The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[markec]

Must be something wrong with the top seller list, I cant see Pillars of Eternity anywhere.

 

[Dexter]

Must be something wrong with the top seller list, I cant see Pillars of Eternity anywhere.

Or CommieRPGCodexGOTY for that matter: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/rpg_codex/announcements/detail/1706233347163182846

I kinda want to see if there was a tangible increase in figures after the show aired. Even normally Witcher 3 GOTY is insane value for money they're asking for it.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com...t-jumps-on-the-back-of-netflix-shows-release/

The game attracted an estimated one million players across all platforms in December, several hundreds of thousands more than it has at any point in the past two years, according to player engagement website PlayTracker.

The first season of Netflix’s The Witcher launched on December 20 and Wild Hunt subsequently hit 48,000 concurrent players on Steam, its highest total since the May 2016 release of the game’s final DLC, the Blood and Wine expansion.

The original Witcher game reached over 5,000 concurrent players on Steam, almost triple its previous 2019 peak, while The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings topped over 3,000 concurrent players, doubling its previous 2019 high.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

The 2019 Steamers have plopped out: https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards?snr=1_4_wintersale__winter2019-SteamAwards

Slay the Spire and Disco Elysium both dunked on, proving that everyone else is wrong about everything.

 

[Gerrard]

The only good thing about this is that DE didn't win Labor of Love once again.

 

[Jigawatt]

The 2019 Steamers have plopped out: https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards?snr=1_4_wintersale__winter2019-SteamAwards

Slay the Spire and Disco Elysium both dunked on, proving that everyone else is wrong about everything.

lol at GTAV for labor of love.



To be fair only 27 minutes of that are people who worked on the game and the rest is music credits

 

[Rahdulan]

Yeah, I died reading that one. I'm still not sure how I feel about the "story-rich" garbage tag that seems to have caught on. Lack of Disco Elysium seems kinda appropriate if you actually let the public vote on their candidates. It's not a mainstream-friendly title.

 

[Jenkem]

where is the innovative gameplay in a sideways hotline miami?

 

[Infinitron]

https://exposure.lunchhouse.software/



https://www.pcgamer.com/were-finally-learning-more-about-valves-long-secret-portal-prequel/

We're finally learning more about Valve's long-secret Portal prequel
An officially sanctioned video series will reveal all there is to know about the fabled F-Stop.

Shortly after the release of the famed Orange Box, Valve embarked upon a series of "Directed Design Experiments" that Gabe Newell hoped would spark a new wave of creativity at the studio. One of them, as explained by the Half-Life Wiki, was called F-Stop, and it was enough of an internal hit that it was tapped for full development as a prequel to Portal. For reasons unknown, that prequel never came to be, and the whole thing sunk into obscurity—another Valve mystery, to be occasionally whispered about in Reddit threads.

One of the reasons so little is known about F-Stop is that Valve simply refused to talk about it, apparently out of hope that it would actually turn it into a proper game someday [Half-Life: Alyx stares directly into the camera]. Valve seems to have had a recent change of heart, however, as an upcoming YouTube series called Exposure, being made by indie studio LunchHouse Software, will not just explain how F-Stop was intended to work, but actually show it in action.

"The mechanics are not based on speculation or hearsay. Instead, Exposure uses the original, official code from Valve's own F-STOP, or as it was properly named, Aperture Camera," the video description states. It also notes that Valve has given the studio "explicit permission to continue with our project using their original code."

The "gameplay" in the clip bears more than a passing resemblance to Superliminal, a perception-bending first-person puzzler released in November—a similarity that didn't go unnoticed on Twitter. That may be why Valve is suddenly willing to let this cat out of the bag: There's not much point in keeping your special mechanic a secret if someone else has already turned it into a game, after all.

And while an unused game mechanic might seem like a thin basis for a multipart video series, LunchHouse's Tristan Halcomb told USgamer that there's enough to it to make more than a dozen videos, although they're aiming to keep it to five or six.

A full release schedule hasn't been set yet: Halcomb said LunchHouse wants to "discuss the future of the project a bit more with Valve to see what opportunities we may have going forward before committing to a follow up, so we're working based on their schedule to some extent." For now, you can follow along with the project at exposure.lunchhouse.software.

 

[Sentinel]

It also notes that Valve has given the studio "explicit permission to continue with our project using their original code."

Absolute madness.

 

[Infinitron]

Equilibrium: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/games-released-in-2019

A record number of Steam games released in 2019 – but the flood is slowing

With rare exception, every year Steam has released more games than it had in the previous 12 months. The floodgates opened wide in 2014, and every year since has seen the number of games released grow by thousands. 2019 marked another record number of releases, but it seems we may have finally reached the peak of how much content can hit Steam in a 365-day space.

8,290 games launched on Steam in 2019, up ever-so-slightly from 8234 in 2018, as SteamSpy shows. (These numbers also include non-gaming software releases, but no DLC.) That’s after years of massive increases from 1,676 in 2014, to 2,708 in 2015, 4,409 in 2016, and 6,339 in 2017. Perhaps 2020 will be the first year in a decade where Steam doesn’t reach a new record of new releases.

Steam’s policy over the past few years of allowing everything that’s not “illegal, or straight up trolling” has been controversial, to say the least. While that’s allowed plenty of small developers to get their games on Valve’s storefront, the good stuff is often buried under 99 cent games with ‘hentai’ in the title.

You don’t need to pay a dollar or play low-effort videogames to see nude anime girls, friends.

Valve’s solution for curation continues to be ever-more-robust algorithms, though it’s ultimately an insurmountable task to ensure that every user sees each game they might be interested in from a pool in the tens of thousands.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Peak shovelware?

 

[Sentinel]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1691596648440131992

Steam Soundtrack Updates
8 JAN @ 7:00PM - SARENYA
Today we're enabling new functionality to better support gaming soundtracks on Steam. This new functionality can broadly be broken into two categories: fixing customer experience issues with the current "soundtrack-sold-as-DLC" model, and completely new features.

Fixing Existing Issues
Up until now, there was no "soundtrack" app type on Steam. The closest was "DLC", and so it became common to sell soundtracks as a type of DLC. This made sense at the time but over time has tied existing soundtracks to a large amount of DLC-specific functionality.

Today there's a new "soundtrack" app type. For music content, this has many improvements over DLC:

• customers can now purchase soundtracks without purchasing the base game.
  
• customers can now download soundtracks without downloading the base game.
  
• customers can browse and manage their owned and downloaded soundtracks directly from the new Steam library.
  
• customers can configure a Steam "music" directory where all soundtrack content will be placed, rather than having to locate it in subdirectories of game content.
  
• developers can upload and manage soundtrack content entirely through the partner site, without using steamcmd.
  
• developers can sell soundtracks where the base game itself is not available for sale on Steam.

Moving forward, we encourage all soundtracks to use the new app type, rather than DLC.

New Functionality
Besides fixing the user experience issues mentioned above, we've also added some brand new functionality.

First, soundtracks can support multiple quality levels. Every soundtrack will contain a set of standard MP3s, but soundtracks can also include optional high-quality audio depots (ie., FLAC, or raw WAV). Individual customers can opt-in to these larger, higher-quality audio files.

Second, there's a new interface for soundtracks in the Steam Library. This interface is minimal for now, but is designed to make it as painless as possible to perform the most common actions: playback, browsing, and managing contents.

Third, soundtracks can now contain bits of associated content, including album art and liner notes. These bits of content can also be viewed from the details page for a soundtrack in the Steam Library.

Existing Content
There is a huge set of amazing soundtrack content already on Steam. To help you migrate your existing soundtracks that were set up as DLC, we've created a tool that can automate the conversion of that DLC to use the new app type. You can find that tool on the bottom of the Basic Info tab for your store page configuration.

Once you push that button, you'll have a list of instructions to follow to finish the conversion process.

Converting a piece of DLC will re-use all your existing app IDs, packages, bundles, pricing, etc. Customers who own the DLC version of your soundtrack will continue to own the new version after you publish your changes.

Moving Forward
You can create a new soundtrack for your existing Steam game from the Associated Packages & DLC page for your game, or you can create a soundtrack for a non-Steam game from the partner site landing page. Soundtracks are subject to the same creation and review processes as other app types. Additional documentation is available through the partner site's Game Soundtracks on Steam page.

This is an initial release of these features for partners. We're planning on launching these features in a wider way, including a sale event, on January 20th. We're excited to release, even in this early state, so we can get more feedback from both partners and customers and figure out what makes sense to do next.

 

[Rahdulan]

That's good stuff for the sake of organizing the DLC mess, but Valve has once again left it in the hands of developers themselves which means fuck all will happen for most games. Especially older ones just like with those new library assets. And this is something community can't really jump in and fix for them.

 

[LESS T_T]

12 hours later, there are 33 music apps created: https://steamdb.info/search/?a=app&q=&type=15&category=0

Our grave robber zwanzig_zwoelf made two of them.

Funny even Valve created only one so far, for Portal 2. Half-life soundtracks are out in the cold.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Our grave robber zwanzig_zwoelf made two of them.

I'm planning to convert all soundtracks released so far to this new format, but I encountered a few issues along the way. Fixing them now, hopefully it won't take too long.

 

[LESS T_T]

Some improvements on Library updated to the beta client: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1698353956261271592

Now you can ignore announcements that are not about game updates on What's New section.

Steam Client Beta - January 9, 2020

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

Library

• Played/Unplayed filters no longer include/exclude games that were installed but never actually played
  
• Improved performance of library artwork precacher
  
• Improved library filtering for Korean game titles when typing in Hangul.
  
• Added Library What’s New settings dialog which makes it easier to find and manage per-game news priorities
  
• Added a setting to show only product updates in Library What’s New
  
• Fixed non-Steam games with the "Include in VR Library" checkbox checked not appearing in dynamic collections with VR hardware support selected
  
• Fixed hidden achievements sometimes still appearing as hidden in the activity feed even after being achieved
  
• Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause the wrong audio to play from a multi-disc soundtrack when playing an individual track

Remote Play

• Fixed cursor scale on different resolution displays
  
• Added client-side screen magnifier for the toggle magnification controller binding

Remote Play Together

• Added error message when trying to join a game that is unavailable due to country or Family View restrictions.

Linux

• Fix a crash while preparing the hardware survey
  
• Fix for Steam Library on some NFS mounts

SteamNetworkingSockets

• Fixed a crash caused by certain types of P2P connection failures

 

[Fedora Master]

Out of interest I looked at the reviews for Crusader Kings 2. If you have a good understanding of the game it really shows how useless Steam reviews actually are, because the positive ones don't make an argument as to WHY a game is good and the negative reviews are all about the DLC policy, not the actual faults with the game.

 

[Dexter]

negative reviews are all about the DLC policy

not the actual faults with the game.

 

[Silentstorm]

I think you have to check, for me i just have the most recent reviews appearing in any game, but by scrolling down and looking around, i do tend to see some people actually reviewing the games, sometimes i even find really damn long reviews of people taking this seriously.

It's like everything, most of it is crap, and small games are more likely to not have any decent review, but mildly popular games and above will usually have those rare reviews that stand out.

Also, Paradox makes a shit ton of DLC to their games, with some having the full collection of DLC being much more expensive than the main game itself and various big AAA titles even if they just came out, some people really don't like that kind of thing.

Heck the Royal Collection which is all DLC(reminder that the main game is F2P now) and shaves off more than 50 euros...is so expensive i could buy a Switch Lite if i wanted for all the DLC, and if a full blown Switch goes on sale, the price wouldn't be too far apart, and for people who aren't huge into grand strategy games, this can feel outrageous.

 

[Fedora Master]

negative reviews are all about the DLC policy

not the actual faults with the game.

Its a Paradox game. A billion DLCs is a given.

 

[Infinitron]

https://ca.ign.com/articles/left-4-dead-3-is-absolutely-not-currently-in-the-works-valve-says

Left 4 Dead 3 Is 'Absolutely' Not Currently in the Works, Valve Says
Valve says any mention of Left 4 Dead 3 is 'misinformation.'

If there was a Left 4 Dead 3, it hasn’t been in development at Valve for years, according to the company.

In a statement to IGN, Valve has denied any development on a new Left 4 Dead title, such as Left 4 Dead 3, calling the rumors on such a project “misinformation.”

“We’ve seen rumors to this effect for the last couple of months,” Valve said in a statement. “We did briefly explore some Left 4 Dead next gen opportunities a few years ago. But we are absolutely not working on anything L4D related now, and haven’t for years."

“It’s clear some people are having fun creating misinformation to spin up the community and other outlets. Unfortunately, for now a new L4D game is not something we’re working on.”

The statement follows an uptick in rumors regarding Left 4Dead 3 thanks to reports from YouTube channels like Valve News Network claiming to have leaked Left 4 Dead 3 screenshots. Furthermore, An HTC representative from China published a recent talk they gave on VR that included a mention of “L4D3.”

However, according to Valve, while there were some explorations into a next-gen Left 4 Dead title in the past, a new game in the zombie series is not currently in active development.

 

[LESS T_T]

SteamDB's investigation on Steam user ids: https://steamdb.info/blog/scanning-all-steam-ids/

Stats
With that out of the way, let's take a look at some of the numbers we could get from scanning all the currently created accounts.

• There are currently a little over 667 million registered accounts.
• From 2020-01-01 to 2020-01-24, there were 86 million accounts that were active. 107 million from 2019-12-01.
• 2018-12 to 2019-04 saw the biggest increase in account registrations. With 2019-02 peaking at 33 million accounts created. You can view raw data of accounts created per month here.
• 11,1 million accounts that have their privacy set to private.
• 10,7 million accounts that have it set to friends-only.
• That's only 3,2% of accounts that have changed their privacy setting.

Keep in mind we're talking about full profile privacy setting, and not the games list privacy setting which was changed to be private by default in 2018.

 

[DalekFlay]

I'm about as non-social on Steam as you can get but I never messed with privacy settings because I don't really give a shit. I turned off all notifications and that's it.

 

[racofer]

Steam is dead at this moment: https://steamstat.us/

Absolutely nothing works. Not even their store page:

Meanwhile, my GOG games work just fine

 

[Infinitron]