After saying bye bye to the voter-led Steam Greenlight last week, Valve have today launched Steam Direct. It s their new way for developers to submit games to the store by filling in some forms and throwing $100 onto Valve s gold hoard as an publishing fee. There s a lot more info about all this in a blog post but let s go over the basics. … [visit site to read more]
Steam Greenlight, the process by which developers can get their game on Steam s digi-store by collecting enough votes, has been shut down and all voting is now suspended. This is to pave the way for Valve s new method of adding games to their store Steam Direct which is coming on June 13. It s all part of a plan that has been in the works for a while, and although it mostly affects developers looking to sell their various murder simulators this will also likely change both the quantity and variety of games you ll be wading through. … [visit site to read more]
$100 ( 80-ish) is how much it’ll cost to publish a game on Steam after Greenlight shuts down, Valve have confirmed. They’re ditching the Greenlight system of having would-be players vote on which games reach the Steam store, and replacing it with a system that’ll let developers sign up and, after being verified, submit games directly to Steam for a fee. What we’ll probably see is many more games hitting Steam, and quicker. Valve had previously tossed around $100 and $5,000 as mooted figures. … [visit site to read more]
New feature! There are more new PC games released each week than any one human could realistically play, and while we try to zero in on the most interesting, many lovely things inevitably fall through the cracks. So here’s the deal: each week, I browse the teeming ranks of Steam (we’ll also be including itch.io a little later, incidentally) for ten likely prospects released within the past seven days. I play each for ten minutes, then decide whether or not I’d like to keep playing them. It’s not a review, but it is, but it isn’t, but maybe? In any case: new games for good people. That’s you, that is.
Update: this piece now includes (as it will every time henceforth) my Pick Of The Week from the ten games included.> … [visit site to read more]
The people working on Steam (and more generally, the team at Valve) seem to be on a transparency kick at the moment. There are multiple blog entries which try to open up particularly opaque bits of the company so users can understand what’s going on. Presumably there’s an element of using that understanding to defuse criticism when it comes to subjects like the terrible reputation of Steam’s support system and whether it’s warranted if you add in some more data. The most recent entry zeroes in on how the store itself works and aims to share the “thinking” the system has used to come up with game recommendations: … [visit site to read more]
Steam has implemented several changes to how giving games as gifts works, some which are helpful and others less so. Helpful: if you send someone a gift and they decline it, you’ll receive a refund rather than a copy of the game. Less helpful: gift now must be bought for someone specific, and not as nebulous ‘gift copies’ you can sit on. There’s more too. Some changes seem intended to combat people who hoard, trade, and sell games in that weird grey market, though Valve’s explanation is simply that “we want to make it easier for you to share the games you love with friends.”
What up, graph nerds? Well, what up-and-down-as-it-tracks-Steam-customer-support-requests-over-time, graph nerds? Steam now has a page where you can track basic customer support data is what I’m trying to say. … [visit site to read more]
Is it me, or is it them? Time was that the presence of yet another icon on my taskbar, yet another login to remember and yet another unknown degree of resource allocation drove me spare. EA’s Origin, Ubisoft’s Uplay, Games For Windows Live whatever it was Stardock used to use, Direct2Drive as-was, even GOG, and probably a fair few more now lost to the cruel sands of time and Windows 10 incompatibility. Used to drive me spare. Used to drive me to angry comments on a videogame blog>. The clutter, the silly interfaces, and most of all the refusal to accept that, for better or worse, they didn’t have a chance of overcoming Steam, so why waste everyone’s time?
I don’t seem to care anymore. Not much, anyway. … [visit site to read more]
In an apparent ongoing battle to hide every unknown new game released on Steam, overnight Valve have updated the Steam store to make it far, far> harder to just see a list of new releases on the platform.
As we’ve discussed many times before, as recently as yesterday, unknown games have an incredibly hard time receiving any visibility in Steam’s crazed daily churn of 20 to 30 new releases. Big names, or those that see instant sales, get promoted to the big boxes on the front page, but smaller games are relegated to a hidden list that just became a whole lot more hidden. … [visit site to read more]
There was a time when Valve could do no wrong. Champions of PC gaming, undeniably pivotal in the current huge success of the gaming platform, and releasing stunning game after stunning game. When they spoke, the industry listened, and reported with a well-earned reverence. Those times, it’s safe to say, are long gone. Apart from past glories, Valve is now primarily known for Dota 2 and Steam (but for an industry-ignored VR hat), the latter being a monopoly-controlling online store that’s becoming increasingly nonfunctional and dysfunctional, and which they apparently have no coherent idea how to control. And yet so much that’s so wrong with Steam is so easily fixed: it just requires people actually doing something. … [visit site to read more]