, and renewed lockdowns, Steam use surges again.

Steam has surpassed previous concurrent user counts to a new height of 24,776,635 players today, per tracking site SteamDB. This new high beats records set in March of this year as Steam use skyrocketed amid global stay-at-home orders and lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. This spike is probably more complex, but the onset of the winter season, renewed lockdowns in some countries, and the release of Cyberpunk 2077 are all likely contributors. Cyberpunk alone boasted more than a million concurrent Steam users earlier this week, a record for a singleplayer game on the platform.

The growing popularity of CS:GO also contributes a significant portion. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive first broke 1 million players in March with a peak of 1.2 million and just as quickly fell back down, but its average player counts have remained much higher than past totals throughout the year. It's now steadily climbing back towards the 1 million average players mark.

Contrary to records set earlier this year, the number of players registered as in-game by Steam is significantly lower than in March. While 8.1 million players were in-game in March, only 7.1 million were in game at the peak today. It's not immediately clear why that is, though some players do choose not to report what game they are playing, if any, to the network.

 

[Infinitron]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/2881704558990580297

Now Available: Steam News Hub Highlights News and Updates About Your Games

Personalized around your games, customizable to your preferences

Whether you're at work, on the bus, or playing at home, you can now browse your personalized Steam News Hub to easily find updates, announcements, and events for the games you play, wishlist, and follow.

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

The News Hub is designed to be flexible and personalized around your games and preferences, with many customization options built in. By default, the News Hub shows posts from the games you play, wishlist, follow, or are recommended. Or, if you want to take full control, you can change all that with a few quick setting adjustments in the left-hand menu. Plus, you can choose to follow and receive news from dozens of top gaming news sources across a variety of languages.

First launched as an experiment in Steam Labs in March, the News Hub has been developed with the feedback of players along the way. Today it becomes a full feature of Steam and replaces the previous news feed found at /news.

Personalized feed of news
By default, the Steam News Hub will show you everything posted by the developers of the games you play, games you wishlist, and games that you follow. From patch notes to weekend tournaments to Major Updates, the News Hub is a great way to keep up to speed with new developments and activities in the games you care about. But you can easily change these defaults to exclude certain kinds of posts or posts from certain categories of games. You can also mute individual games directly from the News Hub.

Explore your personalized Steam News Hub here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/ or by selecting 'store → news' at the top of Steam.

Spoiler

More gaming news choices
In addition to news from Steam and game creators, the News Hub allows you to follow gaming sites from around the world.

The old newsfeed only featured a handful of gaming news sites. Now, housed through the Steam Curator system, dozens of sites from around the world are now featured via a new menu item for “Steam News Curators” that allows you to explore all these sources. Here you can see what sorts of things they write about as you choose which ones you might like to add to your personalized hub.

Each News Curator brings different kinds of news and content, including rich media, screenshots, videos, and/or detailed guides and reviews. Some deliver blurbs that you can quickly scan in the News Hub, while other sources include full articles. Included YouTube videos are even playable right in the news feed. And there's always a link to explore more via the news source's own website.

Check out news sources here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/collection/press/

See what's coming up
Beyond info, the News Hub also makes it easy to explore events coming up and lets you sign up for email or mobile app reminders. Or you can just add the event to your Google Calendar or iCal so you can plan your weekend around interesting tournaments or community events.

Explore your upcoming events here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/?upcoming=1

Game updates and patch notes
Get more info on all the recent updates for the games you play: When you click to read news from games in your library that just updated, you'll find the Steam News Hub, filtered to just update notes about that game (note that not every developer is in the habit yet of posting patch notes with every update. We've got some updates coming soon that should help with that.)

Explore posts from top games
Interested in what's happening in some of the most popular games on Steam? Check the 'featured' channel for major updates, live events, and news from top selling and top played games on Steam.

Check out featured articles here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/collection/featured/

Official Steam announcements
Keep up to date with the latest announcements directly from Steam, such as new feature announcements and exciting new events and festivals. Plus, if you are a game developer, this will include news and updates about Steamworks.

Browse official Steam announcements here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/collection/steam/

Fine-grained control
Of course, the whole goal behind the Steam News Hub is to give you a personalized view of gaming news, so you get to choose what kind of content you want to see and what kind you don’t. If you wish, you can ignore individual news sources from within your feed by selecting the little menu below a post by that source and selecting 'mute' to exclude their news from your feed.

Full Language Support
While your favorite game may not translate everything they post into your language, the News Hub supports it. You'll find official Steam news as well as news and posts from many popular games available in a huge variety of languages.

Mobile friendly
The event hub is designed with mobile use in mind so you can keep up with your favorite games when you're out and about.

--

To get back to the new Steam News Hub, just select 'news' from the main store drop-down in Steam.
Or click "news" on the blue bar.

Check it out now: https://store.steampowered.com/news/



About Steam Labs
Launched in July 2019, Steam Labs is a place where experimental new features can be introduced early in development, tested, and developed in conjunction with the community. For more information, please visit https://store.steampowered.com/labs/

News curators, eh?

 

[Infinitron]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/2947007387788837679

Looking Back At Autumn Sale 2020
A recap of our most recent seasonal sale event.

Every year we host a number of large seasonal sale events on Steam, and our most recent was the Autumn Sale 2020, overlapping the long weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We wanted to share some data and interesting takeaways from that sale with the Steamworks developer community.

This year’s Autumn Sale was the biggest-ever in terms of revenue for developers and publishers—and while that’s important, there are a lot of other goals for these sale events. To that extent, we wanted to talk about some of the growth the platform is seeing and the new ways we’re helping players find the right games. We also have some data to share about the Steam Awards, which we have tied in with the Autumn Sale for the last few years.


Player Numbers
One interesting way to look at our sale events is in terms of how many people are participating. During this year’s Autumn Sale, just shy of a million players bought a game or made a microtransaction on Steam for the very first time (a 33% increase over the same timeframe in 2019). These new customers help our platform grow, and make the opportunity bigger for PC developers.

Existing players showed up in a big way, too. Our concurrent users during the 2020 Autumn Sale peaked at just shy of 24 million people, about 7 million more simultaneous users than the peak of the 2019 Autumn Sale.


Helping Players Find The Right Games
Another useful way for us to measure the health of the Autumn Sale is to look at how many games are finding success. Defining that is tricky- different games and studios have different budgets, headcount, goals-- so we look at a few different revenue benchmarks to compare. That data is encouraging: we saw increases across the board for Autumn Sale Revenue over last year, at all the different revenue benchmarks. From the number of games grossing at least $10,000+ all the way up to the number of games grossing over $1,000,000, more titles than ever found success in this year's Autumn Sale.

Certain factors driving that are beyond our control—the ongoing quarantine, new games finding success, older games finding fresh momentum—but we’ve also put a bunch of work into including personalized recommendations, and broadening the ways customers can browse the sale event. This year’s newly introduced genre hubs made it much easier for customers to drill down into interesting subcategories of games. Here’s an example, looking at the Dungeon Crawler tab of our RPG genre hub:

Customers could always search for particular genres or tags manually, but these genre hubs helped make that browsing experience a lot more appealing (and the genre hub pages drove as many add-to-carts as our front-page highlighted daily deals.)



Steam Awards Nominations

Finally, it’s worth checking out the Steam Awards for a moment. When we first came up with these user choice awards back in 2016, we put a playful set of categories in front of the Steam community to try out something new. Four years later, the Awards have solidified into an annual event. This year, 5.3 million voters cast more than 30 million nominations!

When we tally up all the nominations, the five top finalists per category are included in the final voting during theWinter Sale-- but it’s important that customers still have a reason to support their favorite games. That’s why we provide a Steam community badge for nominating titles, and players can level up the badge by writing a user review for a game they nominated.

More than 1.6 million customers unlocked a badge level this year by providing feedback for a game they love, which is a huge injection of positive recommendations for games big and small.


We hope this recap of the Autumn Sale 2020 was interesting. We’re proud of the sale’s success, and grateful to all of the developers who participated with their games. These big sale events give us a chance to iterate and experiment with new community activities, but they also provide a great gathering point for players to re-engage with Steam or join for the first time. The Steam Winter Sale is coming up next week, and you can submit discounts via the Sale Approval tool if you’d like to participate.

 

[Dexter]

Top Selling Games of 2020: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2020?cc=us&tab=4

Spoiler

Top Selling VR Games of 2020: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2020?cc=us&tab=3

Spoiler

Most Played Games in 2020: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2020?cc=us&tab=1

Spoiler

Top New Releases in 2020 (by month): https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2020?cc=us&tab=2

 

[DalekFlay]

Multiplayer

Gaben was literally one of the largest, earliest supporters of "games as a service" and putting everything online and yet everyone expects some big traditional, singleplayer only Half-Life 3 to come out. It's never going to happen, Valve management has zero interest in it.

 

[Dexter]

yet everyone expects some big traditional, singleplayer only Half-Life 3 to come out. It's never going to happen, Valve management has zero interest in it.

You forgot the GOTY 2020 already?