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STEAM | February 2017 - Giveaways are back

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Y

yuraya

Member
Good news about Steam Direct. I wonder how it will impact the amount of titles released by the end this year. Will be interesting to compare it to 2016.
 
P

Purkake4

Banned
Large Professor said:
New game from the FTL developers.

This is huge.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJR1OpHNgzc

8w7sQEF.gif
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Front Mission-like? Looking good.
 
Wok

Wok

Member
There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store.
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Release as many games in 1 year as games released in all previous years of existence of Steam, of course, you will find some games which are successful in the bigger sampler.

These unforeseen successes made it abundantly clear that there are many different audiences on Steam, each looking for a different experience. For example, we see some people that sink thousands of hours into one or two games, while others purchase dozens of titles each year and play portions of each. Some customers are really excited about 4X strategy games, while others just buy visual novels.
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All these examples do not show there are "many different audiences"...

All this reads like SteamGAF actually.

These improvements have allowed more developers to publish their games and connect with relevant gamers on Steam. One of the clearest metrics is that the average time customers spend playing games on Steam has steadily increased since the first Discovery Update. Over the same time period, the average number of titles purchased on Steam by individual customers has doubled. Both of these data points suggest that we’re achieving our goal of helping users find more games that they enjoy playing.
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To me, it reads like people have been idling for trading cards... and buying games to idle for cards.

The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.
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RIP 🎮⛽️

While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.
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How come Valve cannot figure out the publishing fee based on all the data which they have? It is literally about finding the threshold to remove the noise, i.e. the games which rely merely on trading cards to sell copies, from the rest of the games. Check revenues, average playtimes, etc. and find out the expected revenue over a year for each game genre. You want to release a visual novel, this is the fee. You want to release a FPS, this is the fee. How difficult can it be to automate the search of this threshold given the genre? Valve, you already know a bunch of "good" and "bad" games for each genre, as well as the revenue which the dev earned during the first year, feed all the features to an algorithm, and learn the damn optimal threshold.
 
G

Grief.exe

Member
ramoisdead said:
So now there's going to still be hardly any curation and they get to pocket even more money?

Volvo gonna Volvo.
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5000 is negligible to Valve's profit margin. Edit: apparently it's recoupable fee as well 😂😂😂😂😂

Looks like they are going to curate via barrier to entry rather than dedicating resources to curating games individually. Technically an improvement over the current system, which is almost nothing.
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Wok said:
Release as many games in 1 year as games released in all previous years of existence of Steam, of course, you will find some games which are successful in the bigger sampler.



All these examples do not show there are "many different audiences"...

All this reads like SteamGAF actually.



To me, it reads like people have been idling for trading cards... and buying games to idle for cards.
Click to expand...

I don't think Idling is as big a thing as you'd think. Measuring an average of a sample of pretty much all Steam users, idling is probably so small it gets easily identified and can be taken out.

ramoisdead said:
So now there's going to still be hardly any curation and they get to pocket even more money?

Volvo gonna Volvo.
Click to expand...

"Curation" in the sense of making a decision of what to allow on the store based on genre, game type, apparent quality etc". This doesn't have to mean ignoring spam, malicious content, asset flips, imitations etc etc.
 
A

atr0cious

Member
Is Steam BPM crashing anyone else's PC? Woke up this morning and for some reason my laptop bsods when bpm is running especially the startup. Now when I try to even start up steam, since it was in BPm, it goes to that then immediately crashes my laptop.
 
T

Teeth

Member
Wok said:
How come Valve cannot figure out the publishing fee based on all the data which they have? It is literally about finding the threshold to remove the noise, i.e. the games which rely merely on trading cards to sell copies, from the rest of the games. Check revenues, average playtimes, etc. and find out the expected revenue over a year for each game genre. You want to release a visual novel, this is the fee. You want to release a FPS, this is the fee. How difficult can it be to automate the search of this threshold given the genre? Valve, you already know a bunch of "good" and "bad" games for each genre, as well as the revenue which the dev earned during the first year, feed all the features to an algorithm, and learn the damn optimal threshold.
Click to expand...

Nothing you mentioned would find the line between "good" and "bad" games. Valve doesn't have the "data" on what personal impact publishing rates have on developers, only the rates of purchase based on a presently, arbitrarily set value of $100 per developer (not even per game, like they are proposing here).

There are people who make games in developing countries where $1000USD is a much larger payout than it would be to an American. The amount of revenue generated has nothing to do with dividing good and bad games (or something as ridiculous as "sells only for the cards").

Also, your idea of putting differing publishing rates based on genre is probably the worst idea I've heard in a bit. If you want genre wars to go full nuclear, that would be a good start.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
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Blue Estate The Game -- MB-CD10DB144A869B90 - Taken by Nabs
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apparently already had it >_>
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Spiritreaver said:
Lol, I was going to add Darkest Dungeon to my wait list just now and I see it's on sale today! Yay me.

Turn based tactics basically guarantees I'm going to buy the game.
Click to expand...

This kinda looks like what I imagine Front Mission would have looked like if it progressed onto the GBA from the SNES. Looks pretty great!
 
D

data

Member
Woah, haven't checked my keys page on groupees for like a year now and I had 20 new games that weren't greenlit yet when I bought their bundles. neat.
 
P

Parsnip

Member
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
oh Azure also has that CPU thing?

...

...havent noticed at all lol >_>
 
S

shockdude

Member
So the Steam application fee is recoupable, but is there a condition for recouping that fee? E.g. if you don't sell x copies you never get the fee back?
 
G

GoldandBlue

Member
Honestly never had a problem avoiding all the trash games on Steam. I browse through Steam quit a lot, never even use the tag filter, and was able to find a lot of interesting small titles.
 
T

Tellaerin

Member
GoldandBlue said:
Honestly never had a problem avoiding all the trash games on Steam. I browse through Steam quit a lot, never even use the tag filter, and was able to find a lot of interesting small titles.
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Some people expect Valve to magically curate everything so that any game picked at random is guaranteed to be a triple-A title tailored perfectly to their tastes. :p
 
Wok

Wok

Member
Teeth said:
Nothing you mentioned would find the line between "good" and "bad" games. Valve doesn't have the "data" on what personal impact publishing rates have on developers, only the rates of purchase based on a presently, arbitrarily set value of $100 per developer (not even per game, like they are proposing here).

There are people who make games in developing countries where $1000USD is a much larger payout than it would be to an American. The amount of revenue generated has nothing to do with dividing good and bad games (or something as ridiculous as "sells only for the cards").
Click to expand...

I'm not saying the amount of revenue helps separate good games from bad games. What I'm saying is that, if we condition on a few variables such as the genre of the game, or maybe as you suggest the country of the dev studio, then the amount of revenue should be the main indicator to help define the recoupable fee: say an acceptable game for this condition (genre, country, etc.) should be able to generate at least X amount of money in its first year, then the recoupable fee should be a percentage of X. Since Valve takes 30% of the price of a game, it could reasonable to ask for 30% of X.

Now, the only question which remains is how to define an acceptable game for a given condition. For this, Valve has plenty of data, which include average playtime, average review score, time before appearing in a bundle, etc. Basically, learn how to distinguish good games from bad games by clustering them in an unsupervised manner. One could operate in a semi-supervised manner by saying that we know some good games, such as FTL or Binding of Isaac, so we can spread the info to games in their cluster. Once you have this, get rid of the "bad" category, and compute the recoupable fee based only on the "good" category.

This way:
  • the devs of most good games should be okay with this fee,
  • the devs of only a few of the bad games would be okay, others would not risk it,
  • Valve has an automatic way to define the threshold, as percentage of X, where X is the expected revenue over N months for the game genre and country of the dev studio.
  • You don't need to go and ask everyone for what is a good fee, ranging from $100 to $5000, because you know the recoupable fee is reasonable, conditionally to the genre, etc.
  • You only have a few parameters to tweak, such as X and N.

The fee is all about deterring devs from intentionally listing bad games ("noise" as Valve puts it). Without conditioning on the genre, the most relevant feature to distinguish good from bad games should be the user score anyway, so it should be possible to skip all the clustering altogether, and instead use a threshold for the average user score.

Teeth said:
Also, your idea of putting differing publishing rates based on genre is probably the worst idea I've heard in a bit. If you want genre wars to go full nuclear, that would be a good start.
Click to expand...

Well, I don't really know about that one, you might be right. It is just that a fixed fee, without conditioning on the game genre, seems intrinsically unfair to me. Some genres are niche, you cannot ask the dev an insane amount of money, force him to price his game at an expensive pricepoint, and leave him alone with all the complaints by angry costumers boycotting the game because of its high price.
 
R

ramoisdead

Member
Rhaknar said:
posted I assume?

Ghostlight asking what japanese games to bring to Steam (well they say PC but, you know)
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Ross from Ghostlight posted the link a while back. I think the most logical game they can bring to Steam is El Shaddai. It's pretty much underrated and definitely deserves a second chance since the publisher was at hard times when this was released in the West.

Dinjoralo said:
There's gonna be a patch for Atelier that fixes the cpu usage issues.
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I hope this means they did some more Durante consulting to fix the problem.
 
D

Dinjoralo

Member
I'm kinda hoping that the atelier patch fixes the low res ui... I might jump in if that's the case.

As much as I'm against steam having so much crap, I haven't seen much of it myself. I've seen some dodgy stuff in my discovery queue, but that's about it, and I only filter out porn games and CYOA's.
 
C

Chance Hale

Member
Is it possible to reset game time? I was playing Abzu while crossfaded to hell and back and passed out and now I have like 12 hours on it lol
 
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