In this post we want to talk about Steam Direct's publishing fee, and some additional changes we're making to improve the way the Store works. If you haven't read our first post, where we talked about the Steam Store algorithm, it's probably worth your time to nip back and read that first. That should help you better understand the reasoning behind the changes we're going to talk about in this post.

As you read, it's worth keeping in mind that there has been a subtle, but important shift in the way the Steam Store is designed. In the past, the challenge was to figure out what products should be on the Store. Now, we think the challenge is to figure out what products a specific player wants to see. There are many different kinds of players, with many different interests, so flexibility in how they view the Store seems like a requirement.

Back when we announced Steam Direct in February, we hadn't decided how much developers would need to pay to publish their games. We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems. We thought it would be great if the game community at large had a conversation about it, including both players and developers, which was why we chose not to highlight a specific amount in that original post.

Since then, we've seen a bunch of great conversations discussing the various pros and cons of whether there should be an amount, what that amount should be, ways that recouping could work, which developers would be helped or hurt, predictions for how the store would be affected, and many other facets to the decision. There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned. Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work.

So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting. We're also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we're receiving, so that we're ready to implement more features like the the Trading Card changes we covered in the last blog post, which aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm.

We believe that if we inject human thinking into the Store algorithm, while at the same time increasing the transparency of its output, we'll have created a public process that will incrementally drive the Store to better serve everyone using it.

We know that some players really want to see a human involved in the selection of products they see in the Steam Store. Prior to the Discovery update, that human was someone at Valve. As Steam grew, so did the types of players using it, and the range of games they wanted to see. Over time, we became less and less confident that we represented the interests of all those different players.

The Steam Curators features was designed to be a solution to this problem, allowing anyone to contribute to the process of highlighting games on Steam, and then allowing players to find someone who they felt represented their gaming interests. Some players feared that we'd give too much power to curators to control the Steam store, and that their own particular interests wouldn't be represented. So, as with the other filtering features in the Store, we chose to keep Curators strictly an opt-in feature, where the input from each curator only affected the Store algorithm for players who explicitly stated they wished to follow that curator.

Unfortunately, while we shipped the Curator feature in the first Discovery update, it hasn't received the attention it needs to be a good solution. So recently we've spent some time talking and listening to members of both sides - the curators using the system to provide commentary on the Store, and the players using the system to inform their decisions. In both areas we've identified a set of work that we believe will make it more useful.

We're expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create, allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations. We'll have some more details as we get closer to releasing the update, but here are some highlights:

Many Curators create content for other platforms, such as YouTube, so we're making it much easier for them to show that content alongside their curations.




One suggestion from Curators that we liked was the ability for them to create personal lists of games. This will allow Curators to provide specific kinds of advice, whether that's general suggestions about which games to buy in the current sale, or more specific lists, like which games to play to follow the evolution of a particular type of game design, the body of a work from a favorite developer, or the games in a Curator's weekly Game Club.




Another big request came from both Curators and developers, who want an easier way to help Curators get pre-release access to upcoming games. It's often hard for Curators to get the attention of developers who build the specific kinds of games that a Curator covers, and it can be similarly hard for a smaller developer to find the Curators who would be interested. So we're building a system that will make that a painless process for everyone involved, which means that you should see more useful curations coming out of the Curators who like to explore newer titles.


At the same time, we're making it easier for players to use Curators to help them browse the Store. Since they're an opt-in feature, we've decided to give Curators more visibility throughout the Store as a whole, so if you're following a Curator, you'll see their thoughts in new places, and with higher prominence.

Like all the work in the Steam Store, Steam Direct will take some iteration to get the kinks out. We're optimistic. Aiming for the low publishing fee gives every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players. The Store algorithm will do its best to make sure you see games that are worth your time to look at. Combining everyone's increased visibility into the algorithm's thinking with the human eyes of Curators will hopefully ensure that whenever that algorithm isn't working properly, we'll know about it, and have the chance to fix it.

Our next post will wrap up this series of posts, where we'll cover the sunsetting of Greenlight, and the timing for the release of Steam Direct.

In our previous post, we described what we believe a successful Steam Store would look like, and why balancing the interests of all the players and developers made it an interesting challenge. In this post, we want to talk about another group that adds further complexity: bad actors exploiting the store algorithm for financial gain.

The reason this group exists is due to various systems that add value to owning games on Steam beyond having the game itself. The best example is Steam Trading Cards, which also happens to be the primary one that these bad actors are exploiting.

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We added Steam Trading Cards in 2013, and they had two main goals:

• For players, they were small collectibles associated with games. They were tradeable, which meant you could collect ones for games you loved by trading away cards for the games you loved less. In effect, they were a way for you to show other players what your favorite games were. We knew some players wouldn't care about them, which was fine - they could simply throw them up on the Steam Community Market, and use the results to buy some other game.
  
• For developers, they were an easy way to add extra value to their game, and provide rewards to their biggest fans.

After the release of Trading Cards, the number of players interested in them grew significantly, until it reached the point where the demand for cards became significant enough that there was an economic opportunity worth taking advantage of. And that's when our group of bad actors arrived, aiming to make money by releasing 'fake' games on Steam.

These fake developers take advantage of a feature we provide to all developers on Steam, which is the ability to generate Steam keys for their games. They generate many thousands of these keys and hand them out to bots running Steam accounts, which then idle away in their games to collect Trading Cards. Even if no real players ever see or buy one of these fake games, their developers make money by farming cards.

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Farming Trading Cards for profit as a developer isn't rocket science. The primary difficulty is that they need to get a game up on Steam. For a while now, we've been engaged in an escalating war of disabling their latest method of gaming Greenlight's voting mechanisms, where each time we succeed, they circle around and come up with a new way. Unfortunately, this approach isn't terribly sustainable - they continue to get smarter and more large scale in their methods of generating tons of data, and we're spending more and more time fighting it.

We could restrict the ability for developers to generate Steam keys for their games, but we hate to degrade tools that legitimate developers are using to make their players happy. We're also not certain it would actually solve the problem - there are many ways a bad actor could try to get their game owned by all their bot accounts, and they just need to find a way to do it that costs less than they're making from selling their Trading Cards.

You might wonder why this is really an issue. After all, if no real players are buying their games, and their cards are being traded on the market to players who want them, where's the harm? Isn't Valve making money from the market fees on their Trading Cards? While there's truth in both of these points, the problem is that these games damage something we care about a lot, because it affects all our players - the Steam Store's algorithm.

As we mentioned in our last post, the algorithm's primary job is to chew on a lot of data about games and players, and ultimately decide which games it should show you. These Trading Card farming games produce a lot of faux data, because there's a lot of apparent player activity around them. As a result, the algorithm runs the risk of thinking that one of these games is actually a popular game that real players should see.

So we've decided to take a different approach - remove the economic incentive that's at the root of the problem.



Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we're going to move to a system where games don't start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it's actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who've played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you'll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.

The confidence metric is built from a variety of pieces of data, all aimed at separating legitimate games and players from fake games and bots. You might wonder why the confidence metric will succeed at identifying fake games, when we weren't being successful at using data to prevent them getting through Greenlight. The reason is that Greenlight is used by a tiny subsection of Steam's total playerbase, producing far less data overall, which makes it more easily gamed. In addition, Greenlight only allows players to vote and comment, so that data is narrow. Steam at large allows players to interact with games in many different ways, generating a broad set of data for each game, and that makes identifying fake ones an easier task.

With this change, we hope to significantly reduce the economic incentive for the bad actors to release fake games on Steam. We're hopeful that this will have little negative impact on other developers and players, with a small number of games having a delay before their Trading Cards start to drop. On the positive side, it should significantly improve the quality of the data being fed into the Store algorithms, which is a good thing for everyone.

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As always, if you think we've missed something in the analysis of the tradeoffs we're working within, don't hesitate to discuss it in any major gaming forum (we read them all), or in our own Steam Community Forum.

Next post, we're going to talk about the Steam Direct publishing fee, and some other changes we'll be rolling out soon.

Whenever we announce a change to the Steam Store, we're always really interested to read the discussions that follow. Obviously we see a wide range of opinions on how good a job the Store is doing, but increasingly we're seeing that people have very different ideas of what its job even is - and what it should be.

That's understandable. One of the reasons it's so hard to make a good store - one of the reasons we've been working on it for years, and one of the reasons we think we still have years of work left to do - is that it has so many jobs. It has to serve so many players whose tastes and interests are not only different, but sometimes complete opposites.

So we thought it would be useful to define what we believe success would be for the Steam Store. That way, everyone would understand what we're trying to do, and discussions could focus on what we're trying to do separately from whether or not we're doing it well enough. This distinction also helped us realize we should be collaborating more directly with the community around improving the Steam Store.

This blog post aims to start that process by being the first in a set of three that explains our thinking around the Steam Store, and our plans for how we'll improve it with Steam Direct. We're going to talk about Store's goals, and how it executes them. In the second post, we'll cover some ways the Store is being exploited, and some changes we're making to address that. Finally, in the third we'll talk about the Steam Direct publishing fee, and some features that we'll be releasing in the coming weeks.

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So what would a successful Steam Store look like? To answer that, we need to look at all the different kinds of people who use it.

• Players who are highly connected to the online game community & conversations, and players who are totally unconnected
  
• Players who browse the store looking for a game, and players who arrive already knowing the title they're looking for
  
• Players who come to the store once a month, and players who visit multiple times a day
  
• Players who just want to buy the latest AAA title, and players who want to search for hidden gems
  
• Players who want to play titles earlier in their development, and get involved in their evolution
  
• Players who want games with specific attributes, such as a type of gameplay, support for a specific technology, translation to their local language, etc

• Developers with AAA titles that have large, existing fan bases, and developers who are barely known, yet have a game that would be a hit if players found it
  
• Developers who want to build deliberately niche games, and have them find that niche audience
  
• Developers who want to get community feedback earlier in the development process

We believe that a successful store would be one that treated all these people, both players and developers, in a manner that they would consider fair. Unfortunately, these groups often have competing interests, so it's important to understand that if we're not doing exactly what one group wants, it's probably because we're trying to weigh it against another group's interests. It might seem obvious that developers have some competing interests, but it's also true on the player side - some players specifically enjoy exploring Early Access titles, while others never want to see them.

And ultimately, that is why the Steam Store is a design challenge. We could make the problem a lot simpler by choosing to ignore some set of players or developers, but we think there are already stores that have chosen to do that, and it's much more interesting to try and figure out how to build a single store that works for everyone.



For a while now, the features we've been building have all been aimed at making the Store more successful for those groups of players and developers. Allowing the community to tag games into useful categories, and allowing players to filter the store to their tastes, let players control what they see in the Store. The Discovery updates helped players who came to browse the Store, and developers who had games that needed a certain kind of player to find them. Curators, Reviews, and Refunds all tried to help players and developers of niche or undiscovered games to find their audience.

Greenlight was a step towards opening Steam up to a wider range of games and developers, rather than us acting as gatekeepers trying to guess what people will like. We've seen huge successes from games we had no idea would be popular, and whole new communities have sprung up around genres that previously couldn't get on Steam at all. To us, that confirmed our suspicion that no single, small group of people should be sitting in judgement over what is and isn't a good game. We should do some basic checks to make sure the game works, and we now do that on every title - but not insert our own tastes as a filter between what developers want to make and what players want to play. We could serve one particular group of players that way, but Steam can and should serve a more diverse range of people and experiences than that.

AAA players and developers have probably had the least amount of new features applied to them, largely because our data showed that the store was already working well for them - but we have to be careful to not stop that being the case in our efforts to help all the other titles. As much as the online conversation is dominated by indie titles, there's a huge audience of players who just want to buy AAA titles.

These all feel like positive steps towards what we see as the goal for the Steam Store. But we know it isn't serving every type of player and developer as well as it could, so here's what we're focusing on next.



The algorithm behind the Store that's tasked with achieving the goals we've described above ultimately ends up producing this: the games you see when you load up the Store.

The Store is constantly trying to balance all the different interested groups of players and developers. It knows that it has a limited number of spaces it can use to show games to a player. It has some knowledge of the player, if the player is logged in and has a purchase / play history. It has some knowledge of the game, based on what the developer has told it and what previous purchasers of the game have said & done. It chews on all that data, and finally, decides which games it should show the player in all the various sections of the Store.

The problem with black box algorithms like this is that it's hard to know when they aren't working as intended. Did we not show a game to a player because the algorithm correctly guessed that the player wouldn't be interested in it? Or because there were other games it thought the player would be more interested in? Or just because of a bug?

We had similar problems in the Dota 2 matchmaking system, which was also a black box algorithm. We found that when we better exposed the data around the black box (in that case, the matchmaking ranks of the players), our players understood the black box better, and as a result, were able to better identify cases where it wasn't working correctly.

So we're going to do the same with the Steam Store. We want to show you more of what it's doing and why - and we have some features planned to help with this, starting with one we're launching today: an algorithm section on game pages that states why the Store thinks this game will (or will not) be interesting to you.



This section will let you see inside the black box, and understand what the Store is thinking. We hope it will be useful whenever you're exploring the Store, but in particular, whenever you've navigated from an external web page directly to a specific game's Store page. In those cases, this section will help you understand whether or not this game is something the Store would recommend to you. In other cases, you might be more or less interested in something the store recommends if you know exactly why it's recommending it. For instance, knowing that a particular friend or curator likes or dislikes a game might make it clearer whether you'd like it. Finally, if the store recommends something you know you're not interested in, you'll be able to see where its decision making is going wrong, and tell us about it.

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Hopefully this post gives you a better understanding of what we're trying to do with the Steam Store. In our next post, we'll be covering the ways that bad actors have been gaming the Store algorithms to create revenue for themselves, which confuses our algorithms enough that it starts serving customers less effectively. We'll cover some changes that we believe should tackle the problem.

Following that, we'll talk about Steam Direct's publishing fee, and how we're approaching that decision.

Today we’re announcing changes to gifts on Steam. The gifting process has had a bunch of friction in it for a while, and we want to make it easier for you to share the games you love with friends. Steam Gifting will now be a system of direct exchange from gift buyer to gift receiver, and we will be retiring the Gift to E-mail and Gift to Inventory options. Here's a quick breakdown of benefits from the new system:

Go ahead and buy a gift months in advance and have it delivered to a friend on time, every time.

In the old system, a declined gift would sneak back into the giver's inventory and remain on their bill. Now, if a recipient already has the title, or just doesn't want it, they can click decline and the purchase is refunded directly to the gift giver.

No more worrying if a Gift to E-mail or Gift to Inventory is going to work for a friend, gifts sent through the new system will always work on the receiver's account. When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase.

These changes are now available. Please let us know if you see any issues or have any feedback.

Note: Pre-existing gifts will be unaffected by this change.

Today we’re announcing changes to gifts on Steam. The gifting process has had a bunch of friction in it for a while, and we want to make it easier for you to share the games you love with friends. Steam Gifting will now be a system of direct exchange from gift buyer to gift receiver, and we will be retiring the Gift to E-mail and Gift to Inventory options. Here's a quick breakdown of benefits from the new system:

Go ahead and buy a gift months in advance and have it delivered to a friend on time, every time.

In the old system, a declined gift would sneak back into the giver's inventory and remain on their bill. Now, if a recipient already has the title, or just doesn't want it, they can click decline and the purchase is refunded directly to the gift giver.

No more worrying if a Gift to E-mail or Gift to Inventory is going to work for a friend, gifts sent through the new system will always work on the receiver's account. When there is a large difference in pricing between countries, gifting won't be available and you'll know before purchase.

These changes are now available. Please let us know if you see any issues or have any feedback.

Note: Pre-existing gifts will be unaffected by this change.

We’ve been hearing from users for several years about the need for us to keep working on improving Steam Support. As always, our goal with Steam is to be continuously improving and creating better user experiences across the board.

We hope that most of you never need to contact support because your experience with Steam is issue free to begin with. However, we know that there are times when something just goes wrong and when you need to get help from an actual person. Improving Steam Support to make that experience as smooth as possible has been a big focus for us over the last couple years. We overhauled our support site, we’ve built better integrated tools, we no longer require a separate account to contact support, and we’ve increased our support staffing. We’ve also fixed as many bugs as possible and have provided new self-service options where they make sense. Today we are launching our Steam Support Stats page and seeking to improve transparency around users’ experiences getting support from us. We believe that increasing transparency will both help users understand how we are doing and will help make sure we keep improving over time.


The first thing you’ll see on our stats page is a graph of the volume of submitted help requests that are waiting for a response alongside a graph of the backlog of waiting requests that our support staff has yet to respond to over time. As of today you can see that we receive somewhere around 75,000 help requests per day. We currently end up with around 8,000 requests waiting for responses at most times. We’ve worked hard to expand our staffing and to improve our support processes to get to this point. You can see on our graph that earlier this year we had more than 50,000 requests as our backlog which meant that we had nearly a full day worth of requests waiting for answers at any given point in time. Our goal going forward is to keep the backlog of requests shrinking and to be able to respond to all requests as quickly as possible.


75,000 requests each day is still a big number. Most of these requests are resolved within a few hours. We’ve broken down some of the categories of request types we receive as well as their typical wait times below the graph on the stats page. These typical wait time numbers shown tell you the timeframe that 90% or more of the requests submitted receive a response. We’re still working on further improving wait times and also quality of responses in all categories.

A large number of our help requests are actually related to our refund policy. We’re proud to be able to offer users refunds when appropriate. We think our refund policy is good for users and good for the platform and we’re happy that we are able to respond to more than 90% of refund requests in just a few hours.

The next largest category of support issues is Account Security & Recovery requests. These requests include users who have simply forgotten their password all the way through users who have been phished or hijacked by someone targeting their account. We’ve been working to improve self-service for some account recovery cases and we’ve also continued to push forward adoption of security features like Steam Guard and the Steam Mobile Authenticator. The cases we still receive requests for can be more complicated to handle and wait times can sometimes be a little longer as a result. However, we’re happy to say that we’ve reduced wait times on these requests from once being over a week in many cases to now under 24 hours for more than 98% of requests.


We hope you’ll find the new support stats page interesting and that you’ll keep letting us know what your experiences with Steam Support are. We know that reducing wait times and backlogs is not enough on its own, and we’re also committed to continuing to improve the quality of each interaction. We’ve been continuously investing in staffing, training, and process improvements to that end and while we believe we’ve made progress we know there is always more work to be done. Let us know how we are doing.

We're in the process of making a couple more small changes to Steam Customer Review system as we continue to fine-tune the relevance and accuracy of the overall review score for each product.

In September, we made some adjustments to how the review score was calculated for each product. You can read about those changes and the reasoning behind it here. We're continuing with a few more changes in this direction to improve the relevance of the score by better reflecting the sentiment expressed by invested, paying customers.

With the changes we are making now, the review score (shown at the top of store pages and in various places throughout the store such as search results) will no longer include reviews by users that received the game for free, such as via a gift, or during a free weekend. Reviews can still be written by customers that obtained the game in any of these ways, but the review will not count toward the overall review score.

We started rolling out this change earlier this week, and it will take a few more days for our system to completely update all reviews and re-calculate the scores. In the meantime, you may see the review score on a game change a couple of times depending on how many reviews come from the sources mentioned above.

This change only affects games that are listed for sale on Steam. For free or free-to-play games, reviews by all users will continue to count toward their review score.

As always, please let us know what you think.

When we consider any new features or changes for Steam, our primary goal is to make customers happy. We measure that happiness by how well we are able to connect customers with great content. We’ve come to realize that in order to serve this goal we needed to move away from a small group of people here at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to vastly different groups of customers.

Thus, over Steam’s 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.


After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal. Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. 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.

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.

Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.

To solve these problems a lot of work was done behind the scenes, where we overhauled the developer publishing tools in Steamworks to help developers get closer to their customers. Other work has been much more visible, such as the Discovery Updates and the introduction of features like user reviews, discovery queues, user tags, streamlined refunds, and Steam Curators.

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. (You can read a more detailed analysis of our recent updates here.)


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.

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.


We want to make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences. The updates we’ve made over the past few years have been paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam, and Steam Direct represents just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better.

We intend to keep iterating on Steam’s shopping experience, the content pipeline and everything in between.

As we prepare to make these changes, we welcome your feedback and input on this and any other Steam issues. As always, we'll continue to read the community's discussions throughout the Steam forums and the web at large, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.