The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Grauken]

That's pocket money for Valve, and probably the others too

 

[Sentinel]

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.

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'

He said the same thing before Alyx released. He mentioned 2 announcements were coming after Alyx.

 

[Dexter]

 

[Fedora Master]

CS:GO now integrates with the Chinese Social Credit system.

More multiplayer game services should do this, it might finally put a break on Chinese cheaters.

Or you could just, you know, segregate the bugs like we used to. Make a China Steam and leave the real people the fuck alone.

 

[Dexter]

 

[LESS T_T]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

 

[Tyrr]

reasons steam is the best digital storefront in existence:

Adding the 'LGBTQ+' tag to games you don't like is also a good strategy.

 

[Baron Dupek]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

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]

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]

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

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.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

china needs to be walled off from the rest of the internet for the good of the world

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/total-games

Steam just reached 50,000 total games listed

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.

 

[Fedora Master]

There are now 100% Chinese games on Steam. No English translation, no English description. Why is this allowed.

 

[Zarniwoop]

china needs to be walled off from the rest of the internet for the good of the world

They are

 

[Lhynn]

There are now 100% Chinese games on Steam. No English translation, no English description. Why is this allowed.

A few quality games there, and they get fan translations on the workshop.
You can always edit it to remove them from your listings if you arent interested, so i see absolutely no reason as to why you would care.

 

[Fedora Master]

There are now 100% Chinese games on Steam. No English translation, no English description. Why is this allowed.

A few quality games there, and they get fan translations on the workshop.

Who gives a shit. I don't want Chink garbage.

 

[Lhynn]

Who gives a shit. I don't want Chink garbage.

*Tips fedora*

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Who gives a shit. I don't want Chink garbage.

*Tips fedora*

you're either actively anti-chinese or you're a xi asslicker

 

[Lhynn]

I only care about quality releases, and their rpg scene is less pozzed than the kwans. Their games offer pretty deep and detailed systems, sometimes they are obtuse obtuse, but it never fails to be creative. The writing is mostly shit, but its not like its any better in the US.

And i rather have Xi than Biden you retarded twat. Enjoy them turning your firstborn into a tranny.