PC Gaming ERA | July 2019 - Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of RICHAAAAAAARD!

zkylon · Jul 10, 2019

eonden said:
Pretty sure Valve is not oblivious to the "destructive whims of their own algorithm", the truth is that there is just so many customer growth and many more games being published and the rope is going to break on one point. There is no way to serve all the struggling gamedevs in the world without damaging other gamedevs, which is the reason why some gamedevs report the algorithm changes kills them while others do not notice anything (or see better numbers). This is nearly a zero sum game and, given the explosion on game supply, it is just not possible to have everything be succesful just for being on a Store (same with Switch nowadays, were the situation is not as rosy as one year ago).

i don't think anyone excepts "everything being successful", devs are mostly frustrated with their livelihood being tied to an unpredictable black box that can silently ruin them overnight

eonden said:
That Steam does not support devs is also annoyingly also taken as a fact when they offer the best discoverability tools on the industry and allow you to easily access and publish your game there, some of the main reasons that has lead to more people being able to publish games. Steam is also continuously improving and listening to devs despite what they think. What indies want is always the same: that they are the ones that are noticed, not caring about the other games, which goes against the other indies.

ehhhhhh that's not quite it. indies want to be noticed for sure, the rest you just made up...

and i didn't say valve doesn't support devs or doesn't offer a good toolset, i'm saying devs are within their rights to ask better of valve, just like users like you or me when we see valve do a poop

eonden said:
On the part of "gamers stanning for steam hard", you also avoid to mention how most of the indie community just go on a daily "fuck customers, who cares about them" whenever they have any issue with us. The adversarial relationship is not only on the side of the people buying the game, as much as both the media and the devs want to blame it on us.
I do feel bad for indie developers, but we had reached a point were the customer and the developer media bubble (who they talk with and who they trust) has been separated for a while, creating a bigger distance into what the dev and customer goals are, and it is hard for some people to care for other people that only think of them as a walking wallet.

ehh i don't think devs say "fuck customers" unless customers are being fucky

eonden · Jul 10, 2019

zkylon said:
i don't think anyone excepts "everything being successful", devs are mostly frustrated with their livelihood being tied to an unpredictable black box that can silently ruin them overnight

ehhhhhh that's not quite it. indies want to be noticed for sure, the rest you just made up...

and i didn't say valve doesn't support devs or doesn't offer a good toolset, i'm saying devs are within their rights to ask better of valve, just like users like you

I mean, we got indie devs now going full on "we need curation" and saying that Steam is full of trash, clearly thinking they are the ones above the supossed trash qualification line. I am not going to blame them for wanting more money, and more importance, but it is clear that in the end their focus is on their product being successful (and maybe their friends), not on everyone equally. And with a huge amount of games there comes a other problem: Discoverability will always end up recommending one game instead of another, it wont be able to recommend all games and please everyone.

On the other side, it is more about being annoyed at devs thinking that any fault in the system is clearly targetting them, and that clearly Steam has something against them, despite trying to please them as much as possible. And the "ask better of Valve" while not asking better of other shitty practices outside of Valve. Valve is the store / platform with the best tools for discovering games and that has the lowest entrance barriers (because they listened to the devs), yet developers are always arguing that it is shit and bad.
Edit: I just noticed the bolded part about what I invented. I sadly did not. It comes from one of the demands that indies had with EGS: that their games didnt contain links that redirect to other games, and that the focus of their page should be only them. Yes, that is a good thing for them if people go into their page... but fucks up the similar games which would be recommended.

Edit: I would also say that the "devs frustrated about being tied to an unpredictable black box" is the same in all other platforms (with the added unpredictability of being accepted into the black box) and that it is just a situation caused by an explosion of offerings while the demand (even if it grew quite a bit) being outstripped by the offerings. There is just not enough of us to support all the devs that try to make it.

ehh i don't think devs say "fuck customers" unless customers are being fucky

I mean, most small indie devs are in "well fuck u" whenever there is any argument with the customers, which the whole EGS situation just made worse, as it gives them an avenue not to care about us in any aspect. Devs saying they are fucking us over because we will know it will make it better in some nevulous future.
We have talked about it months ago and i have said i dont blame them fully, as it is a problem of our social bubbles not touching nowadays, makinh it easier to blame us (and Steam) for the failure of their projects.

zkylon · Jul 10, 2019

honestly i think we might be following completely different devs, i wouldn't describe the devs i follow's behaviour to be anything as you say. i've seen mostly frustration about valve's usual lack of transparency and sudden changes in the algorithm, as well as general discomfort around the slow decay of sales for most

so uh, shrug i guess?

not gonna bother with the epic store stuff cos oh boy i don't fucking want to

eonden · Jul 10, 2019

zkylon said:
honestly i think we might be following completely different devs, i wouldn't describe the devs i follow's behaviour to be anything as you say. i've seen mostly frustration about valve's usual lack of transparency and sudden changes in the algorithm, as well as general discomfort around the slow decay of sales for most

so uh, shrug i guess?

not gonna bother with the epic store stuff cos oh boy i don't fucking want to

Yeah, I guess part of my annoyance is the devs I follow(ed) all going full on "steam is causing the indieapocalypse!!" which just ends up making me more annoyed .

As I said before, Valve needs to be more open(improved lately) about the changes they make and give reason for people to use the discoverability tools.

Deleted member 18857 · Jul 10, 2019

The whole thing about the wishlist is a bit of a mystery for me. During any sales, not only this one, I go through my wishlist thinking "what was this game I wishlisted 2 years ago? Is it still something I'd like to play now? Was it a genre I was playing at the time but now I'm over the whole thing?" and then removing things left and right. As for adding new games, I generally rely on the thread for hidden gems here. The discovery queue might be useful for some, but my taste changes so often that the automatic queue creation can't keep up.

On that topic, one game in my wishlist that I don't know what to think of is Dandara. It was a kind of indie darling when it was released, a bit like Celeste or Hollow Knight, except one week later no one was talking about it anymore. Is it worth playing through one year later?

eonden said:
In happier news:

Godhood out in EA.

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
...
Noooooooooooo this week is hell at work and I won't be able to start a game before Sunday bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh

dirtywhirlwind · Jul 10, 2019

~~Super Puzzle Fighter II~~ Crystal Crisis coming to Steam.

Deleted member 43872 · Jul 10, 2019

Iggy said:
On that topic, one game in my wishlist that I don't know what to think of is Dandara. It was a kind of indie darling when it was released, a bit like Celeste or Hollow Knight, except one week later no one was talking about it anymore. Is it worth playing through one year later?

Well I enjoyed it, tho I'd put it a tier below those other two. It's got some cool visuals, good bosses, and the zero-G movement mechanic is fun to learn. Caveats are that the late game gets demanding a bit too quickly, and while it's technically got a Metroidvania structure some of the upgrades are lock-and-key. (Checking the store page now, it looks like it's had a balance patch since I played, so my difficulty complaint might be outdated.)

Chairmanchuck (另一个我) · Jul 10, 2019

zkylon said:
honestly i think we might be following completely different devs, i wouldn't describe the devs i follow's behaviour to be anything as you say. i've seen mostly frustration about valve's usual lack of transparency and sudden changes in the algorithm, as well as general discomfort around the slow decay of sales for most

The thing about the slow decay of sales is, that there are more and more good and great games on Steam and with the endless backlog there will be more and more.

The Metroidvania you develop for years and set at a normal indie pricepoint? People can get Hollow Knight, Rabi Ribi, Touhou Luna Nights for that.
The Visual novel you think people will love? You can get Steins;Gate, Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, Grisaia for that.
The horror game you thought people will shit their pants while playing and make thousands of YT videos about it? There is Layers of Fear 1+2, RE, Subnautica etc.

Then when I go through a discovery list and see those newer games, unless they really look unique or have some twist, why should I buy them, when already big games by other indies have proven they are great. Valve can only do that much for showing other people those games, but maybe those games are just not... interesting enough?
I still see a lot of interesting games in popular new releases and trending releases that I never heard of.

Cosmic Schwung · Jul 10, 2019

Wok said:
True. If I look at my curator page, the peak of views on the first day of the summer sales is similar to last year's.
The main difference is that there are fewer views during the rest of the sales, because people do not use the discovery tools without any monetary incentive.

Can you see what views were like before June last year? Just interested in those flat periods just before and after the summer sale until October where it starts to go up and stays there. Was it the similar over the same months in 2017-18?

Back to the actual point of your post, yes, getting rid of the reward for checking your discovery queue will have badly hurt the number of people finding new games. You'd think they'd want to stick with cards as they take a cut of each sale so it's basically free money for them. I guess they thought the new system would get people to buy more games, but that only helps games which people are already aware of. The more obscure ones are shit out of luck.

fspm · Jul 10, 2019

zkylon said:
this is a poor appreciation of what's discussed here, and also a very biased and unfortunate way of putting it

nobody is asking valve to market their games for them, they're principally asking valve to stop being stupid and screwing them over

devs are in a business relationship with valve and are very much within their rights to negotiate/demand better conditions if they feel they're being treated unfairly. in this modern youtube world i'd say indie devs specially (and specially smaller indie devs) are in almost a worker-employer position with valve, but this is a discussion for another day

in any case, asking indie devs to "run brain damaging commercials on tv 24/7" when clearly valve fucked up (and not even to devs, this event was a disaster for everyone) is dumb and you should stop looking at things that way. Gamers are so bent on stanning for steam over this epic store bullshit that they're starting to develop an adversarial relationship with gamedevs, and specially with struggling gamedevs that are who deserve most support. they're not "shitty games", they just don't have the $$ to run the marketing campaigns you're demanding of them, and they're seeing their livelihood threatened by valve being oblivious to the destructive whims of their own algorithm

If you don't buy every indie game you're hurting 'struggling gamedevs that are who deserve most support'. So just like everybody else. Millions of unknown music bands, artists, writers, unemployed workers whose livelihood depends on this and that. And you don't care about those.
Since when do valve owe discoverability to devs, because it's good for you? Getting paid $10^6 a day is good for me but that's where it ends. Maybe they should put all 20k games on front page, that would be fair.

About epic store 'bullshit'. Let's assume your os is win and you play league of legends. Then epic makes a deal - lol is only available on epic launcher, linux.
'Why the f would I install some shitty linux and some shitty launcher to play my effing game'.
'It's good for the pub, devs and their fluffy cat lucile'
'Why should I care, and f ur cat'
No need to be a hypocrite, a customer 'putting devs first' smells like a fishy schmuck full of bs. I don't need another malware bloatware cause it's good for timmy and his moneyhatted flip flopping friends shafting their customers on kickstarter.

dex3108 · Jul 10, 2019

I am back to my PC again so i can write longer posts :D

To continue my talk about Steam from this morning. Another thing that i find annoying is that Valve is being constantly criticized no matter what they do despite Steam being biggest and most advanced digital game store in the world. It is basically only digital game store that offers this level of store customization. And because they are the biggest they experiment, they have to if they want to advance. Sometimes those experiments work, sometimes not. But they are doing something. I never saw any indie developer complain about PSN or Xbox Live Store that are literally light years behind even stores like Origin, not to mention Steam. Those stores almost never feature indie games on front page and they are nightmare to browse. They literally do nothing to improve those stores for years and nobody says a thing. Sometimes i think that Valve would be better just doing nothing.

So basically Valve in most cases is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Obvious example is opening Steam to everyone. For years indies complained how it is hard to get on Steam, now they want curation back. No other store does anything to improve game discoverability, Valve does it, they get criticized, they offer tons of tools to devs to improve their game visibility, devs don't use them... Honestly i really don't see how Valve can win.

Shelbyville Milhouse · Jul 10, 2019

dex3108 said:
Another thing that i find annoying is that Valve is being constantly criticized no matter what they do despite Steam being biggest and most advanced digital game store in the world.

To be fair, that is exactly why people are criticizing Steam more than other stores. That's just how the world works, if you are the biggest fish around people pay more attention to what you do.
I think it's totally fair to criticize Steam for everything they do wrong, it would just be nice to see the same standard applied to other big stores. Like, I don't need a tear-down of itch.io or anything, but the Microsoft store for example has been a fucking disaster for decades but barley anybody talked about it because nobody cared. UPlay still doesn't have voice chat or the option to appear invisible. But now that Microsoft and Epic are ramping up their store-initiatives it would be nice to actually talk about what they do or don't do compared to Steam instead of just focusing on the couple of things they might do better.

dex3108 said:
Honestly i really don't see how Valve can win.

They can't, really.
Everybody complains about the "bad games on Steam" but the moment Steam starts to regulate games again it'll only be a matter of time before a "Good game not allowed on Steam for dumb reason" thread pops up and people are angry about that.
On the other hand everybody is talking about how "Epic get's all the exclusives", meanwhile there are amazing games coming out on Steam each and every week but you read some comments here and it sounds like all Steam has nowadays are Erotic My Little Pony Visual Novels drawn in MS Paint.

rainking187 · Jul 10, 2019

Ugh, I don't understand why a game that has a ton of side quests like Prey would populate everywhere with strong enemies later in the game to discourage you from doing them.

dex3108 · Jul 10, 2019

Fantastapotamus said:
To be fair, that is exactly why people are criticizing Steam more than other stores. That's just how the world works, if you are the biggest fish around people pay more attention to what you do.
I think it's totally fair to criticize Steam for everything they do wrong, it would just be nice to see the same standard applied to other big stores. Like, I don't need a tear-down of itch.io or anything, but the Microsoft store for example has been a fucking disaster for decades but barley anybody talked about it because nobody cared. UPlay still doesn't have voice chat or the option to appear invisible. But now that Microsoft and Epic are ramping up their store-initiatives it would be nice to actually talk about what they do or don't do compared to Steam instead of just focusing on the couple of things they might do better.

I have nothing against valid criticism, that is always good thing. That is how you improve. But as you said there are far worse stores out there that get 0 criticism for some reason. And i would even say that Sony is worse than MS when we look how they treat indies for example. Sony was best buds with them for first 2 years of PS4 when there wasn't enough games for the system, after that they just "ignored" them. And if they promoted some of the indie games on their shows they were mostly success stories from the PC. I mean just go and look PSN Store for the love of God.

Wok · Jul 10, 2019

Cosmic Schwung said:
Can you see what views were like before June last year?

I created the curator at the very beginning of May 2018, so nope.
Moreover, the graph is not much interactive: I can see the value for each day by hovering the mouser over the plot, but that is it.

dex3108 said:
Honestly i really don't see how Valve can win.

More seriously, Valve does not have to play to win: they can wait for their competitors to play the wrong move. It is only a matter of time.

Teeth · Jul 10, 2019

fspm said:
Since when do valve owe discoverability to devs, because it's good for you? Getting paid $10^6 a day is good for me but that's where it ends. Maybe they should put all 20k games on front page, that would be fair.

Just a point on this: Discoverability is good for a storefront and for consumers.

In a Valve libertarian utopia, marketing is not about getting people to buy things they don't want, it's to optimally expose customers to products the do want. A consequence of a store that continuously shows its users products they don't want is that the customer becomes disinterested in going to that shop.

This works on a micro and macro scale;

A user that is already "bought in" to a marketplace (like, say, a Steam hardcore fangirl) is more likely to make repeat visits to the store if the store is constantly showing them things that they want.

On a macro scale, new users or uninvested users who come to a store and see nothing that they want are less likely to come back again (the "all mobile games are gacha garbage so why would I ever play a mobile game" malaise).

There's tons of data out there about frequency of store visits and frequency of marketing exposure that shows that it converts to purchases, so I don't really feel the need to prove that.

So this is one of those win-win situations for store fronts: promote games that people specifically want and they'll keep coming back.

Wishlists are marketing; they are reminders for consumers about things they thought, at least at one point, that they were interested in. They put desirable products at the forefront, easy to find for users and easy to scrape for algorithms to determine other things those users may like (as they create combinatorial data rather than isolated data points).

Valve doesn't owe marketing to anyone, but it's in their best interests to promote things that people want back to those people, because it keeps them coming back.

matimeo · Jul 10, 2019

AHA-Lambda said:
Aww I didn't know that about it :/

I'll give it a bit more time to see if it'll ramp up but if not I'll be dropping it :(

Yeah, you can play solo but the spirit is really playing with at least another person.

Nothing compares to having to save your friend from a huge web after yelling at them to not go down that alley.

Also to revive, takes half your health so better not collect all the health until you need it lol.

Or trying to find what alley your friend is down in and getting directions from your buddy while they yell "watch out on your left !".

I've played a bit solo but once I played with my buddy, I just wait till he's available and we are trying to recruit another friend but he won't get off his PS4 bah.

dex3108 said:
I have nothing against valid criticism, that is always good thing. That is how you improve. But as you said there are far worse stores out there that get 0 criticism for some reason. And i would even say that Sony is worse than MS when we look how they treat indies for example. Sony was best buds with them for first 2 years of PS4 when there wasn't enough games for the system, after that they just "ignored" them. And if they promoted some of the indie games on their shows they were mostly success stories from the PC. I mean just go and look PSN Store for the love of God.

Bigger you are and the larger your perceived impact is on any one area , the more criticisms.

That's why big companies have huge PR, marketing, customer and business partner relations and legal departments.

There will never be a comparison to MS or Sony or anyone else, that's not how people work. They care about what is impacting them in that moment.

Oinone · Jul 10, 2019

I just rage quited Obduction and watched the rest on Youtube. What the hell.

First it gave me nausea. It was especially bad while I had to use the cart. It became a bit better after that, but still I got an unpleasant feeling deep down in my stomach and couldn't play it longer than 2 hours.
I was also quickly fed up of the long ways you have to walk back and forth. Those two points alone made me grab a walkthrough rather quick.
But even with the walkthrough, sometimes I had really no idea what was going on and how I'm supposed to understand shit. Especially when this swapping back and forth through the worlds started.
All this stuff is waaaay over my head, and I don't have the patience to read all those docs lying around, too.
Sometimes it is even hard to discover all the small pathes in the big environment. I wasn't even able to water the other trees, let alone get close to them.
And then I reached that cursed maze puzzle.

Who thought that would be a good idea? That's were it broke me. Not touching this ever again, thanks.

Blu · Jul 10, 2019

Jawmuncher

dex3108 · Jul 10, 2019

matimeo said:
Bigger you are and the larger your perceived impact is on any one area , the more criticisms.

That's why big companies have huge PR, marketing, customer and business partner relations and legal departments.

There will never be a comparison to MS or Sony or anyone else, that's not how people work. They care about what is impacting them in that moment.

Both PSN and Xbox Live for example are impacting millions of people around the world because they are still limited services. They still use regional accounts instead unified accounts and regional stores. They still offer limited payment methods and features (for the love of god PSN still doesn't have gifting). I own both consoles and they both offer awful services for non supported countries. I am literally breaking their ToS just to be able to use damn consoles. And yet if i would to post thread about this on Era for example it wouldn't even reach second page. And this is happening for years in console space and yet we see very little criticism. So those companies don;t even need to use PR machines because almost nobody cares.

Wok · Jul 10, 2019

eonden said:
Valve is the store / platform with the best tools for discovering games

They have an API, which is nice, and allows us to have third-party websites like SteamDB, etc. However, the official tools are not so great.

Teeth said:
Valve doesn't owe marketing to anyone, but it's in their best interests to promote things that people want back to those people, because it keeps them coming back.

For some reasons, it seems that Valve is having a hard time recommending products to its customers. I don't have the same experience as eonden and I find the (personalized) recommended games pointless. If I want to learn about a game, I would rather quickly check the new releases with a Discord bot, SteamDB, or in a MetaCouncil thread. It is infinitely more effective for me.

From Valve's perspective, it is a lot easier to "keep [customers] coming" with the activity feed (addiction to social media), and sale events which reward users for visiting daily (carrots), or even better, for using the "discovery queue" (which to me is another "I'm feeling lucky" button) every day.

I would not believe that Valve chose the hard path and prioritized their recommendation/promotion tools over the usual marketing techniques. If they did work on it, then it must have been either too hard for them to achieve good results, or at the bottom of their priority list.

Jawmuncher · Jul 10, 2019

Blu said:
Jawmuncher

City 17 · Jul 10, 2019

Jawmuncher said:

Now go and fun the whole thing before it gets the DC treatment.

AvernOffset · Jul 10, 2019

Oinone said:
I just rage quited Obduction and watched the rest on Youtube. What the hell.

First it gave me nausea. It was especially bad while I had to use the cart. It became a bit better after that, but still I got an unpleasant feeling deep down in my stomach and couldn't play it longer than 2 hours.
I was also quickly fed up of the long ways you have to walk back and forth. Those two points alone made me grab a walkthrough rather quick.
But even with the walkthrough, sometimes I had really no idea what was going on and how I'm supposed to understand shit. Especially when this swapping back and forth through the worlds started.
All this stuff is waaaay over my head, and I don't have the patience to read all those docs lying around, too.
Sometimes it is even hard to discover all the small pathes in the big environment. I wasn't even able to water the other trees, let alone get close to them.
And then I reached that cursed maze puzzle.

Who thought that would be a good idea? That's were it broke me. Not touching this ever again, thanks.

If the maze puzzle you're talking about is the one where you shift chunks of the maze back and forth between different worlds, then yeah... I enjoyed Obduction well enough, but that puzzle stuck out as particularly awful. It's not that hard to solve, but it takes FOREVER because of all the load times as you warp between worlds. It's a ponderous game to begin with and that sequence just takes it too far. If I ever play that game again, it will be on an SSD or not at all.

Tizoc · Jul 10, 2019

Blu said:
Jawmuncher

Not feeling the pixel art sadly :/

Wok · Jul 10, 2019

We are going to see so many games with 2077 in the title. This one has just appeared and it is yet another sexy jigsaw anime game (which is not in the adult section).

eonden · Jul 10, 2019

Wok said:
They have an API, which is nice, and allows us to have third-party websites like SteamDB, etc. However, the official tools are not so great.

For some reasons, it seems that Valve is having a hard time recommending products to its customers. I don't have the same experience as eonden and I find the (personalized) recommended games pointless. If I want to learn about a game, I would rather quickly check the new releases with a Discord bot, SteamDB, or in a MetaCouncil thread. It is infinitely more effective for me.

From Valve's perspective, it is a lot easier to "keep [customers] coming" with the activity feed (addiction to social media), and sale events which reward users for visiting daily (carrots), or even better, for using the "discovery queue" (which to me is another "I'm feeling lucky" button) every day.

I would not believe that Valve chose the hard path and prioritized their recommendation/promotion tools over the usual marketing techniques. If they did work on it, then it must have been either too hard for them to achieve good results, or at the bottom of their priority list.

Yeah, it is weird, my experience with my dummy account and my real account both gave me interesting games in the discovery queues. I guess in my case I am just lucky or Steam has enough information to at least give me 2-3 games that are quite interesting. I also share some of the finds with Tizoc when he misses them in the monthly topic :P. But still, the discoverability tools I was comparing it with the other videogame stores which offer much much less on that regard.

Again, I have said I want them to do more, such as promoting more directly via paying journalists to write pieces like the amazing "Games you might have missed this week" and showing them on the store, doing smaller "nintendo mini directs", more genre related events (which we have seen an increase on), more in-depth articles of the most sold games of the month (improving on what they have done the last 2 months), making curators a more integral part of the store (and give them some sort of reward to encourage better curator work), and encourage the use of the discovery queues.

About the queue, for instance from today:

A.N.N.E on Steam

Explore the mysterious and beautiful planet Gomi on foot or with your spaceship in this action packed platformer and space shooter hybrid. Your mission is simple, retrieve A.N.N.E and escape.

store.steampowered.com

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098340/Zup_9/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1094250/It_Stares_Back/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1077600/Song_Beater_Quite_My_Tempo/

and:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1106850/Totally_Reliable_Delivery_Service_Beta/

Also, talking about that last one, I find it interesting how some devs are now creating a second store page that is an open Beta so that they can get the game reviewed and get feedback from it, but without affecting any possible reviews on the base game like in EA.

Aaron D. · Jul 10, 2019

Oinone said:

I've always loved and respected the MYST series, but damn I'm dumber than a rock when it comes to actually playing them.

Never beat a single one. Not even close.

Chance Hale · Jul 10, 2019

Unlock earth defense force 5 now

Kaffeemann · Jul 10, 2019

zkylon said:
this rx 580 thing is fucking loud. i feel like i'm gonna end up underclocking it (is that a thing?)

You should look into undervolting. It can help a lot with heat and noise. With AMD GPU you can even do that via the driver.

dex3108 · Jul 10, 2019

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforc...er-and-performance-benchmarking-app-download/

Volimar · Jul 10, 2019

LOL @ Cyberprank. I didn't even know Asylum films was also in the games business.

Gelf · Jul 10, 2019

One thing I'm always curious about when there's talk about the valve algorithim killing sales is who on the otherhand recieved a spike, we never hear about that. Surely if a change was bad for sales across the board valve would notice the drop in overall revenue right away and revert it pretty quickly, the fact they don't suggests to me the sales went elsewhere.

Oinone · Jul 10, 2019

AvernOffset said:
If the maze puzzle you're talking about is the one where you shift chunks of the maze back and forth between different worlds, then yeah... I enjoyed Obduction well enough, but that puzzle stuck out as particularly awful. It's not that hard to solve, but it takes FOREVER because of all the load times as you warp between worlds. It's a ponderous game to begin with and that sequence just takes it too far. If I ever play that game again, it will be on an SSD or not at all.

Yessss.
That made me think: Oh, that's why they highly recommend a SSD... But even with, it would still be an unnecessary tideous task.

Aaron D. said:
I've always loved and respected the MYST series, but damn I'm dumber than a rock when it comes to actually playing them.

Never beat a single one. Not even close.

I remember the first being okayish, but the second was beyond me already. Played it with a walkthrough without understanding anything. But I always enjoyed the worlds, in Obduction too.
Never touched the following Myst games. I played some alikes, which could be better or as abstruse as the original, but not my cup of tea overall, so I started to avoid them. Just grabbed Obduction when it was for free, wouldn't have played it otherwise.

Deleted member 43872 · Jul 10, 2019

Volimar said:
LOL @ Cyberprank. I didn't even know Asylum films was also in the games business.

The SteamDB history reveals that previous titles include Cyberfuck 2069 (does Steam have rules about swears in titles?) and Cyberpunk 2069 (just plain old trademark violation).

AvernOffset · Jul 10, 2019

This looks neat. Parenting simulator against the backdrop of... *checks notes* an alien invasion.

Deleted member 5621 · Jul 10, 2019

Madjoki said:
Pretty much confirms users actually wanted to delete from wishlist and not because they didn't understand rules.

Dunno about that. People are just not prone to spend time "fixing" past actions because someone else sent the wrong message. Of course, it's probably a mix of both.

Baron von Loathsome said:
I just might have to bite the bullet for Karnov's Revenge, Galaxy Fight, and Waku Waku 7.

But Galaxy Fight sucks.

Chairmanchuck said:
The thing about the slow decay of sales is, that there are more and more good and great games on Steam and with the endless backlog there will be more and more.

The Metroidvania you develop for years and set at a normal indie pricepoint? People can get Hollow Knight, Rabi Ribi, Touhou Luna Nights for that.
The Visual novel you think people will love? You can get Steins;Gate, Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, Grisaia for that.
The horror game you thought people will shit their pants while playing and make thousands of YT videos about it? There is Layers of Fear 1+2, RE, Subnautica etc.

Then when I go through a discovery list and see those newer games, unless they really look unique or have some twist, why should I buy them, when already big games by other indies have proven they are great. Valve can only do that much for showing other people those games, but maybe those games are just not... interesting enough?
I still see a lot of interesting games in popular new releases and trending releases that I never heard of.

Really makes you think how the market would end up if some people got their wish of not having separate platforms at all; one box can play any game. Also makes an interesting discussion for streaming services.

PC-tan · Jul 10, 2019

I've been playing OG Half Life and I can see why people liked it, I'm guessing that for it's time a lot of the stuff in it was really something.

Becks' · Jul 10, 2019

Does triple buffer v-sync increase input lag?

manchego obfuscator · Jul 10, 2019

A.N.N.E. was Kickstarted back in 2013 or so. Weird to finally see it on Steam, but I wasn't too impressed with the demo, unfortunately.

.exe · Jul 10, 2019

Becks' said:
Does triple buffer v-sync increase input lag?

Compared to no vsync? Yes.

Becks' · Jul 10, 2019

daxy said:
Compared to no vsync? Yes.

What about when you compare to double buffer?

.exe · Jul 10, 2019

Becks' said:
What about when you compare to double buffer?

Not a lot of games do true double buffered anymore afaik. I haven't seen anything recently that dips down to 30 if you don't get a stable 60 anyway. (Or 1/2 * monitor refresh) DQ11 did it iirc, but outside of that I can't think of any other example.

I believe that at a locked 60, double buffered should always be faster. But if if it dips, it'll go all the way down to 30, so triple buffering has the advantage of operating with variable faster frame times in between 30 and 60. In those situations it can be quicker.

If you're on Nvidia, fast sync is the fastest vsync available. You can also try borderless windowed and see how that feels.

apathetic · Jul 10, 2019

Wok said:
[redacted]

Just beat Furi and looked up the maker to see what else they had going on and that popped up. Neat.

ghibli99 · Jul 10, 2019

PC-tan said:
I've been playing OG Half Life and I can see why people liked it, I'm guessing that for it's time a lot of the stuff in it was really something.

It was pretty mindblowing stuff at the time. The opening half hour or so was permanently burned in my brain. I also remember combat encounters in that game being no joke.

Annubis · Jul 10, 2019

AvernOffset said:
This looks neat. Parenting simulator against the backdrop of... *checks notes* an alien invasion.

I'm interested...

Also:
«How will you raise Ciel? Using a helpful schedule with touch-screen controls on Nintendo Switch, plot each day of the week and see what happens as the days unfold.»
What?

Teeth · Jul 10, 2019

Wok said:
They have an API, which is nice, and allows us to have third-party websites like SteamDB, etc. However, the official tools are not so great.

For some reasons, it seems that Valve is having a hard time recommending products to its customers. I don't have the same experience as eonden and I find the (personalized) recommended games pointless. If I want to learn about a game, I would rather quickly check the new releases with a Discord bot, SteamDB, or in a MetaCouncil thread. It is infinitely more effective for me.

From Valve's perspective, it is a lot easier to "keep [customers] coming" with the activity feed (addiction to social media), and sale events which reward users for visiting daily (carrots), or even better, for using the "discovery queue" (which to me is another "I'm feeling lucky" button) every day.

I would not believe that Valve chose the hard path and prioritized their recommendation/promotion tools over the usual marketing techniques. If they did work on it, then it must have been either too hard for them to achieve good results, or at the bottom of their priority list.

One thing to keep in mind, and I've gleaned this from your posts here: you are likely an outlier when it comes to taste. Any algorithmic recommendation is going to be tuned for the most users (and if they have any feedback mechanisms built it, they likely have routines that eliminate outlier results, as they can improperly skew data). So yeah, the algorithm isn't going to work for you.

I also don't think Valve has very strict or advanced algorithms going on. They appear to try to filter for "good" rather than "what this user thinks is good". This might be a purposeful design philosophy, as Valve likely doesn't want to get criticized by its partners (or at least moreso) for tuning an algorithm beyond generalisms.

Deleted member 5621 · Jul 10, 2019

Here's my experience with Steam's algorithm:

>play Blazblue
>get erotic anime games recommended for a week, maybe a fighting game or two
>play Dustforce
>get 2D indie games recommended for a week
>play Sleeping Dogs
>get FPS and open world recommendations for a week

It's so binary it's laughable.

chadskin · Jul 10, 2019

Parsnip · Jul 10, 2019

Speaking of algos, has there been any recent talk about the machine learning stuff they mentioned back in January?

Also I wonder how soon after the sale we'll get the beta of the new library. Next week?

PC Gaming ERA | July 2019 - Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of RICHAAAAAAARD!

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