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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

Latelistener

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gaussgunner

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4Hyc9LQ.png


:roll:

Another great new feature Gabe!

For me it's
- You played <Shit game X> for 0.2 hours
- Currently Popular

Now we know *why* this particular recommendation engine sucks, but it still sucks just like all the rest.

In all fairness, I get most of my games on GOG and other DRM-free outlets, so I haven't given Steam much to go on.
 

Turjan

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Mar 31, 2008
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The confidence metric is built from a variety of pieces of data, all aimed at separating legitimate games and players from fake games and bots.
I'm sure they are using something else, but I always wondered that you got all card drops for games that had achievements for things like moving a character for the first time without actually reaching that achievement.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-22-valve-hired-the-kerbal-space-program-developers

Valve hired the Kerbal Space Program developers
Kerbal your enthusiasm.


Valve has hired the team behind Kerbal Space Program to work on... something.

What the Kerbal developer, Squad, is doing at Valve is anyone's guess, but one can only speculate that they're working on a new game with the Half-Life 2 and Portal studio.

News of the Kerbal devs moving from their base of Mexico City to Valve's Redmond, Washington headquarters came courtesy of the Game Dev Unchained podcast (via PC GamesN) where former Valve environmental designer Roger Lundeen mentioned the acquisition.

"They're still buying up mod teams," Lundeen said, unaware that Kerbal Space Program is its own game and not a mod.

"The modders who made Kerbal Space Station [sic]" he continued, "they just gave that entire team jobs."

He noted that this happened around four to six months ago.

When asked for comment on how many former Squad staffers accepted jobs at Valve, a Valve spokesperson told Eurogamer "I can confirm that they joined Valve a while back. More details soon."
 

Latmey

Novice
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6
Heh, that's a good one.

Also, the Steam algorithm knows that I hate RPGs:

Ol0kjXB.jpg


I guess I clicked "not interested" at too many free-to-play shovelware titles that were labeled with "RPG".

Now that every shitty game has "RPG elements" slapped onto them, I'm guessing that there isn't a game in the Steam store that doesn't have "RPG" buried somewhere in the tags.
 

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
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-22-valve-hired-the-kerbal-space-program-developers

Valve hired the Kerbal Space Program developers
Kerbal your enthusiasm.


Valve has hired the team behind Kerbal Space Program to work on... something.

What the Kerbal developer, Squad, is doing at Valve is anyone's guess, but one can only speculate that they're working on a new game with the Half-Life 2 and Portal studio.

News of the Kerbal devs moving from their base of Mexico City to Valve's Redmond, Washington headquarters came courtesy of the Game Dev Unchained podcast (via PC GamesN) where former Valve environmental designer Roger Lundeen mentioned the acquisition.

"They're still buying up mod teams," Lundeen said, unaware that Kerbal Space Program is its own game and not a mod.

"The modders who made Kerbal Space Station [sic]" he continued, "they just gave that entire team jobs."

He noted that this happened around four to six months ago.

When asked for comment on how many former Squad staffers accepted jobs at Valve, a Valve spokesperson told Eurogamer "I can confirm that they joined Valve a while back. More details soon."

UPDATE 23/05/2017 5.45pm: Kerbal Space Program's developer Squad has clarified that Valve only hired certain former members from the rocket simulator's development team, not the whole team.

“To clarify Valve did not hire 'the KSP team' to join them, but rather hired several people who had once been a part of the Squad development team, and have not worked there for nearly a year,” said a Squad spokesperson in an email to Eurogamer.

"They formerly worked at Squad - they were never poached directly from Squad," the developer noted.

“We want to clarify that Squad is not joining Valve, and we continue to be an independent studio with the core KSP team remaining at Squad, hard at work on the improved KSP for consoles port, Update 1.3 and the Making History Expansion. The KSP community shouldn't be concerned about this news having any impact on the game,” the developer added in a statement on its forum.

“Regarding the developers joining Valve, it is important to note that we have had several people working on our team over the years, and it is common among development studios for team members to come and go. If some of them joined Valve, it is on their own behalf and we wish them good luck and success in their current and future endeavors.”
 

Metro

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Valve, as a developer, is wholly irrelevant. I'm sure their next 'game' will be Portal VR or some crap like that. What percentage of gamers actually have a VR setup? Under 20%? I can't imagine it's higher. And I don't include families that play some dippy whack-a-mole game once a month.
 

Metro

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All this stupid VR/Vive shit you see on the store and it's marketed to a fraction of a percentage of your user base? Why bother? And then you see all these momos clamoring for VR in the latest indie games like that vaporware Underworld Infinitron pimps or even the new Bard's Tale.

VR PL0x, IT MAKE GA3M GOOOD! Why the fuck would a studio waste a penny on something so few consumers want?
 

gaussgunner

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All this stupid VR/Vive shit you see on the store and it's marketed to a fraction of a percentage of your user base? Why bother? And then you see all these momos clamoring for VR in the latest indie games like that vaporware Underworld Infinitron pimps or even the new Bard's Tale.

VR PL0x, IT MAKE GA3M GOOOD! Why the fuck would a studio waste a penny on something so few consumers want?

Investing in a potential "next big thing" I suspect. It doesn't usually pan out but if you try you occasionally get lucky. For example I got into HTML5 early and it was good for my career, even though it's predictably turned to shit now.

What I don't understand is why studios will risk VR but not non-popamole gameplay.
 

Latelistener

Arcane
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All this stupid VR/Vive shit you see on the store and it's marketed to a fraction of a percentage of your user base? Why bother? And then you see all these momos clamoring for VR in the latest indie games like that vaporware Underworld Infinitron pimps or even the new Bard's Tale.

VR PL0x, IT MAKE GA3M GOOOD! Why the fuck would a studio waste a penny on something so few consumers want?

Investing in a potential "next big thing" I suspect. It doesn't usually pan out but if you try you occasionally get lucky. For example I got into HTML5 early and it was good for my career, even though it's predictably turned to shit now.

What I don't understand is why studios will risk VR but not non-popamole gameplay.
Because the VR creators funding and supporting them for that, but despite that, they are still unprofitable.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Steam Direct fee is $100 per game: http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265921510652460726

So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting. We're also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we're receiving, so that we're ready to implement more features like the the Trading Card changes we covered in the last blog post, which aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm.

We believe that if we inject human thinking into the Store algorithm, while at the same time increasing the transparency of its output, we'll have created a public process that will incrementally drive the Store to better serve everyone using it.

Full post:

Steam Direct Fee & Upcoming Store Updates

In this post we want to talk about Steam Direct's publishing fee, and some additional changes we're making to improve the way the Store works. If you haven't read our first post, where we talked about the Steam Store algorithm, it's probably worth your time to nip back and read that first. That should help you better understand the reasoning behind the changes we're going to talk about in this post.

As you read, it's worth keeping in mind that there has been a subtle, but important shift in the way the Steam Store is designed. In the past, the challenge was to figure out what products should be on the Store. Now, we think the challenge is to figure out what products a specific player wants to see. There are many different kinds of players, with many different interests, so flexibility in how they view the Store seems like a requirement.

Determining the Steam Direct Fee
Back when we announced Steam Direct in February, we hadn't decided how much developers would need to pay to publish their games. We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems. We thought it would be great if the game community at large had a conversation about it, including both players and developers, which was why we chose not to highlight a specific amount in that original post.

Since then, we've seen a bunch of great conversations discussing the various pros and cons of whether there should be an amount, what that amount should be, ways that recouping could work, which developers would be helped or hurt, predictions for how the store would be affected, and many other facets to the decision. There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned. Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work.

So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting. We're also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we're receiving, so that we're ready to implement more features like the the Trading Card changes we covered in the last blog post, which aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm.

We believe that if we inject human thinking into the Store algorithm, while at the same time increasing the transparency of its output, we'll have created a public process that will incrementally drive the Store to better serve everyone using it.

Upcoming Updates to Steam Curators
We know that some players really want to see a human involved in the selection of products they see in the Steam Store. Prior to the Discovery update, that human was someone at Valve. As Steam grew, so did the types of players using it, and the range of games they wanted to see. Over time, we became less and less confident that we represented the interests of all those different players.

The Steam Curators features was designed to be a solution to this problem, allowing anyone to contribute to the process of highlighting games on Steam, and then allowing players to find someone who they felt represented their gaming interests. Some players feared that we'd give too much power to curators to control the Steam store, and that their own particular interests wouldn't be represented. So, as with the other filtering features in the Store, we chose to keep Curators strictly an opt-in feature, where the input from each curator only affected the Store algorithm for players who explicitly stated they wished to follow that curator.

Unfortunately, while we shipped the Curator feature in the first Discovery update, it hasn't received the attention it needs to be a good solution. So recently we've spent some time talking and listening to members of both sides - the curators using the system to provide commentary on the Store, and the players using the system to inform their decisions. In both areas we've identified a set of work that we believe will make it more useful.

We're expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create, allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations. We'll have some more details as we get closer to releasing the update, but here are some highlights:

Many Curators create content for other platforms, such as YouTube, so we're making it much easier for them to show that content alongside their curations.

30ae62a4801ba736abc4dee61945421bb5c0647b.jpg



One suggestion from Curators that we liked was the ability for them to create personal lists of games. This will allow Curators to provide specific kinds of advice, whether that's general suggestions about which games to buy in the current sale, or more specific lists, like which games to play to follow the evolution of a particular type of game design, the body of a work from a favorite developer, or the games in a Curator's weekly Game Club.

5d0ca94bac768738657986b90ba404b5a464f8b5.jpg



Another big request came from both Curators and developers, who want an easier way to help Curators get pre-release access to upcoming games. It's often hard for Curators to get the attention of developers who build the specific kinds of games that a Curator covers, and it can be similarly hard for a smaller developer to find the Curators who would be interested. So we're building a system that will make that a painless process for everyone involved, which means that you should see more useful curations coming out of the Curators who like to explore newer titles.


At the same time, we're making it easier for players to use Curators to help them browse the Store. Since they're an opt-in feature, we've decided to give Curators more visibility throughout the Store as a whole, so if you're following a Curator, you'll see their thoughts in new places, and with higher prominence.

Next Steps For Steam Direct
Like all the work in the Steam Store, Steam Direct will take some iteration to get the kinks out. We're optimistic. Aiming for the low publishing fee gives every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players. The Store algorithm will do its best to make sure you see games that are worth your time to look at. Combining everyone's increased visibility into the algorithm's thinking with the human eyes of Curators will hopefully ensure that whenever that algorithm isn't working properly, we'll know about it, and have the chance to fix it.

Our next post will wrap up this series of posts, where we'll cover the sunsetting of Greenlight, and the timing for the release of Steam Direct.
 

vonAchdorf

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So the only thing that changed is that you don't have to jump through the Greenlight hoop anymore, but just pay $100 and are done?
 

gaussgunner

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Goodbye Greenlight, hello infinite shitware.

Steam will be fine, AAA studios will be fine, shovelware devs will be fine. True indies will get buried among the shovelware.

I guess this is good news for indies who just want a place to sell their game, but don't expect Steam Discovery to be worth a shit, you'll have to promote your games elsewhere.
 

J_C

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shovelware devs will be fine.

Depends. Shovelware devs put up their games to recoup their expenses through scamming Trading Cards. But according to the new Trading Card system, cards won't drop in games until a game reaches a certain confidence metric, which will prove that the game is actually played by people and not bots. So if the shovelware devs won't get money from trading cards, I don't think they will be willing to put down 100 dollars per game each time.

And anyway I always thought that this "oh the true indie gems are buried under greenlight shovelware" complaining is bullshit. It is not Valve's job to promote one's game. If you can't promote your game so that it is actually burried by shovelware which nobody actually plays, than you deserve it.

I never encountered these shovelware shit on Steam because I'm not spending my day digging through the whole catalogue of Steam. If I want to buy a game I heared and read about, I go and buy it.
 

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
I wonder if I have the energy to use those new curator features.

How about "the Chris Avellone collection"? :obviously:
 

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