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STEAM | February 2017 - Giveaways are back

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Tizoc

Tizoc

Member
The fuck kinda supercomputer is Aiden using?
20613A7B1ED8AAAEBCA094D5022549E17BBC7367
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S

spindoctor

Member
My favorite thing about whenever Valve announces major changes to Steam (such as this Steam Direct thing or previous discovery updates, sale format changes etc.) is how indie developers on Twitter inevitably have a knee jerk reaction of freaking the fuck out. It's like clockwork.

I especially like the developer who says the future of indie games is on a store whose name sounds like the cartoon inside The Simpsons cartoon show.

Wok said:
How come Valve cannot figure out the publishing fee based on all the data which they have?
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I guarantee you they have data telling them how to price this. They are still taking feedback from the community anyway.
 
R

Rickenslacker

Banned
Jawmuncher said:
One day you'll all realize I'm right.
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I don't really find RPG stories (that is to say, the main thread) all that engaging most of the time, but I will say that the best story in Mass Effect 1 was allowing me to mod (with the in-game mods, not external ones) a sniper rifle into a hitscan rocket launcher that could splash damage enemies by sniping their feet and ragdoll tossing them by the impact. That's an RPG story I can get behind.
 
T

Teeth

Member
Wok said:
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.



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.
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The problem with all of this is that your system relies on delineation that doesn't exist (genre, acceptable play time) and it relies too heavily on standardizing future acceptability based on present and historical data.

It also doesn't account for marketing, which can make a huge difference in sales.

Beyond even that, no uniformity exists in genre sales, they'd constantly have to create exceptions for outliers.
 
T

Tagyhag

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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I can understand having trouble finding games that cater exactly to your specific niche, but yeah quality in general?

Browse -> all games (or specific genre) -> filter by userscore.

It's not PERFECT but it's so easy I can't see why people think they have to wade through 10 shit games to find 1 good one.
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Dino Crisis will never come back.

Ever.

Ever.

giphy.gif
 
R

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Ozium said:
it was already in a humble monthly, so I doubt it
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speaking of a game like Darkest Dungeon, how do they go back to a "smaller" $20 indie game as the highlight after having XCOM 2 and Total Warhammer back to back as the highlight?
 
P

Parsnip

Member
I wonder if a dinosaur ate their source code.
A barebones clean up of that Windows version of DC probably wouldn't be too much trouble if they had the assets.
 
G

Grief.exe

Member
Parsnip said:
I wonder if a dinosaur ate their source code.
A barebones clean up of that Windows version of DC probably wouldn't be too much trouble if they had the assets.
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I have a feeling it has to do more with the brand.

Capcom keeps RE relevant because they are planning on continuing the series, so porting older titles ends up being profitable marketing. What does Dino Crisis do for Capcom? Relatively little from a financial side and nothing from a promotional side.

That's my 2 cents.
 
A

Annubis

Member
Wok said:
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.
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What about Free games?
 
T

Teggy

Member
Dino Crisis does seem like a pretty obvious reboot. It has some name recognition, cheesecake/waifu potential and dinosaurs, which are pretty hot right now. Honestly surprised they haven't gone for it.
 
T

ThirtyFour

Member
I feel like I care about time played and achievements too much.

My internet dropped out for about 2 hrs and I didn't want to play anything because my time played would be under its true value.

I should break that habit, pretty sure no ones cares about my time playing things.
 
S

Saty

Member
Steam Direct is stupid. Just put a button on the Steam client named 'Greenlight Store' which directs you to a separate landing page that is basically a second store with no data or customization pulled from the main store.

You then proceed to buy any game a dev puts forward (no votes limit). Knock yourself out. A game gets X amount for revenue or favorable user score? Congrats, the title now 'graduates' to the main store where it can get promoted, highlighted and have sale promotions (Greenlight Store being full price only with no chances or very limited ones to have sales).
 
S

Sajko

Member
So G2A has their own bundles now, made in cooperation with the developers apparently (Still waiting for some confirmation from the devs themselves until I even consider this).

First month is Lords of the fallen, Superhot, Dirt 3 and Syberia 1 and 2. It sounds too good considering its one time payment of 2.5€.
 
J

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
spindoctor said:
I guarantee you they have data telling them how to price this. They are still taking feedback from the community anyway.
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Valve's even said that it's basing its decision on the data it receives. I think a scaling system would be difficult to automate, especially with the entire point being that Greenlight being abolished means a smaller barrier to entry, but at the same time I get the impression that Gabe realises that the current $100 fee hasn't been enough of a deterrent. I mean, the neat thing about software development is that code is putty, however I presume Valve's aware that its current recommendation systems aren't quite up to par such that, say, user reviews can be used as the basis of an approval scale.
 
B

Baron von Loathsome

Member
What I know about Dino Crisis thanks to the Steam thread:
It's a Capcom series
It's Resident Evil with dinosaurs
It has a redheaded protagonist
It went to space for third installment

What I know about Dino Crisis thanks to anything but the Steam thread:
It exists
 
T

Teggy

Member
Baron von Loathsome said:
I'm under the impression that name recognition mainly comes from people talking about the game, which you don't see a whole lot of in Dino Crisis' case.
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People who owned a PlayStation 1 will have heard of Dino Crisis.

For goodness sake, people were excited about a Phantom Dust reboot.
 
E

Eila

Member
D the Game is such a weird game. I was shocked when the actual game started. For some reason I was under the impression that it was a Resident Evil like game, but it's actually a FMV adventure.
 
B

Baron von Loathsome

Member
Teggy said:
People who owned a PlayStation 1 will have heard of Dino Crisis.

For goodness sake, people were excited about a Phantom Dust reboot.
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Fair point.

Eila said:
D the Game is such a weird game. I was shocked when the actual game started. For some reason I was under the impression that it was a Resident Evil like game, but it's actually a FMV adventure.
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It seems like most of Night Dive's rereleases are FMV games.
 
G

Grief.exe

Member
Teggy said:
Dino Crisis does seem like a pretty obvious reboot. It has some name recognition, cheesecake/waifu potential and dinosaurs, which are pretty hot right now. Honestly surprised they haven't gone for it.
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Sounds risky in a period where Capcom is very risk adverse.

Sajko said:
So G2A has their own bundles now, made in cooperation with the developers apparently (Still waiting for some confirmation from the devs themselves until I even consider this).

First month is Lords of the fallen, Superhot, Dirt 3 and Syberia 1 and 2. It sounds too good considering its one time payment of 2.5€.
Click to expand...

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
 
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