The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Immortal]

Irrlicht for C++

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks.
Thank god game development has improved from years ago.

I still remember sobbing in a corner trying to extend and work with Irrlicht / OGRE3D..

 

[Bad Sector]

Irrlicht for C++

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks.
Thank god game development has improved from years ago.

I still remember sobbing in a corner trying to extend and work with Irrlicht / OGRE3D..

Hm, anything specific? I remember looking at Irrlicht and playing around with it years ago (somewhere around midlate 2000s) and i do not remember anything negative about it.

 

[Dexter]

 

[Dexter]

 

[Riskbreaker]

So how does long playtime necessarily indicates "depth" of a game or that it is played by "deep players"? I can think of many a time-waster game that folks spend dozens of hours on. The stuff that you can play on autopilot. Not exactly something requiring Deep Intellectual Engagement or Deep Aesthetic Contemplation.

(and "depth" is an empty signifier in this abstract all-encompassing usage anyway - like the "depth" of an arena shooter and that of a grand strategy capture the same thing)

 

[Berekän]

TLDR: Don't expect a storefront to do your marketing for you, which is a lesson every other industry has known for ages

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Maybe deep in like: Deep time investments.

Btw. here's the full blog post.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/08/09/steam-hates-small-games/

Some thoughts (being at the blog post.)

Barrier #1 - Popular Upcoming. Completely true but getting to that 5000 wishlists barrier isn't easy for long time indies even.
Barrier #2 - Ten reviews. You can get ten reviews with a cheap game, you just need to market it properly. If you have a big community, it can be totally viable.
Barrier #3 - Trading cards/Achievements. I think that these are revenue and not units sold based (or maybe playtime?).
Barrier #4 and #5 - Playtime. Just make grindy games, clicker games for example, lol. There are a lot of genres which can totally bypass that.
Barrier #6 - Daily Deals. Completely true but it's brutal to get there.

It seems like he's building the narrative of poorly marketed small games on the one hand and greatly marketed big games on the other. Some of his points are less true if you have a cheap game that's marketed properly (or a 10-15$ game that's marketed poorly for that matter). But overall I think it's a great post since the underlying thought is correct.
Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Moaning_Clock
But what would count at "deep time investment" in this case? Take some clicker played for 10, 15 minutes in one sitting to waste time. If that, over time, accumulates to dozens of hours of registered playtime, is that equatable with "deep time investment"?
I'd say that, whenever folks talk of depth in this context, whatever it is that they mean and however dimly they mean it, it is something qualitative rather than purely quantitative.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

is that equatable with "deep time investment"?

I think it's just poor wording tbh.

 

[Immortal]

Irrlicht for C++

I'm getting PTSD flashbacks.
Thank god game development has improved from years ago.

I still remember sobbing in a corner trying to extend and work with Irrlicht / OGRE3D..

Hm, anything specific? I remember looking at Irrlicht and playing around with it years ago (somewhere around midlate 2000s) and i do not remember anything negative about it.

Honestly, I'm just exhausted with writing Game engine wrappers around graphical api's / dx & opengl implementations.
My experience with "Old School" engines is that your not actually making a game until you've gone and extended the engines capabilities and found 20 different plugins and integrated them.

AKA you become so front loaded with engine programming that 6 months in your still not making the actual fucking game.
From my shitty drunken memory Irrilicht was purely a graphics engine, you had to integrate everything else, animations, audio, physics, etc etc.

I mean the results speak for themselves.. how many games were ever made on Irrlicht - I bet I could count them on one hand.
That said, Irrlicht wasn't horrible necessarily - it did exactly what it said it did and from my fairly shitty memory was fairly easy to extend, I'm taking a little creative license for laughs and brofists.

 

[Outlander]

So how does long playtime necessarily indicates "depth" of a game or that it is played by "deep players"?

It doesn't, but people tend to pay more attention to a game with an average playtime of 20+ hours than a game with ~3 hours.

 

[Immortal]

TL;DR - Steam algorithm rewards real games over one-shot 99 cent garbage.

It's almost like they are trying to market to a PC demographic and not 40 year old soccer moms on mobile phones. :thinking:

 

[Rahdulan]

Those were kinda my thoughts as well. Marketing and knowing your audience pays off? Who'd a thunk it.

 

[Immortal]

Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.

Anything billed under 5 dollars screams to me Scam or Meme game.
I would likely refuse to buy anything that cheap unless it arrived at that price from a sale..

If your target retail price is 5 dollars or less, you are probably better off making it free with some type of gacha style monetization and hope you net a few whales.

Maybe I don't represent the feelings of most gamers - but in my mind the 1 - 5 dollar range is about where most Russian sweatshop games fall - quick asset flip trash that gets pumped out en masse. (I guess maybe cause it works?)

(I actually filter / sort the store page so that I never see games that fall into this category.. it's usually 1000's of pages of shitty puzzle and shooter games cobbled together in Unity or Game Maker)

 

[Moaning_Clock]

There are many great games which cost less than 5$. Superflight is awesome, Interactivity the Game, the Tonguc Bodur games, also the Rusty Lake games, Suits and The Corridor and many more. But all of these games are underpriced imho due to various reasons so it makes sense that they are great value. But I couldn't find a game that costs under 5 bucks, is great and not underpriced.

 

[Lutte]

So how does long playtime necessarily indicates "depth" of a game or that it is played by "deep players"?

It doesn't, but people tend to pay more attention to a game with an average playtime of 20+ hours than a game with ~3 hours.

It's really not that hard if you make a game that's actually a game to get past the mark of 3 hours of avg playtime on users despite the game itself not being longer than 1 hour from start to finish for a single session. That's the story of beatemup, shmups, actual rogue likes but also those newfangled roguelites, card games/deck builders, racing games, anything multiplayer, repeatable (pattern generation) puzzle games etc.

Heck, just look at simple computer implementations of real life non video games.
Look at that sweet average playtime :
https://store.steampowered.com/app/733070/Sudoku_Universe/
With real games, player engagement is real.

There's a level of degeneracy everyone of us have accepted when we add the word 'video' next to 'game'. Think one minute about what it would imply to, before video games existed, buy a board game, or a manual about a set of rules for a game, that you use once in a very short session and then throw away?

Video games are computerized games. They're not meant to be shittier version of the most basic jigsaw puzzles (I'm looking at you here, the "puzzle" part of most adventure games, that barely amount to putting the round peg into the round hole), of the shittiest books, or the shittiest movies. If you make an actual game then it can be played and enjoyed for hours. If you don't make a real game you will need to pad it with, ahem, narrative, cutscene and other bullshit.

The computer implementation of the solitaire card game included in every windows installation is more successful as an actual game than most of what is sold on steam. It's a fact. It's certainly more of a game than many of the so called best sellers too.

 

[Tyrr]

Is it 10 times easier to sell a game which usually cost 1 buck instead of 10 bucks? I honestly don't think so (except mobile). Even at 1$ many people wait for a sale. And a 10$ game with 90% discount seems to be cheaper than a 1$ game with a 50% discount. It's also more interesting for all these bundle sites later. And some people skip 1-3$ games altogether since they think that they aren't worth it.

Anything billed under 5 dollars screams to me Scam or Meme game.
I would likely refuse to buy anything that cheap unless it arrived at that price from a sale..

If your target retail price is 5 dollars or less, you are probably better off making it free with some type of gacha style monetization and hope you net a few whales.

Maybe I don't represent the feelings of most gamers - but in my mind the 1 - 5 dollar range is about where most Russian sweatshop games fall - quick asset flip trash that gets pumped out en masse. (I guess maybe cause it works?)

(I actually filter / sort the store page so that I never see games that fall into this category.. it's usually 1000's of pages of shitty puzzle and shooter games cobbled together in Unity or Game Maker)

It's the same with food. Too cheep and there must be something wrong about it.

 

[Bad Sector]

Honestly, I'm just exhausted with writing Game engine wrappers around graphical api's / dx & opengl implementations.
My experience with "Old School" engines is that your not actually making a game until you've gone and extended the engines capabilities and found 20 different plugins and integrated them.

AKA you become so front loaded with engine programming that 6 months in your still not making the actual fucking game.
From my shitty drunken memory Irrilicht was purely a graphics engine, you had to integrate everything else, animations, audio, physics, etc etc.

Irrlicht is a game engine, it is Ogre3D that is a graphics engine. Irrlicht however provided enough functionality to make a game.

But yeah, they're not like Unity, etc, they are frameworks. However i was comparing it with XNA which is also a framework.

I mean the results speak for themselves.. how many games were ever made on Irrlicht - I bet I could count them on one hand.

Sadly the vast majority of game developers - despite what they may claim - are really influenced by hype and other unrelated factors. The main reason there weren't many games using Irrlicht was that there weren't many games using Irrlicht and no successful games using Irrlicht. It had little to do with the engine's own quality - it was a known fact that the best way to promote an engine was to have a popular game on it (regardless of the engine's quality). This is why Torque was way more successful among indies at the time despite having a price attached to it and pretty much everyone who worked on it said it was awful (nowadays it might be ok but AFAIK it had a massive rearchitecturing at some point, but that was after it lost to Unity) - it was the engine powering Tribes, a popular game. Also back when XNA was released many gamedevs were still skeptical of open source stuff.

But Unity managed to break through all that crap with their tools' quality and ease of use.

 

[Immortal]

Irrlicht is a game engine, it is Ogre3D that is a graphics engine. Irrlicht however provided enough functionality to make a game.

I went back and checked.. pretty sure Irrlicht is just 90% a Graphical Framework. Barebones collision detection but their own documentation says to not use it.
No Audio framework, no Animation framework / tools (That I can see). Not sure if it has any particle system or any predfined / boilerplate shader code (AKA you have to do this all yourself), irregardless - Really missing all the bells and whistles of what I'd expect from a "Game Engine".

It's a nice Graphics API wrapper with an editor IMO.

 

[Bad Sector]

I went back and checked.. pretty sure Irrlicht is just 90% a Graphical Framework. Barebones collision detection but their own documentation says to not use it.
No Audio framework, no Animation framework / tools (That I can see). Not sure if it has any particle system or any predfined / boilerplate shader code (AKA you have to do this all yourself), irregardless - Really missing all the bells and whistles of what I'd expect from a "Game Engine".

Having collision detection, even if barebones, is still more than what XNA provided - remember that i was comparing it with XNA. Also it does have particle system, animation framework and other stuff, you can see the features here. BTW XNA also didn't have any of that either. When i made the RobGetOut demo i linked previously i made everything myself, the only thing XNA provided was the graphics framework (note that i also had to write the shaders as the default weren't that great), input handling and audio playback (in comparison Irrlicht doesn't have audio playback but there is irrKlang which was made by the same developer as Irrlicht - but TBH i only used the very low level API which would be trivial to do manually in C++ anyway).

 

[Immortal]

I went back and checked.. pretty sure Irrlicht is just 90% a Graphical Framework. Barebones collision detection but their own documentation says to not use it.
No Audio framework, no Animation framework / tools (That I can see). Not sure if it has any particle system or any predfined / boilerplate shader code (AKA you have to do this all yourself), irregardless - Really missing all the bells and whistles of what I'd expect from a "Game Engine".

Having collision detection, even if barebones, is still more than what XNA provided - remember that i was comparing it with XNA. Also it does have particle system, animation framework and other stuff, you can see the features here. BTW XNA also didn't have any of that either. When i made the RobGetOut demo i linked previously i made everything myself, the only thing XNA provided was the graphics framework (note that i also had to write the shaders as the default weren't that great), input handling and audio playback (in comparison Irrlicht doesn't have audio playback but there is irrKlang which was made by the same developer as Irrlicht - but TBH i only used the very low level API which would be trivial to do manually in C++ anyway).

I never used XNA - I wasn't making that comparison. Isn't XNA dead?
Also when was that support added? Are you saying it had that 10 years ago? AFAIK you said you only slightly dabbled with it long ago and haven't touched it since?

 

[Bad Sector]

I never used XNA - I wasn't making that comparison. Isn't XNA dead?

Yes, my first message about the topic was my amazement that so many games still used it based on that tweet about engine use in Steam :-P and how it was IMO overhyped for what it offered considering that other frameworks at the time (jMonkeyEngine if you wanted a managed language or Irrlicht if you wanted C++) had similar (if not more) features and how developers really used XNA because of Microsoft's promotion instead of its featureset.

(well there was also the XBox360 indie stuff but those weren't there from the beginning and many XNA games didn't even target it)

Also when was that support added? Are you saying it had that 10 years ago? AFAIK you said you only slightly dabbled with it long ago and haven't touched it since?

I don't know the exact date but when i played around with Irrlicht it had collision detection, particles and shaders. It was certainly more than 10 years ago, actually i do not think Irrlicht has seen much development in recent years, at least compared to back in 2000s.

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.pcgamer.com/indie-dev-l...anks-to-exploitation-of-steams-refund-policy/

Indie dev leaves industry 'indefinitely' thanks to exploitation of Steam's refund policy
By Mollie Taylor about 10 hours ago

Steam's refund policy can be bad news for short game developers.

A horror indie developer has stepped away from games development "indefinitely" because Steam's two-hour refund policy has led to a high number of returns on their latest game.

Solo developer Emika Games released the psychological thriller Summer of '58 at the end of July, receiving Mostly Positive reviews on Steam. But as they tweeted in a statement this week, the game's short length has led to a high number of refunds being processed, leaving Emika out of pocket.

"The fact is that my game Summer of '58 does not reach two hours of playing time by Steam standards," the statement read. "In this regard, a huge number of returns on the game, even with positive reviews, and I do not earn anything to create a new game."



It's proven a disheartening situation for Emika, who said they would be "leaving game development for an indefinite time" in order to "collect [their] thoughts." They also said that From Day To Day, another horror game currently in development, "will not see the light of day in the near future."

Steam's current refund policy allows for any game to be refunded if it's within 14 days of purchase and has less than two hours of logged playtime. This isn't a problem for larger titles where two hours barely scratches the surface. But for smaller games, especially those created by indie developers, it can be a frustrating loophole allowing players to essentially experience their game for free. One solution would be to implement a different policy for shorter games, but such ideas are easier said than done, and would be a tricky line for Steam to walk.

 

[Grauken]

https://www.pcgamer.com/indie-dev-l...anks-to-exploitation-of-steams-refund-policy/

Make the game longer, problem solved

 

[rashiakas]

Maybe dont charge 8 € for a 90 min game you fucking cunt.