The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

going chromium based was a mistake.

 

[deuxhero]

The new version of the client seems to actually be faster on Linux than before.

 

[HansDampf]

Some improvements like the new overlay. But the server windows are terrible, twice as big as before, like they were designed for smartphones, but with less functionality.

 

[Akachi]

I have to launch Steam from the terminal with a specific parameter to even launch it now, per this Github issue. Great Linux support from Valve! What a downgrade, all for a worse UI and worse everything from what I can tell so far, although it's not as horrific as the last major UI overhaul that ruined the Steam interface to where I avoid using it whenever possible. Updates like this are why friends don't let friends use DRM, where you're forced to put up with whatever godawful changes they make in the future to play your games through it.

 

[Catacombs]

Steam has UI designers?

Yes, with job stability, great benefits, and six-figure salaries

 

[Infinitron]

Just noticed that Steam Greenlight pages are no longer accessible. They were all still there for many years even though the service shut down in 2017. A piece of gaming history gone.

Oddly the main Greenlight site itself is still up: https://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/

 

[Maxie]

Remember what they took from you.

 

[Reinhardt]

it's complete shit with random crashes and pop-ups.

 

[Reinhardt]

to "wat" pipo. today i was playing ddo. end of the quest, killed boss and halfway through easy puzzle to getquest reward and SUDDENLY steam "preparing your gaem to shut down" me: "dafug iz dis shit! literally never happened before!"
but ok, there is few minutes of grace period where you still considered being in quest in case of dc so you can log in again. me - log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? me - nah, close window, me just want to play game. log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? few minutes and tries later i'm in. oh, look, i'm back to the tavern already.
annoying.

 

[Anthedon]

Remember what they took from you.

Never forget, they shut down the WON servers for Steam:

 

[Hirato]

to "wat" pipo. today i was playing ddo. end of the quest, killed boss and halfway through easy puzzle to getquest reward and SUDDENLY steam "preparing your gaem to shut down" me: "dafug iz dis shit! literally never happened before!"
but ok, there is few minutes of grace period where you still considered being in quest in case of dc so you can log in again. me - log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? me - nah, close window, me just want to play game. log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? few minutes and tries later i'm in. oh, look, i'm back to the tavern already.
annoying.

Steam has a restriction in that your library can only be played on 1 device at a time.
If you're using family sharing, it would be because the 'owner' of the game wanted to play something in their library.
And if not, it's because something was run on another device you were logged into.
If you happen to use ASF to gather the trading cards, that also counts as a separate device for the above.
There might be more possibilities (e.g. involving Big Picture mode)

 

[Tse Tse Fly]

It doesn't seem like it has become less of a pain in the ass to browse the store pages in the desktop client. The web version is still more convenient.

 

[Reinhardt]

to "wat" pipo. today i was playing ddo. end of the quest, killed boss and halfway through easy puzzle to getquest reward and SUDDENLY steam "preparing your gaem to shut down" me: "dafug iz dis shit! literally never happened before!"
but ok, there is few minutes of grace period where you still considered being in quest in case of dc so you can log in again. me - log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? me - nah, close window, me just want to play game. log in. steam - nah, app still running BUT HOW ABOUT THIS POP UP WITH SALES? few minutes and tries later i'm in. oh, look, i'm back to the tavern already.
annoying.

Steam has a restriction in that your library can only be played on 1 device at a time.
If you're using family sharing, it would be because the 'owner' of the game wanted to play something in their library.
And if not, it's because something was run on another device you were logged into.
If you happen to use ASF to gather the trading cards, that also counts as a separate device for the above.
There might be more possibilities (e.g. involving Big Picture mode)

nah, i'm alone right now and using only my pc.

 

[Latelistener]

It takes about 1 second for the tray menu to appear (clicking on the Steam icon in the Windows tray with right mouse button). Did they even test the new UI? Basically, nothing has changed from Beta. Lazy fucks.

 

[Infinitron]

DidYouKnowGaming takes a look at a dozen cancelled Half-Life games, including Half Life 3, featuring exclusive new details and images from these unreleased projects.

 

[Caim]

Yeah, Valve's company structure is all sorts of fucked up.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-sc...t-violation-is-the-developers-responsibility/

Valve is scrutinizing games with AI assets on Steam, says avoiding copyright violation 'is the developer's responsibility'​

There's no full, formal policy as of yet, but Steam's boundaries are starting to materialize.

The controversy around AI-generated content for videogames is starting to impact the biggest digital distribution platform on PC: an anonymous developer recently made a post on reddit (first spotted by Simon Carless) about the rejection of their game, claiming that "Valve is not willing to publish AI-generated content anymore." In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve elaborated that it is not opposed to generative tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns around them extremely seriously.

The developer says they tried to get a game approved on Steam about a month ago "with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated" and received the following response:

"While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.

"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belong to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game."

The developer says Valve failed the build and offered an opportunity to re-submit with all AI-generated content removed. "I improved those pieces by hand," says the dev. "So there were no longer any obvious signs of AI, but my app was probably already flagged for AI generated content, so even after resubmitting it, my app was rejected."

Valve's response was another rejection, saying "we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data." Valve did, at least, offer the dev a refund of their submission fee.

"It seems like Valve doesn’t really have a standard approach to AI generated games yet," said the developer, "and I’ve seen several games up that even explicitly mention the use of AI."

In its statement to PC Gamer, Valve said that "The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.

We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies. Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

Valve did not directly confirm or deny that the story of the anonymous developer on Reddit was legitimate, but the content of Valve's statements to us and the rejection emails are pretty much in sync.

The fact that AI models are trained on datasets containing copyrighted material remains a legal grey area, and it doesn't help that many of the companies involved don't want to be upfront about just what exactly they're using for their datasets. A prompt-generated "science fiction cityscape" will be crafted from a slurry of untold thousands of human-drawn science fiction cityscapes, not parsed and reinterpreted by a human being, but scraped and frankensteined together by pattern-recognizing software. Those artists are often understandably none too happy about having their work used in this way.

Big rights holders are understandably not happy as well, and one of the test cases that may set a precedent will be Getty's lawsuit against Stability AI, which Getty alleges used over 12 million images "without permission [...] or compensation" to train AI software. But where the courts will land, in the US at least, remains a massive (and potentially very expensive) unknown.

Why might this worry Valve especially? The scale and size of Steam, and the simple fact it's a distribution platform, mean the potential liabilities for getting this wrong are incalculable. There are games that incorporate AI on Steam right now, but it may be that these are early exceptions and as the tech achieves more widespread adoption and begins running into more barriers and scrutiny.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-sc...t-violation-is-the-developers-responsibility/

Valve is scrutinizing games with AI assets on Steam, says avoiding copyright violation 'is the developer's responsibility'​

There's no full, formal policy as of yet, but Steam's boundaries are starting to materialize.

The controversy around AI-generated content for videogames is starting to impact the biggest digital distribution platform on PC: an anonymous developer recently made a post on reddit (first spotted by Simon Carless) about the rejection of their game, claiming that "Valve is not willing to publish AI-generated content anymore." In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve elaborated that it is not opposed to generative tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns around them extremely seriously.

The developer says they tried to get a game approved on Steam about a month ago "with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated" and received the following response:

"While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.

"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belong to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game."

The developer says Valve failed the build and offered an opportunity to re-submit with all AI-generated content removed. "I improved those pieces by hand," says the dev. "So there were no longer any obvious signs of AI, but my app was probably already flagged for AI generated content, so even after resubmitting it, my app was rejected."

Valve's response was another rejection, saying "we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data." Valve did, at least, offer the dev a refund of their submission fee.

"It seems like Valve doesn’t really have a standard approach to AI generated games yet," said the developer, "and I’ve seen several games up that even explicitly mention the use of AI."

In its statement to PC Gamer, Valve said that "The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.

We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies. Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

Valve did not directly confirm or deny that the story of the anonymous developer on Reddit was legitimate, but the content of Valve's statements to us and the rejection emails are pretty much in sync.

The fact that AI models are trained on datasets containing copyrighted material remains a legal grey area, and it doesn't help that many of the companies involved don't want to be upfront about just what exactly they're using for their datasets. A prompt-generated "science fiction cityscape" will be crafted from a slurry of untold thousands of human-drawn science fiction cityscapes, not parsed and reinterpreted by a human being, but scraped and frankensteined together by pattern-recognizing software. Those artists are often understandably none too happy about having their work used in this way.

Big rights holders are understandably not happy as well, and one of the test cases that may set a precedent will be Getty's lawsuit against Stability AI, which Getty alleges used over 12 million images "without permission [...] or compensation" to train AI software. But where the courts will land, in the US at least, remains a massive (and potentially very expensive) unknown.

Why might this worry Valve especially? The scale and size of Steam, and the simple fact it's a distribution platform, mean the potential liabilities for getting this wrong are incalculable. There are games that incorporate AI on Steam right now, but it may be that these are early exceptions and as the tech achieves more widespread adoption and begins running into more barriers and scrutiny.

Nah. Preempted moral excuse when something happen. Valve will never be check games under that angle, it's too expensive.

 

[tritosine2k]

Good rug pull from Valve to coax people into "spatial computing". Now I tend to believe in their wearable display initiative & thank fuck Palmer isn't around.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-sends...es-off-to-the-great-trashcan-fire-in-the-sky/

Steam sends 90 low-effort asset-flips and bootleg games off to the great trashcan fire in the sky​

Valve giveth, and Valve taketh away.

Steam has removed a large clutch of games of various genres which all seem to have one thing in common: they were low effort shovelware. That might seem a slightly mean designation, but we've all seen the type of thing that this ban wave targeted. Extremely basic asset-flipped titles with popular words in the name, such as Zombie Defense TD or Play Football, out there just to try and make a few bucks from the unwary.

Ever since Valve opened up Steam this has and will continue to be a problem, the inevitable downside of what is inarguably an otherwise good policy. Steam's biggest issue these days, for both developers and players, is discoverability, and the sheer mass of shovelware on there is a big part of that. While this ban wave appears to have removed 90 games total (per SteamDb's tracking of removed apps, available via Discord), that's still a drop in the ocean.

Not all of these titles were removed for the same reason. I doubt 3D Pacman was an official Bandai Namco title (kind of amazing it got on there in the first place) and Dong Nguyen would no doubt be surprised that Flappy Bird was apparently available too.

As well as the games themselves, most of the developer accounts involved also seem to have been banned. Which is unambiguously good for the wider ecosystem. Obviously everyone has to start somewhere, and developers learning their trade often make games using easily available assets and in an established style. Most developers don't then go on to try and flog their juvenilia though, and the veneer of legitimacy Steam adds to even the dodgiest looking title means that no doubt players have been suckered into buying titles like these in the past.

There's clearly something going on behind-the-scenes at Steam right now. It had been a while since the last ban wave like this, and it follows hot on the heels of Valve beginning to pay a much closer eye to games with AI-created assets on Steam (this is not, as widely reported, an outright ban). There was a big front-facing change recently, too, with lots of new functionality (some of which was exploited by ingenious Counter-Strike players for ez wins).

 

[Maxie]

damn pretty based. if only they banned disco elysium too and sent assassins after those who bought it

 

[Modron]

So I finally updated my steam to the newest ui was there some way to change it back to the previous one?

 

[Tacgnol]

So I finally updated my steam to the newest ui was there some way to change it back to the previous one?

Nope, they've switched to a new rendering engine. Also removed the ability to use themes/skins annoyingly.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

they just went chromium.

 

[Tacgnol]

they just went chromium.

I thought they were already chromium-based, just using an old version of the rendering engine.