Valve are talking a lot more lately, actually telling us what's been going on and what some of their plans are. In their latest blog post, they had plenty to share.
A nice recap of what they've been up to, which started off with a small announcement on how they've increased their monthly active user count to "nearly 95 million", meaning they added close to 5 million new monthly active users over last year. Using the current operating system figures from the Hardware Survey, that could put the number of monthly active Linux users at around 855,000.
That's not all, they said revenue actually made by developers was up "year over year" and the last sale in 2019 was the most successful they've ever done. So even with competition heating up from Epic Games, game streaming and more it doesn't seem to have affected Valve much overall.
It goes over what happened during 2019 like the new store experiments with Steam Labs, as Valve work with community developers to build new tools to help people find games. I quite like the Deep Dive feature that Valve worked on with Lars Doucet, letting you click through games as it gives you new suggestions.
Steam Play got a mention too, with compatibility increasing as more reports come in on ProtonDB which is very good news for anyone switching to Linux.
As for what's to come next, surprisingly Valve even gave some information on that. Shocking—I know! Who is this Valve and what have they done with the silence we're used to having? Jokes aside, it's good to see.
One thing they're going to do that I'm quite interested in are their "Deep Dives", as they said others have tried figuring out how games on Steam are doing so they're going to do their "own analysis and share the results as a multi-part series of blog posts". Steam Trust, part of their newer matchmaking system is in a "closed beta" with some developers having access and it seems every developer will be able to use it later this year. They're also working on new Steam Labs experiments, SteamVR is getting big upgrades and there's plenty more sales to come.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: fleskI hope they fix the Steam Labs experiments to respect your platform settings soon. Last I tried, only Lars Doucet's did, making the rest pretty much useless.As I understand, it needs a conscious effort from each tool developer to respect the settings.
That's unfortunate. :( I guess it will never happen then, unless Valve takes steps to enforce it.
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