The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Moaning_Clock]

why won't steam stop recommending me "Horse games"?

I knew a guy who had a similar experience. He also had a horse suit and a horse mask and put it on when his boyfriend came over. But it's likely a coincidence.

 

[Nano]

why won't steam stop recommending me "Horse games"?

Play Star Stable just once and horses will follow you for the rest of your life.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[LESS T_T]

New download page and storage manager are live in the beta client. https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/2974049913511655206

Steam Client Beta - July 29

Note: This beta was re-released on July 29 to fix an issue with "Disk Write" errors during download for some cases on OSX.

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


New Downloads Page
The downloads page in the Steam client has been replaced with a new implementation.

• A minimal and more focused design with stronger CTAs (Calls to Action)
  
• Game keyart/logo featured in the header for whichever game is actively downloading
  
• More accessible color palette for the visually impaired
  
• When a game/update is actively downloading it will now display the total progression completed for the download or update. Previously the progress bar would only display the downloading content progress but not the disk allocation process which would make an update to appear completed when it was not.
  
• Any partially completed downloads/updates in queue now will show a faded progress bar and percent completed next to it to clearly display its current state.
  
• A new (i) icon next to the game's title will reveal a tooltip displaying the types of content that is included in that update. Types consist of: Game Content, Downloadable Content, Workshop Content, and Shader Pre-caching. This icon only appears if the update is not solely game content.
  
• The download queue is now fully reorderable using drag and drop.
  
• The context menu for the actively downloading item now includes an option to launch the game when the download is complete and an option to suspend download throttling (if enabled) for the duration of that download.
  
• The "View News" button is now a "Patch Notes" link that will open an overlay to the most recent relevant patch notes for the game. This will only display for games that have entered patch notes into the new event system. The patch notes link will only show up on updates, not fresh installs.
  
• A Settings icon button is now located in Downloads header that opens the settings popup window directly to the Downloads section.
  
• In the Completed section there is a "Clear all" button to help clean up your downloads page.

Library

• Updated Steam library folders dialog to better manage various game content installed on your drives
  
• Game counts in various places in the UI will no longer include Tools unless the Tools filter is selected in the left column.
  
• The Recent Friend Activity shelf has been removed.
  
• Fixed some errors for users whose account name was the maximum length.
  
• Fixed duplicate events appearing in the app detail activity feed

Steam Input

• Further reduced CPU usage of Steam Input, especially in Steam Input API games
  
• Added support for the current set of PowerA Xbox Series X controllers

Linux

• update scout LD_* and container runtime to 0.20210721.1:
  
• library pinning process is significantly faster at startup after runtime updates
  
• update soldier container runtime to 0.20210723.18:
  
• Restore compatibility with NixOS (steam-runtime#431)
  
• Make /usr/share/nvidia available to the container if using the NVIDIA proprietary driver, so that app-specific profiles can be applied (steam-runtime-tools#73)
  
• Silence most LD_PRELOAD warnings

SteamVR

• Added detection of HTC Vive Pro 2 and a prompt to install the Vive Pro 2 Driver
  
• Fixed bug that prevented Steam from counting some USB-connected headsets when gathering data for the hardware survey. In general, the sampling of SteamVR sessions should have caught most of these cases, but this could have resulted in some undercounting.

Images from SteamDB guy's Twitter:

Also mobile page. https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/5095244170241810278

Store Update for Mobile Phones

Over the last few weeks, the Steam Mobile team has released improvements and bug fixes for a handful of store pages, as we work toward releasing a new version of the mobile app.

Starting today, we’re testing out a new layout for store game pages on mobile phones. We’ve streamlined the layout to be more mobile friendly and easier to read. We’d like to know what you think.

These changes are live now. So the next time you browse to a store game page on your mobile phone, you’ll see this banner at the top of the game page.

If you’d like to send us feedback or report a bug, tap the banner to go to the Steam Mobile Forum.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm not too sure about that, Gabe.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interesting experiment. Automatically detecting engines by looking at file structures.

 

[LESS T_T]

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

7 months later, this comes to the new downloader UI: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3002196778031904661

New! Display Patch Notes right in the Downloads view
So what changed? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



Now you can associate any game update event with a specific build, so users have direct access to your latest patch notes when downloading or updating your game.

When creating your event, whether it's a Major Update, Regular Update, or Small Update, you can now select the Link to Build option, then select the branch you'd like to be associated with your post.

Then when players download or update your game, rather than shrugging about what changed, they'll have direct access to your associated event's news via a PATCH NOTES link, which displays your news inline. Check out our patch notes documentation for more information, and give the new link a spin in the downloads view when you opt into the Steam Client Beta today.

 

[Hirato]

Interesting experiment. Automatically detecting engines by looking at file structures.

I'm hoping they introduce filters for these things.

I'd love nothing more than to put ANYTHING made with Unity3D on a black list, at least until they sort their performance issues with CPUs more powerful than your typical 4C/4T intel quadcore...
Seriously, I've had to turn off over half my 16C/32T CPU to get framerates measured in FPS instead of SPF; requiring the user to perform such workarounds is not acceptable.

 

[Fedora Master]

Steam doesn't support more than 10 filter tags, there's no chance they'll let you filter by engine.

 

[Caim]

I've checked and Unity is not a searchable tag either. So it's not being used on any game on Steam, or it's being filtered out.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3002196778013479574

Steam Next Fest boosts engagement and sales for most games
October event registration open through August 15th

Registration is open for the October edition of Steam Next Fest, with the deadline of August 15 fast-approaching. For those considering the event, we're excited to share some analysis on the impact of 2020 Next Fest participation with regard to wishlisting and sales rates.

The first Steam Next Fest ran in the summer of 2020 as a way to offer playable demos to fans in the absence of physical events such as E3. We've since run the event three more times as an opportunity for devs to build an audience for their upcoming games. Each fest has comprised hundreds of games offering demos for players to download and try. The fests have also provided an opportunity for devs to feature scheduled livestreams and connect with players over the course of the multi-day event.

The median jump in wishlists was up over 400% among participating games
Among 2020 Next Fest participants, the median game saw daily wishlist additions jump 421% during the fest, compared to the two weeks leading up to the event. Wishlisting rates were higher than 421% for half of participating games, while 45% saw a smaller increase, and 5% experienced a decrease in their rate of wishlist additions.

Wishlisting rates were still up after the event
The rate of wishlisting remained elevated for the majority of games even after Next Fest ended, with the median game seeing a 15% increase in daily wishlist additions in the three weeks following Next Fest compared with the two weeks prior to the event.

This increase in wishlist additions resulted in more sales
To study Next Fest's impact on sales, we tracked whether Next Fest wishlist additions were converting to sales among the games that have been released since participating in the fest. The median released game saw an increase of 292% in "converting wishlists" made during Next Fest compared to converting wishlist additions made in the two weeks leading to Next Fest.

Player participation in Steam Next Fest remains strong
Through our 2021 editions of Next Fest, we've continued to see strong player interest. For example, the median number of wishlist additions has increased in the 2021 editions of the fest.

To join us in Steam Next Fest October edition, register now through August 15th.

Update: The included infographic has been simplified for clarity.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interesting experiment. Automatically detecting engines by looking at file structures.

 

[Bad Sector]

Surprised at how many XNA + FNA + MonoGame (MonoGame and FNA are basically recreations of XNA) are there. Also i'd expect FNA to be far above MonoGame since IIRC MG had a lot of issues unlike FNA which was made to be as "pixel perfect" as possible... and i still wouldn't expect XNA to be that high.

Also i didn't expect Construct to be THAT popular.

On the other hand there are certainly more than one games using Phyre, like all of Spiders' games (Silk Engine, which doesn't seem to be counted separately, is based on Phyre).

 

[Volrath]

29000+ games on Unity. I don't want to live on this fucking planet anymore.

 

[Immortal]

29000+ games on Unity. I don't want to live on this fucking planet anymore.

Unity has came a long way in the past few years honestly.
Although likely most of those games are exactly what you are describing - shitty puzzle games made on free assets cobbled together by a Russian sweat shop that pumps 20 of these a day for steam card farming.


I'm semi surprised it leads by such a large margin though.

 

[Curratum]

Don't be like that about Unity, there's a decent amount of good games on the engine. I can point out a dozen games that are nearly unplayable from horrible optimization and run on UE4, but I'm not cringing at UE4 as a whole.

 

[Caim]

You can make good games with Unity with a bit of work, but it's a lot easier to make a bad game with Unity.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

You can make good games with Unity with a bit of work, but it's a lot easier to make a bad game with Unity.

it's always easier to make a shit game, the tool isn't that important tbh

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Also i didn't expect Construct to be THAT popular.

Well, it is possible that they're reading things wrong. I was checking the engines I recognize, and it seems for some engines they're really wrong. They did say that's to be expected. Curiously, the Build engine has a lot of not Build engine games there. I wonder if their script is looking for games with "build" in text somewhere, and making it that if it isn't recognized as another engine.

 

[Immortal]

You can make good games with Unity with a bit of work, but it's a lot easier to make a bad game with Unity.

it's always easier to make a shit game, the tool isn't that important tbh

In Unity you can produce more shit games faster.

 

[ferratilis]

Every big game engine has an interesting origin story behind it: Ron Gilbert wrote SCUMM because he thought it would be a waste of time to make an engine for only one game so he made a modular one that could be expanded based on needs which was revolutionary at the time (and we know how many classics LucasArts released thanks to this, not to mention how revolutionary iMuse was at the time), 90% of Unreal was written by Tim Sweeney in an attempt to rival Doom and resulted in a game and engine that were way ahead of its time, so impressive in fact that even before it released a bunch of other projects were already using (Deus Ex being one of them). Doom and Quake engines have an entire book written about them, they spawned a genre and a subculture around it (with a bunch of interesting anecdotes along with it) while being installed on more computers than Windows. Some guys who worked on Windows 3.1 and left Microsoft licensed Quake engine to build their own, again revolutionizing gaming industry (for good or bad, depending on what you think about Half-Life). Infinity Engine shaped cRPGs in such a way that even 20 years later it's still being imitated, and two of the games made on IE are still the greatest RPGs ever made. The list goes on.

The lore behind Unity:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/17/how-unity-built-the-worlds-most-popular-game-engine/

Unity was founded in Copenhagen by Nicholas Francis, Joachim Ante, and David Helgason. Its story began on an OpenGL forum in May 2002, where Francis posted a call for collaborators on an open source shader-compiler (graphics tool) for the niche population of Mac-based game developers like himself. It was Ante, then a high school student in Berlin, who responded.

Ante complemented Francis’ focus on graphics and gameplay with an intuitive sense for back-end architecture. Because the game he was working on with another team wasn’t going anywhere, they collaborated on the shader part-time while each pursued their own game engine projects, but decided to combine forces upon meeting in-person. In a sprint to merge the codebases of their engines, they camped out in Helgason’s apartment for several days while he was out of town. The plan was to start a game studio grounded in robust tech infrastructure that could be licensed as well.

Helgason and Francis had worked together since high school, working on various web development ventures and even short-lived attempts at film production. Helgason dropped in and out of the University of Copenhagen while working as a freelance web developer. He provided help where he could and joined full-time after several months, selling his small stake in a web development firm to his partners.

According to Ante, Helgason was “good with people” and more business-oriented, so he took the CEO title after the trio failed to find a more experienced person for the role. (It would be two years before Ante and Francis extended the co-founder title and a corresponding amount of equity to Helgason.)

They recruited a rotating cast to help them for free while prototyping a wide range of ideas. The diversity of ideas they pursued resulted in an engine that could handle a broad range of use cases. Commercializing the engine became a focus, as was coming up with a hit game that would show the engine off to its best advantage; for indie developers, having to reconstruct an engine with every new game idea was a pain point that, if solved, would enable more creative output.

Supported by their savings, a €25,000 investment from Ante’s father, and Helgason’s part-time job at a café, they pressed on for three years, incorporating in the second year (2004) with the name Over The Edge Entertainment.

I couldn't copy the rest because it's a paid article, but you get the picture. It's a shitty origin story. I feel the only reason behind Unity's success is that it's free. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Tyranicon]

You can make good games with Unity with a bit of work, but it's a lot easier to make a bad game with Unity.

it's always easier to make a shit game, the tool isn't that important tbh

In Unity you can produce more shit games faster.

More user-friendly software leads to more users of a lower skill range.

Good games on any engine take a shit ton of work and talent. Bad games usually don't.

Thankfully, we have this remarkable filter that weeds out most bad games. It's called "being ignored by everybody."

 

[Bad Sector]

I couldn't copy the rest because it's a paid article, but you get the picture. It's a shitty origin story. I feel the only reason behind Unity's success is that it's free. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

There were tons of capable free engines when Unity was released on Windows, what made Unity stand out by far was how easy it was to use as a tool and get immediate feedback. In comparison pretty much every single other engine, from small to big, had clunky tools (and often required endless arcane configuration) to the point where the tools for other engines started copying Unity's interface.

Also they did make a game, GooBall:



Unity was actually originally made for this game, but they released their toolset for Mac (originally Unity was only available for Mac OS X, they later ported the engine to Windows when they rewrote the editor UI because the Mac versions used Cocoa).

 

[Tacgnol]

XNA was always the popular choice before Unity for rapid game production. Whilst XNA itself is obsolete, the legacy is still carried by FNA and Monogame.

Others have probably made the same observations in this thread, but Unity is popular I feel because:

1. It has uncomplicated licensing. Unless you're raking in more than $100k you can just use the free license.
2. It's relatively simple/easy to use. This is also a downside in that bad devs can easily do dumb things, hence common unity problems like awful load times, save game bloat etc.
3. It has a massive asset store making it easy to acquire assets for almost any possible game.
4. There are millions of tutorials and guides for almost every possible feature you would need to implement.

I have less experience of UE4, but from the murmurings I've seen on dev forums it seems to have a reputation as being much more complex to use. I'd also heard that the licensing was much more complex, though these days it seems to be fairly similar to Unity.

 

[Bad Sector]

XNA was always the popular choice before Unity for rapid game production. Whilst XNA itself is obsolete, the legacy is still carried by FNA and Monogame.

TBH i think that XNA is a bit overrated and wouldn't be as popular if it wasn't the hype (at the time) by Microsoft and being an easy entry (actually only entry for many indies) to targeting XBox 360. I played around a bit with XNA some time ago (which i originally picked up for a job):



From my (admittedly little) experience using it, i do not think it provides anything that you wouldn't find in other free frameworks at the time - e.g. jMonkeyEngine for Java (if you wanted to stick with a managed language) provides at least the same features (actually nowadays it provides more features than XNA) as did engines like Irrlicht for C++. XNA provides very little functionality by itself, it is only a notch above something like SDL or LWJGL and some of the functionality it provides isn't that great (e.g. the content pipeline, which many games simply ignore and do their own).