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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/2961646623386540826

Steam - 2020 Year in Review
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As we put 2020 behind us, we'd like to review and share some of the more noteworthy updates, features, and events that happened last year. This is our third "Year in Review" blog post, so presumably you're used to the format by now (i.e. this is long and we hope you read it). If you're a new developer to Steam, feel free to check out the previous entries for 2018 and 2019 for things you may have missed.

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As many of you already know, this past year had more than its share of challenges, with everyone's lives upended by the global pandemic. While Steam was already seeing significant growth in 2020 before COVID-19 lockdowns, video game playtime surged when people started staying home, dramatically increasing the number of customers buying and playing games, and hopefully bringing some joy to counter-balance some of the craziness that was 2020. This has led to new highs for monthly active users (120.4 million), daily active users (62.6 million), peak concurrent users (24.8 million), first-time purchasers (2.6 million per month), hours of playtime (31.3 billion hours), and the number of games purchased (21.4% increase over 2019).

The Store

Sales & Events

Throughout 2020 we hosted a number of big seasonal sales and events, including the Lunar New Year Sale, the Spring Cleaning Event, the Summer Sale, the Halloween Sale, the Autumn Sale, the Winter Sale, and the 2020 Steam Awards. Notably, the largest seasonal sales of the year (Summer, Autumn, Winter) were record breaking in terms of revenue generated for developers and publishers, something we touched on in our recap of the Autumn Sale. But it wasn't all going to the top-end: for example, there was a 36% increase in the number of games that grossed over $100k from the 2019 Winter Sale to the 2020 Winter Sale.

In addition to these sales, we focused a lot of our energy last year providing opportunities for visibility to games throughout the catalog. We built tools that make it easier to host official themed sales and special events, as well as support the multitude of conferences, conventions, and game festivals organized by teams outside of Steam. With various industry conventions cancelled, it became increasingly important for developers to have more ways to get their products in front of potential customers.

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With this in mind, we took what we learned from our collaboration with Geoff Keighley and the Game Awards Festival in December 2019, and organized the Steam Game Festival: Spring Edition. Player interest from that event was promising (559k demo activations for only a few dozen demos), so we hosted a bigger and better Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition, which included over 900 demos, livestreams, and developer interviews. This led to some awesome numbers: 4 million customers from 202 countries downloaded at least one demo, total wishlist numbers increased an average of 82%, millions of people watched the livestreams, and the developer spotlight videos received hundreds of thousands of views. Following on the success of that event, the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition resulted in 5.1 million demo activations.

The investment in these sales & events tools also enabled us to more easily organize and host themed sales, including the Tower Defense Sale, the Steam Digital Table Top Fest and the Fighting Game Sale. We were also able to host sale and event destinations for various conferences and conventions from around the globe, including PAX Online, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, PC Gaming Show, and many more. We look forward to collaborating with organizations to bring even more community events to life this year through Steam.

Steam Labs & Discoverability

Steam Labs continues to be a place where users help us iterate on new features for Steam. This feedback process has been invaluable as it helps the team figure out what works and what doesn’t. In February, experiment 008 - Play Next was introduced to help users discover games within their existing libraries. Utilizing the same machine learning technology that powers the Interactive Recommender (which graduated in March), this experiment quickly proved its worth and became a permanent feature in the Steam Library. Also in February, another experiment, 004 - Search made it out to the broader userbase and got its own mini-update with Query Expansion. Experiment 006 - Community Recommendations shipped to all users on the anniversary of Steam Labs in July.

While not all experiments were successful enough to graduate out of the Labs, we leveraged our learnings from some, like Deep Dive, to build out experiments 010 - Browsing Steam and 012 - Exploring Sales. These new experiments provide users more powerful and intuitive ways to explore the Steam catalog via user tags.

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The Steam Points Program

In 2020 we launched the Steam Points program, a set of features that rewards users for buying games and engaging with the Steam Community. Initially, these features were only available during sale events, starting with the Lunar New Year Sale in 2019, but it became clear that customers really wanted them year-round. So with the start of the 2020 Summer Sale, these features became a permanent fixture on the Store. Now users can redeem their Steam Points for items to decorate their profile (e.g. animated backgrounds & avatars, avatar frames, etc.), use in chat (stickers & effects), or reward other users for creating great content, anytime they want. As a result, demand for fresh content increased, so we introduced new items and types of Community Awards in September. In early December, the Points Shop developer tools were made available, which allowed developers to create their own game-specific items for their customers. And with the Winter Sale, we added some features that gave users new ways to customize their profiles, interact with friends in chat, and recognize others with Community Awards for helpful discussion posts or cool Steam profiles. Thus far, 15.5 million users have redeemed their points for 99 million items. And over 2 million users have granted 7 million Community Awards to their fellow community members.

Subscriptions

Steam has supported monthly subscriptions for individual games for a while now, but to support Electronic Arts bringing their catalog back to Steam, we've expanded on that functionality. With EA Play on Steam, users can purchase unlimited access to many of EA's top titles. This membership also allows players to try EA's new releases for up to 10 hours (a feature called timed trials), with the option to purchase them at a discount. We're excited about the possibilities here and look forward to seeing what other developers would like to do with this capability.


The Steam Community

Text and Chat Filtering

Players interact with each other in many ways inside and outside of games, and while the vast majority of these interactions are positive, some are not. Steam Discussions are already managed by a full-time moderation team, but chat has always been a difficult area to moderate in real-time. So as a test, Steam Labs experiment 011 - Chat Filtering attempted to mitigate some of the toxic language that users encounter in chat. After iterating on the feature with both players and developers, the feature (which players can opt-out of) launched for everyone in October. If you'd like to use these features in your games, take a look at the documentation for the Steamworks API.

Keeping the Community Safe

In March, we rolled out a system that automatically analyzes user reviews for malicious text. Since then, we've expanded its scope to cover areas like discussions, comments, user-generated content, etc, because bad actors will take advantage of any and all of Steam's input fields to misdirect users and lure them to websites with the false promise of free items or whatnot. Typically, these websites ask for account credentials or entice the users to download what inevitably ends up being malware, at which point the Steam accounts are compromised and all sorts of terrible things can happen. This behavior has unfortunately led to a proliferation of scam reviews, forum posts, comments, Workshop items, etc. that have crowded out genuine discussion and real content that players actually care about. To combat this, before user-entered text is made visible to anyone, our system runs it through a NLP machine learning model and flags it for further review if necessary. As a result, we've seen a huge decrease in scam user reviews, discussions, and comments. The battle against bad actors is never-ending, of course, but the successes we're seeing gives us some confidence that we can leverage this tech in other areas on Steam.

Staying Connected with Players

Experiment 009 - The News Hub entered Steam Labs in March and gave players a centralized place to discover events, news, and activities for their games. Building upon the Events & Announcements feature that shipped in September 2019, the team felt that users could really benefit from having one place to see all the latest happenings for their games. Now users can easily see live or upcoming events and plan accordingly, and, of course, read any patch notes, updates, or announcements for games they are interested in. The News Hub also replaced the old syndicated news feed (which only supported a handful of sites) with a more flexible framework that pulls in articles from dozens of external news sources around the world, with more being added all the time. After lots of feedback and iteration, the News Hub graduated out of Labs in December.


More Ways to Play

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SteamVR

VR Gaming on PCs has continued to show growth in 2020 with game sales up 32% year-over-year. That's not even counting the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, which added an additional 39% on top of that. Demand for PC VR is strong and growing as more than 1.7 million users on Steam experienced VR games for the first time in 2020. Concurrently, Valve Index hardware demand was consistently high with inventory catching up toward the end of 2020. VR users have enjoyed over 104 million PC VR sessions last year, with each session averaging about 32 minutes, culminating in a 30% increase in total playtime.

To support all these users, SteamVR has been continually upgraded throughout the year with dozens of point releases. The most notable updates featured an all new Dashboard and expanded support for OpenXR, which makes it easier for developers to have their games work on all supported headsets by writing to just one API.

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Controllers on Steam

More and more people are choosing to play their Steam games with a controller. To date, there have been 46.6 million users who have used a controller–as a comparison, at the end of 2019 there were 31.8 million users. Last year, there were 1.68 billion game sessions where a controller was used, a 66.6% increase from the 1.01 billion sessions in 2019. And of these sessions in 2020, 452 million were in games that integrated with Steam Input, up from the 232 million the previous year. If you leverage Steam Input for your games, you'll get support for hundreds of devices out of the box. And we'll do the work for you when new controllers come out, like when we added support for PS5 and Xbox Series X controllers.

Linux & Steam Play

Throughout 2020, work continued on Steam Play and extending Proton, our runtime for seamlessly running existing Steam games on Linux without additional developer work. We released Proton 5, which supported many new games, improved performance, and introduced support for DX12 and EA Origin games on Steam. For a full list of changes, see our changelog.

We also saw an increase in developers engaging with Valve for early Proton testing during their game development, and fixing Proton-specific issues post-release. All in all, this resulted in exciting new releases this year such as DEATH STRANDING, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Cyberpunk 2077 being playable on Linux at or shortly after release.


Steamworks Stuff You May Have Missed

In order to keep developers informed of all the Steamworks happenings, we published Winter and Spring/Summer recaps. Here are some notable highlights from those posts, as well as some other announcements you may have missed:
  • Share Application Management Access - Share management of your application with others outside your organization.
  • Data Deep Dive - Read a blog post that goes into detail about how new releases are performing on Steam.
  • Traffic Reports Update - Learn about fixes and updates to our popular navigation traffic tools.
  • Steamworks Tag Wizard - Use this tool to tag your games appropriately, since we're leaning on them more in features like the themed sales mentioned above.
  • Steam Playtest - Utilize a new feature that lets you manage beta testers, all on Steam.



Behind the Scenes

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Operations

The enormous increase in the number of people buying and playing games is a good problem for us to have--one that kept our operations teams busy managing the increased demand on our servers and network infrastructure. At the start of March, there was a 30-40% increase in total traffic related to game downloads; this is less than the bump we usually see during a sale, so it was fairly easily handled. In combination with one of the biggest launches of the year in Cyberpunk 2077, we hit a record for download traffic of 52 Tbps (26 Tbps just for the preload period alone), which doubled our previous peak. In spite of the lockdowns, we still managed to completely upgrade 1 of our network sites (Chicago), and add 3 new sites (Frankfurt, Dallas, Buenos Aires), with at least another 2-4 in the pipeline for the first half of 2021.

An interesting note: various countries' government bodies approached us and other large Internet companies to see how we could help mitigate the rise in global traffic that ISPs were seeing, because it was getting to a point where it was affecting people's ability to work from home and their children's remote schooling. In response, we made some changes to help manage the bandwidth during work and school hours, and to defer updates to the evenings.

Customer & Partner Support

Our support teams around the world also faced new challenges, with most agents transitioning to working remotely outside of their offices when lockdowns went into effect. In total the support team handled 13 million support tickets (excluding refund requests), which is 5% more than 2019 and nearly double the 7.7 million tickets in 2017. Our support team also continued to grow, which led to improved coverage of supported languages on Steam, and increased availability in all time zones. Even with the increase in tickets and other logistical challenges associated with working from home, wait times haven't really increased (beyond the expected spikes around sales)–you can view the stats here.

Developer Outreach

Being unable to travel to meet with partners has most assuredly made it harder for us to communicate with developers and keep our finger on the pulse on what matters to you. We've tried a variety of ways to stay involved with the game dev community, including sponsoring and participating (virtually) in the Indie Arena Booth Online at GamesCom, the Game Devs of Color Expo, GirlGeekCONLINE, etc. We also hosted a dozen virtual developer chat sessions throughout the year with help from various game dev incubators, associations, and conferences: this included groups from Game Republic UK, LevelUp in Malaysia, Boston area devs, Dev.Play in Romania, the Dutch Game Garden, Pro Chile, GameBCN in Barcelona, the Montreal GamePlay Space, and a couple other groups.

We've also posted numerous videos throughout the year, such as a walkthrough of the new Events & Announcement tools, a deep dive into how the Steam Front Page works, and Steamworks Quick Tips Videos. We know it's not the same as being able to interact with game devs in person, so we really look forward to the day when we can see you again at GDC and other conferences around the world.

Store Trailers

We rewrote our video processing pipeline for game trailers in 2020 to support the steady increase of video uploads over the last few years and support new video codecs. This growth has come from both new game release as well as developers taking advantage of the ability to update their game trailers for incremental updates and special events. As a result, partners should see shorter video conversion delays and users should see higher fidelity videos.


Onward to 2021

While many of the projects we planned to ship in 2020 did, in fact, ship, dealing with an ongoing pandemic shifted some of our priorities throughout the year. This inevitably meant that some of the planned projects had to take a backseat to managing the increased traffic and demand from the additional millions of users on Steam. However, we still think it's useful for us to talk publicly about some of the projects we want to push forward in 2021.

  • Steam China - Together with our partner Perfect World, the team has been hard at work, and we're really close to launching this program to bring Steam onshore into China in early 2021.
  • User Experience Improvements - We're looking at filing down the rough edges that most
    users encounter when interacting with Steam–basically, we want to make it as easy as possible to buy, install, and play games.
  • Steam Login - We still plan on refreshing the Steam Mobile app and making it easier for users to login and keep their accounts secure.
  • The Steam Points program - We're brainstorming more ways to reward users, including folks who aren't especially interested in Steam Community features.
  • Linux - We're continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We're also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
  • Steam Labs - Along with iterating on existing experiments, such as 010 - Browse and 012 - Exploring Sales, we're exploring new ways for players to browse the catalog in the coming year.


There's plenty more that we're working on that we can't talk about publicly just yet. Have ideas for what we could do that would positively affect your experience on Steam, either as a developer or a player? Please send us your feedback! And if any of the problems we deal with sound interesting to you, we'd love to talk to you--after all, we're always hiring.

Want to stay up-to-date with all the latest Steamworks news? Follow us:

Steam: Steamworks Development Announcements
YouTube: Steamworks Development Videos
Twitter: @Steamworks
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
If there was any fairness to it, there would be a male protagonist and straight genre search too. I would of course prefer it only kept the normal genre stuff though.
 

Wirdschowerdn

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https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell...development-that-were-going-to-be-announcing/

Gabe Newell says Valve has 'games in development that we're going to be announcing'
By Andy Chalk an hour ago

The Valve boss also talked about moving The International to New Zealand and his experience with Cyberpunk 2077.

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Valve boss Gabe Newell has been hanging out in New Zealand for the better part of a year now, after deciding in March 2020 to extend a ten-day holiday into an indefinite hideout from the COVID-19 pandemic. (One of the nice things about being a billionaire is that you can do that sort of thing when the urge strikes.) The longer he stayed, the more he seemed to like it: In October 2020, he mused about the possibility of relocating game developers—maybe including some portion of Valve—to the country.

In a new interview with 1 News, Newell said again that there's "strong interest" among some Valve employees about making the move, although he added that there's no plan in place to start bringing people over just yet.

"You don't want to uproot a bunch of families, have them come here, and then the situation gets a bunch better and then they have to turn around and go back," he said. "So that's why getting a better handle on how long the epidemic is going to be affecting our operational decisions is important to that."

Something else that could be moved to New Zealand, Newell said, are major esports tournaments, including The International and CS:GO Majors. Last year's International and Rio Major were postponed because of the pandemic and there's still no date on either, as it remains impossible to hold in-person events in most of the world. But it's "a realistic possibility" that such a thing could be pulled off in New Zealand, where the pandemic is under control, "and it gets more realistic all the time."

"I literally could not, if I had to guess when it would be safe to do an in-person tournament anywhere [else] in the world, it would be very hard for me to say that—whereas I think, with a lot of confidence, we'd be able to plan for that in New Zealand," he said. "Hopefully the procedures can be put in place so that becomes feasible—like, you know, this is what the quarantine would look like."

"As long as Covid keeps mutating, it certainly is increasing the likelihood that we'll be having events here."

Newell also touched on the topic of Half-Life 3 (or, more accurately, the topic of why he refuses to discuss the topic of Half-Life 3) and "Citadel," an apparent codename for something that may or may not be in the works at Valve. Despite his refusal to actually talk about either, he did confirm that Valve has new projects in the works, and maybe more importantly a renewed enthusiasm for game development driven by the success of Half-Life: Alyx.

"We definitely have games in development that we're going to be announcing. It's fun to ship games," he said. "Alyx was great. To be back doing singleplayer games, that created a lot of momentum inside the company to do more of that."

And he weighed in on the subject of Cyberpunk 2077, saying that he "had a lot of fun" playing the PC version, and has "a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in."

"All I know is that there are a lot of very happy gamers in the PC space, which are the ones that are most visible to us," Newell said. "There are aspects of the game that are just brilliant, and it shows a tremendous amount of work. It's unfair to throw stones at any other developer, because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing. The PC version that I played, I had a lot of fun playing."

Gaben Hagrid has spoken.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-publishers-7-8m-for-geo-blocking-steam-games

European Commission fines Valve and five publishers €7.8m for geo-blocking Steam games

UPDATE: Valve has issued Eurogamer with a statement disputing the European Commission's claims and vowing to appeal.

A Valve spokesperson told Eurogamer: "During the seven year investigation, Valve cooperated extensively with the European Commission ("EC"), providing evidence and information as requested. However, Valve declined to admit that it broke the law, as the EC demanded. Valve disagrees with the EC findings and the fine levied against Valve.

"The EC's charges do not relate to the sale of PC games on Steam - Valve's PC gaming service. Instead the EC alleges that Valve enabled geo-blocking by providing Steam activation keys and - upon the publishers' request - locking those keys to particular territories ("region locks") within the EEA. Such keys allow a customer to activate and play a game on Steam when the user has purchased it from a third-party reseller. Valve provides Steam activation keys free of charge and does not receive any share of the purchase price when a game is sold by third-party resellers (such as a retailer or other online store).

"The region locks only applied to a small number of game titles. Approximately just 3% of all games using Steam (and none of Valve's own games) at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA. Valve believes that the EC's extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law. Nonetheless, because of the EC's concerns, Valve actually turned off region locks within the EEA starting in 2015, unless those region locks were necessary for local legal requirements (such as German content laws) or geographic limits on where the Steam partner is licensed to distribute a game. The elimination of region locks may also cause publishers to raise prices in less affluent regions to avoid price arbitrage. There are no costs involved in sending activation keys from one country to another, and the activation key is all a user needs to activate and play a PC game."

We've asked the European Commission for a response.


ORIGINAL STORY: The European Commission has fined Valve and five publishers €7.8m for geo-blocking PC games.

Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax (Bethesda) were all fined for breaching EU antitrust rules.

The European Commission said the companies restricted cross-border sales of certain PC games on the basis of the geographical location of users within the European Economic Area (EEA), violating EU antitrust rules.

The Commission published a useful graphic, below, explaining what went on:

jpg

The fines were reduced for the publishers because they cooperated with the Commission.

Here's the breakdown:

jpg

The Commission said Valve refused to cooperate, and so slapped the US company with a heavier fine (€1.624m) than they would have otherwise. We've asked Valve for comment.

"Today's sanctions against the geo-blocking practices of Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales," said executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy.

"Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU."

It may get worse for the publishers - the Commission said any person or company affected by the anti-competitive behaviour described in this case may bring the matter before the courts of the member states and seek damages. In cases before national courts, a Commission decision constitutes binding proof that the behaviour took place and was illegal.
 

Sentinel

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Now devs finally can actually associate patches and patch notes. https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/2961646623387542635

Sharing your patch notes just got easier
Post right from your build release process in Steamworks

With today's update, the Steamworks backend now makes it easier to share your patch notes with players when you update your game. Immediately following when you set your new build live, you'll be prompted to post your change notes so players can read about what changed in your game.

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From this new prompt in the build release process, you can enter and post your patch notes directly, or you can choose to visit the full announcement editor to add more detail or artwork to accompany your patch notes if you have more to say.

Why it's important to post patch notes for every update
When you push a new build of your game to the default branch, any Steam players that have your game installed will see an update for that game queued for download. Many players will immediately check to see what kind of interesting new features have been added to the game or to see if the developers have addressed a particular bug that has been impacting that player. For these reasons, it is important that you post patch notes with every update you make to your game, regardless of how small you may think it is. Your players care and are interested to see you improving the game.

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It doesn’t have to be complicated. Posting patch notes can be as straight-forward as sharing a bullet list of changes you’ve made with your most recent build, or it can be a marketing opportunity if you are shipping a big update with lots of new content.


"Last Updated" now appears on your store page
While the patch notes type events don't appear prominently on your store page, we have added an indication so that players can tell when the most recent post was made about an update. This new indication will help players know how recently you have updated, as long as you post accompanying patch notes.

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Patch notes won't get in the way of your bigger posts
No need to be concerned about frequent patch notes getting in the way of the bigger events and news that you post about. Simply use the new UI as part of your build release process in the Steamworks website, or select "patch notes" as the type of post when creating a new post. Steam will then make sure to make it accessible from the 'downloads' panel or a game detail view in the Steam client and for players that view all news from a specific game.

For more information, please see Steam Events & Announcements Tools Documentation.

Cheers!
-The Steam Team
 

Tacgnol

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
All the people rating incline at that post don't realize that the EU is fining Valve for selling games at fairer prices in poorer regions (eastern europe particularly), lol.

Yep, all they'll do is up prices for the poorer regions to get around it.

Telling Valve/Publishers, "you can't restrict cheap key purchases", is the same as telling them not to sell cheap in certain regions.
 

Baron Dupek

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t...sed-of-abusing-market-power-through-contracts

Gamers have a new play — seeing how a federal judge will scrutinize the dealmaking behind a digital platform responsible for 75 percent of all PC games sales. On Thursday, five gamers filed a putative class action in California federal court against Valve Corporation.

"Valve Corporation’s Steam platform is the dominant platform for game developers to distribute and sell PC games in the United States," states the complaint being handled by attorneys at Vorys Sater. "But the Steam platform does not maintain its dominance through better pricing than by rival platforms. Instead, Valve abuses the Steam platform’s market power by requiring game developers to enter into a 'Most Favored Nations' provision contained in the Steam Distribution Agreement whereby the game developers agree that the price of a PC game on the Steam platform will be the same price the game developers sell their PC games on other platforms."

Legal attacks on MFN clauses aren't completely new, although such contracts are now receiving newfound interest for the potential of being exclusionary and collusive. Last year, for example, the Department of Justice held a workshop on the topic. The new suit tackles one popular digital platform with the charge that MFN clauses are keeping prices high on other platforms too including the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store at a time during a pandemic when gaming has exploded.

"The Steam MFN also hinders innovation by creating an artificial barrier to entry for platforms," adds the complaint. "When a market, such as this one, is highly concentrated, a new entrant can benefit consumers by undercutting the incumbent’s prices. The ability to provide PC games to consumers at lower prices is one way a firm or new entrant could gain market share. If this market functioned properly—that is, if the Steam MFN did not exist and platforms were able to compete on price—platforms competing with Steam would be able to provide the same (or higher) margins to game developers while simultaneously providing lower prices to consumers."

The lawsuit also names CDPR, Ubisoft and Devolver Digital.
 

LESS T_T

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Is there actually a clause for that? The only price parity rule I aware is that thing about selling Steam keys off-site, which has nothing to do with Epic and Microsoft stores.
 

Sentinel

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Ommadawn
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t...sed-of-abusing-market-power-through-contracts

"The Steam MFN also hinders innovation by creating an artificial barrier to entry for platforms," adds the complaint. "When a market, such as this one, is highly concentrated, a new entrant can benefit consumers by undercutting the incumbent’s prices. The ability to provide PC games to consumers at lower prices is one way a firm or new entrant could gain market share. If this market functioned properly—that is, if the Steam MFN did not exist and platforms were able to compete on price—platforms competing with Steam would be able to provide the same (or higher) margins to game developers while simultaneously providing lower prices to consumers."
Damn this quote is fucking hilarious. How wrong they are.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.videogameschronicle.com...on-steam-controller-patent-infringement-case/

Valve loses $4 million Steam Controller patent infringement case
STEAM FIRM TOLD TO PAY DAMAGES IN FIRST EVER VIRTUAL PATENT INFRINGEMENT JURY TRIAL

Valve has lost the first ever patent jury trial to be conducted remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The trial, which saw attorneys for Valve and plaintiff Ironburg Inventions giving evidence from various locations via Zoom, began in late January.

Ironburg alleged that Half-Life and Portal maker Valve was warned in 2014 that a prototype of the Steam Controller shown at the CES trade show featured the same rear-side controls it had recently patented.

The patent, for additional controls on the back of a pad to be operated by the user’s middle fingers, would later be licensed by Microsoft for use in its Xbox Elite controllers, which feature rear paddles.

Despite the warning, Valve went on to launch its controller and reportedly sold 1.6 million units before the product was discontinued in 2019.

“Valve did know that its conduct involved an unreasonable risk of infringement, but it simply proceeded to infringe anyway — the classic David and Goliath story: Goliath does what Goliath wants to do,” Ironburg’s lawyer, Robert Becker, had argued.

Valve claimed there was no infringement, but the jury found otherwise and Ironburg was awarded $4 million in damages, Law.com reports.

While the award is on the low end of the damages range sought by Ironburg, the possibility of enhancements remains as jurors decided that Valve had wilfully infringed the patent.

In January the European Commission fined Valve and five publishers of Steam games €7.8 million ($9.4m) for anti-consumer geo-blocking practices, which restrict access to content or products based on which country a person is in.
 
Joined
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Codex Year of the Donut
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t...sed-of-abusing-market-power-through-contracts

"The Steam MFN also hinders innovation by creating an artificial barrier to entry for platforms," adds the complaint. "When a market, such as this one, is highly concentrated, a new entrant can benefit consumers by undercutting the incumbent’s prices. The ability to provide PC games to consumers at lower prices is one way a firm or new entrant could gain market share. If this market functioned properly—that is, if the Steam MFN did not exist and platforms were able to compete on price—platforms competing with Steam would be able to provide the same (or higher) margins to game developers while simultaneously providing lower prices to consumers."
Damn this quote is fucking hilarious. How wrong they are.
pc gaming would be dead right now without steam
 

Spectacle

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t...sed-of-abusing-market-power-through-contracts

"The Steam MFN also hinders innovation by creating an artificial barrier to entry for platforms," adds the complaint. "When a market, such as this one, is highly concentrated, a new entrant can benefit consumers by undercutting the incumbent’s prices. The ability to provide PC games to consumers at lower prices is one way a firm or new entrant could gain market share. If this market functioned properly—that is, if the Steam MFN did not exist and platforms were able to compete on price—platforms competing with Steam would be able to provide the same (or higher) margins to game developers while simultaneously providing lower prices to consumers."
Damn this quote is fucking hilarious. How wrong they are.
pc gaming would be dead right now without steam
Nah we'd just be using Direct2Drive instead.
 

Boleskine

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Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-china-launched/

Steam China (蒸汽平台) officially launched
Valve has partnered with Perfect World to bring an onshore version of Steam to China.
SteamDB Team / 9 February 2021

store_home_share_sc.jpg

Valve has partnered with Perfect World to bring an onshore version of Steam to China, called Steam China (蒸汽平台). At this time, Valve is working with a select group of partners for releasing games on Steam China.

You can browse this store at https://store.steamchina.com/

As the Steamworks documentation states:

A prerequisite to publishing games on Steam China is receiving Chinese government approval for your game. Upon receiving approval, the Chinese publisher of your title will be issued an ISBN number, which will be displayed on your Steam China product page. Please note this prerequisite does not apply to non-gaming applications, which can be directly self-published.

If you have an existing ISBN number for your game, are currently undergoing the formal approval process with a Chinese publisher, or would like to publish a non-gaming app on Steam China, please submit a developer ticket along with the AppID of the app you are considering, and we can help you with next steps. If you have not yet started the approval process and would like to learn how Perfect World can partner with you as your local Chinese publisher to bring your game to Steam China, please stay tuned as more information will be available soon.

So what is it, really?
Valve already provided special launchers for CS:GO and Dota 2 for China, which were "operated" by Perfect World. In reality, these launchers were very minimalistic Steam clients, and connected to Steam servers operated by Valve. You can read more about this in our in-depth investigation here.



Steam China is a consolidation of these previous efforts, bringing the separate launchers into one ecosystem. The accounts used by these launchers were still Steam accounts, and with this launch they were simply migrated.

This platform is entirely interconnected with global Steam, which can be easily verified by using cookies from steampowered.com on steamchina.com. As well as other hints such as review count on CS:GO's store page which matches the global Steam.

Steam China websites are heavily cut down on features, almost everything related to the Steam community is not there, such as the market, discussions, workshop, and everything else. The only available things are the profile pages, their game list and inventory.

Right now there are only 41 games available on the platform compared to over 48 thousand on global Steam.

Game purchases are shared between the platforms as well. Game purchased on global Steam will be available to you on Steam China if it is available there, and vice versa.

Will this affect player counts?
As our investigation back in 2018 concluded, players from China were always counted. On top of that, in 2019, a Valve employee confirmed to us that Steam APIs and websites report logged-in Steam accounts and do not exclude specific regions.

And with Steam China launch, that will continue to be the case because under the hood it is still global Steam and operates on the same database.

Will normal Steam be banned in China?
Short answer, we don't know.

In 2019, in an interview with Eurogamer asked Valve's DJ Powers "So Steam global will still be available in China?", and he answered "Nothing'll change about Steam global.".

As it stands, Chinese users already needed a VPN to access steamcommunity.com.

We don't see Valve willingly blocking Chinese users from accessing global Steam, not at least until all the features are available on Steam China. Big ones would be the market, workshop, and basically most of the Steam community features.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/total-games

Steam just reached 50,000 total games listed
SteamLogo-580x334.jpg


Valve opened the Steam floodgates some years ago, and games have been pouring in by the truckload ever since. Thousands (and thousands) of Steam games launch every year, and the numbers are adding up. The total number of games on Steam has surpassed 50,000 as of this week, and the increase isn’t slowing down any time soon.

As of this story, 50,046 games are listed on the US Steam store, though that number’s probably already gone up by the time you’re reading this. (It also includes the porn games, which currently number 1,335, that may or may not be filtered out on your search preferences.) You can see the numbers for yourself over on Steam – just make sure you’ve got ‘games’ alone selected, the numbers get even more absurd with software and DLC included.

This isn’t every game ever released on Steam – that number is quite a bit higher, as it would include games that have been delisted, whether due to licensing issues, content restrictions, or being grossly misleading. The 50k here are just those games which are still listed, either available now or pre-release.

The number of Steam games released every year started to increase exponentially in 2014, though the flood has evened a bit since 2018. Now, we’re reliably getting 8,000 to 10,000 new PC games every year, as SteamSpy continues to show. Don’t expect it to slow down any time soon.

How much would it cost you to buy all of every Steam game? Just over a half-million dollars, it turns out, though the Steam Lunar New Year Sale would bring that total down by a sizable margin.
 

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