I said before we would see Valve start talking a lot more this year, especially with the Epic Store being a thing and we're starting to see that now. Valve have put out a post giving some background on Steam and what's to come in future.
For those that missed it, a most recent change this January is an overhaul to the DLC list. Take a look at the DLC list for Stellaris for example, which brings it much more in line with the publisher and franchises store pages Valve rolled out last year. Instead of a rudimentary list, it's now a bit flashier.
Even Steam Play got a mention in the post, it really does cover a lot. In particular for us, it's nice to Steam Play get mentioned in such a way alongside their help with Vulkan and the Shader Pre-caching feature of Steam.
As for what's to come across 2019, some of it does sound pretty great:
Store Discoverability: We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.
Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.
Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.
Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.
Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.
Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.
Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.
The Steam Trust upgrade along with the ability for other games to use it could be interesting, especially since that should work with Steam Play titles, something I had a gripe with only recently when EAC stopped me playing Darwin Project.
Discoverability has certainly become an issue as Steam has grow that's for sure. I follow a lot of developers, the vast majority of which have recently talked about how a recent change made their store traffic decrease dramatically. This will only get worse as more games arrive on Steam (and any other store), so hopefully Valve's changes here will do good.
I'm sure a lot of people are eagerly awaiting the refreshed Steam Client, I know I am. The Library feature in Steam is so basic when you've built up a big library of games it tends to be a little unhelpful in how basic it actually is.
See their full post here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Shmerl on 15 January 2019 at 2:38 am UTC
Last edited by Pinguino on 15 January 2019 at 2:45 am UTC
Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT1. Epic StoreEpic is paying other devs for exclusivity. That's a lot more outwardly aggressive than just making their own games exclusive. That'd be obnoxious enough on its own, but add onto that the fact that Epic has no plans to support Linux, and that means they're also effectively paying devs to not support Linux.
Why do you get so crazy about it? It's basically a launcher that allows you to buy games. Nothing more, nothing less. Many publishers do have stores. Many of them have exclusives.
2. Valve exclusives
All of their titles are exclusives, aren't they? Why do you never complain about that?
Doc Angelo Jan 15, 2019
Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT2. Valve exclusives
All of their titles are exclusives, aren't they? Why do you never complain about that?
Not all of their titles are exclusive to PC or Steam. But even if some titles are: They are the developer. They decide where to release. An exclusive game is a game, where the developer was payed to intentionally not release on other platforms or launchers. That's a big difference. Valve never payed anyone to artificially restrict the release of a software.
Doc Angelo Jan 15, 2019
QuoteSteam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
Oh man... really? The new chat is still bugging out for me, sadly especially on Linux. Regularly a hover popup doesn't disappear and I have to manually hover over it again and then move the mouse away. Regularly hover popups appear with a part of them outside of my display region. The toolkit used for it sometimes just bugs out and wants the windows maxed out, sometimes it just leaves the buttons where they are and you need to close and reopen the window to get rid of the problem. Sometimes the chat overview window has a size, so that I can not move it with the title bar, because the game name wraps and the upper line moves upwards. I have to manually widen the window in order to be able to move it.
These are, at least for me, all things that would have prevented a release into the public. Maybe it's getting more and more normal to release buggy software, but... this is just too much for a company like Valve. They should be able to do it better. On top of that, it feels sluggy and not complete overall.
Man, I really like what Valve is doing as a company. But they should really up their quality levels at store and library development. They should have the resources to do that. I'm not sure why they are so lazy at that front.
Here, just two examples:
- During this winter sale I tried to buy 2 controllers, but I could only order one at a time. That's stupid and after I contacted their support I got some fruitless "bla bla" and I gave up. It made no sense to waste money on two shipping fees due to the basic missing feature of allowing the customer to get 2 items in one purchase. They could've also prepared the store before their hardware was released, so we can buy more than one per order, but either they don't care that people have to pay extra shipping fees or they get something out of it. They can't be that stupid to completely miss a detail like this, right?
- For a while now, I have plenty of downloads/updates with 0 bytes. Now I can understand that someone messed up, but a few simple features would make this issue much easier to ignore: "Start/Queue All" and "Remove All (Completed)". Why isn't this issue addressed? Who knows...
Huge amounts of money flow into the Steam store, so I hope the other stores will motivate Valve to step up. Obviously, I have plenty of reasons to like Steam or I wouldn't have a lot of games and use their platform, but I dislike seeing them dragging their asses not fixing simple things that keep getting in our way.
Doc Angelo Jan 15, 2019
And now, it doesn't work at all - if you start to watch using UI features that were introduced with the new chat. If you are using other UI elements in order to start a stream, a different kind of window appears and it works (still buggy like I said above, but it does). So there are right now 2 versions of the stream watching window, with two different toolkit and visual design, and one of them doesn't work at all.
I had to read a fucking guide in order to know how to start a stream so that it works. For those who are interested: One of the three ways to do it is to start a watching a stream through Big Picture.
Man, I have to be honest... they really suck at the Steam client updates lately. Big time. Horribly and extremely big time.
Quoting: anewsonre: reorganizing steam library: I've only recently discovered that steam has a pretty robust game filter based on tags, they should use tags similarly for your library.
Hey. I love your avatar picture! L'Avventura is one of my favorite films.
Arehandoro Jan 15, 2019
But right now the first thing I want from Valve is to ease the taxes to smaller companies and indie devs. And I’m not a dev myself.
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