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Steam or mildly warm air?

Unread postby zak » 14 Jun 2006 15:23

I was looking at this without any real intent of getting an account, but thinking about all this episodic content business.

I was pretty pleased with the way in which HL2 ended and 19.95 for Episode 1 doesn't make much sense right now. Neither does Sin Episodes but lately I haven't been too keen on shooters.

The way I see this episodic content thing right now is that they're just selling me a shooter a part at a time. So you get one HL episode every six months or so instead of waiting another 5 years for HL3. That might just work.

But the way I saw Steam before was as a distribution system for small producers. It should sell more games like Darwinia and less HL. It could give small studios a chance to compete by selling their games cheaply on the internet. It completely rules out the middle man between the producers and the public. And here they are using it to sell HL and Sin. It's not being used to its full potential.

Guess what I'd like to see on Steam is more indie games and less HL mods. Maybe then I'll get an account.
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Unread postby Jedah » 14 Jun 2006 15:37

You forgot to mention that each episode costs half the price of a full game.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 Jun 2006 20:55

He said it.

Well, it is a cheap tactic to make more money with less work. I guess the market will determine whether it succeeds or not. If people buy them, they'll keep making them. That will cause them to become complacent, maybe, but if other companies come out and do the same, and give you more value for your money (i.e. more content for less $$), the competition will ensure that gamers are not ripped off. Episodic content will probably be good for everyone in the long run.

I haven't finished HL2 yet, so I am not interested. If I had beaten it though, and I if I had loved it, there's a good chance I'd spend the 20 bucks. That's what they are betting on.

As for indie games, I am not much into them. There are a few gems, but they are buried under piles of boring, uninspired crap, and I don't really have the time to sift through all that.

Darwinia is not an indie game, is it?
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Unread postby zak » 14 Jun 2006 21:38

Darwinia won the 2006 Independent Games Festival so I guess it does qualify as indie, but that's beside the point.

I saw Steam as a way for small, bright developers to get out more, sell more and make better games. New gameplay ideas, maybe new genres. An internet-powered new garage games era. Of course it's ultimately up to the public, and the vast majority of people will always be tempted to spend their cash on well-known brands such as HL rather than on obscure games. But at least vast internet distribution gives the little guys a shot, and Steam seems to take some steps in the right direction.

As for the whole episodic content it doesn't really work that well for me. I usually hate games that make me wait for sequels leaving the characters in cliffhangers. I like to look at games as complete experiences rather than episodic ones. So I'd rather wait 4 years to see what happens to Gordon than to play one tiny part of that adventure every few months. I'm affraid I'd eventually decide it's not worth the hassle and give up, just as I did with a few TV shows. And I really liked the way HL2 ended, I'm not even curious about Episode 1.

And yeah, it's a pretty cheap way to make cash. Just take HL2, call the level designers and crop something up. Ask 20 bucks for it and you've got yourself episodic content. But people that loved HL2 will buy it for sure. I don't have the time to dig through indie games either, so right now I should just go out and buy Katamari or something.
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Unread postby Molloy » 16 Jun 2006 21:24

I didn't think HL2 was very good (despite being a massive fan of HL1), so I had very little interest in Episode 1.

The main problem with the retail HL mods is that they're competing with all the absolutely incredible free ones. Zombie Panic, The Specialists and Zombie Panic lasted me months. I haven't played the HL2 mods very much yet but I've dabbled in Hidden: Source, Battlegrounds 2 and Dystopia and they all seemed very polished.
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Steam UI update

Unread postby Victory » 26 Feb 2010 14:05

http://store.steampowered.com/uiupdate/

Valve is dipping their toes into running a news service, something that reminds me of "Beyond the Videogame News Racket". They will allow their developers to post news and will provide the readers with aggregation and filtering. This could obviously expand into something more in the future, which could hurt the major fluff sites at least a bit. Unedited news cannot compete with properly edited news, but at least Valve has no reason to obscure the news like Kotaku et al. do, since their business model is not based on "eyeballs".

On the UI front, Valve is finally switching from IE to Webkit as their underlying technology. Good -- the biggest oddities in the UI at the moment are IE-induced as far as I can tell. Looks like the graphic design is going to stay close to the current one, which is to say quite usable.
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Unread postby recoil » 12 Mar 2010 08:02

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."

Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac."

Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately. Interested developers should contact Jason Holtman at jasonh@valvesoftware.com.
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Unread postby Joshua » 12 Sep 2013 01:20

http://store.steampowered.com/news/11436/

Valve wrote:Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another's Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.”

Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.

For more information about Steam Family Sharing and the beta program, please visit store.steampowered.com/sharing.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Sep 2013 04:36

And the battle is on! It's hilarious how Valve is ripping off Microsoft's failed ploy to counter EA's latest move. Goes to show that MS's idea was sound in principle, and only failed because of the execution. MS tried to FORCE people into it. They felt that Microsoft was TAKING AWAY something from them, whereas now they feel Valve and EA are GIVING something to them -- whereas in fact in both cases the end result will be the same.

Subhumans lol.
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 Nov 2013 23:35

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=709289

thefil wrote:Is anyone else using Steam Big Picture mode regularly? Impressions within.

I've recently become a pretty regular user of Steam Big Picture Mode. I have my desktop in the same room as my TV (I live in a 4 room apartment) and run an HDMI cable from one to the other.

With all the talk of SteamOS and Steam Machines, which I desperately want to succeed, I have been testing some stuff out. My impressions are pretty negative, and I'd like to hear if things are working better for anyone else.

First of all, in Windows. I own 147 Steam games with controller support, but it feels like less than 25% of those have full controller support, which means I'm configuring them on my PC, or often going through an intermediate "launcher" to get started. This is fine for me now, but what about people who aren't going to have a mouse plugged into their Steam Machine? Will they have to read the tiny config popup text from the couch while using the trackpad to click "Go"? For example, Skyrim is horrible to click "play" on from the couch, even with a wireless mouse. Note not even many of Valve's games have full controller support - Half Life 2 does not, and TF2's controller support which I recently tried is serviceable, but the UI needs a "big" mode for configuring from a TV.

Plus, Big Picture Mode is still BUGGY. Pretty much half the time I launch a game in it (lately I've been playing Dark Souls, Spelunky HD, Poker Night 2, and Geometry Wars), after popping in and out of the overlay a few times, the interface gets confused. The most common error is that even though I'm in the overlay and I can HEAR it responding to my actions, what I see is a chat screen, or game info screen, or what have you frozen in front of me. So the visual part of the interface is frozen while it's clearly still working in the background. The only way to fix this seems to be quitting Steam and restarting, not a good option on a TV-only Steam Machine.

Another bug I have is that sometimes when I quit a game I don't go back to big picture, but rather to the windows desktop with big picture in an unfocused window in the background. Again, not a big deal when I have a mouse, but a huge pain in the ass without one.

I've also put some (though admittedly much less) time into testing Steam out under Ubuntu. Multimonitor support in Linux is a train wreck for another year at least until the X stack gets phased out, so I'm forced to change to single monitor, TV-only mode to even get basic behaviours working, such as putting Big Picture mode on the correct screen. Once I do this, launching a full controller support game like Mark of the Ninja is still liable to change my system resolution until I change it back manually in the system settings (it feels like trying to run 16bit color mode games in Windows XP). This may actually be the most surmountable of the problems for Steam Machines and SteamOS though, as they can pretty much consistently expect an unchanging 1080p display - but if the games don't take that as the default, the problem may still show up.

Another problem under Linux is load times. First of all, disk performance on Linux is generally bad. But I think what's really killing it is the need to compile shaders just in time. Loading up Crusader Kings 2 takes literally 10 minutes on my i5 3570K and GTX 660Ti. This is exactly the opposite of the "pick up and play" mentality we want on a console-like platform.

So basically I'm pretty disappointed in the level of polish here. Things are not as "good to go" as I'd hoped. The Steam software has traditionally been pretty bad (it had hanging problems and would delete categories/favorites until quite recently) but I'd hoped Valve would have gotten it together by now for this much more entry-level platform.

Is anyone else using BPM or Steam Linux regularly? Are you experiencing similar issues, or have things been better? How ready is Valve for this leap deeper into user space?


Don't forget the laundry list of Linux complaints in there as well. Shitty multimonitor support, slow as fuck load times, etc.
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Aug 2014 05:31

Worst online store I've ever used. The start of the story is here (and in the following couple of posts): http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=23293#p23293

It took them 3-4 days to get back to me, and this is what I got:

Hello Anthony,

Thank you for contacting Steam Support.

We apologize for the delay.

If you are using IP proxy or VPN software, disable it or remove it from your computer. Such software is known to cause issues with purchasing through the Steam Store and connecting to the Steam network or game servers.


Regardless of whether or not you were knowingly using IP proxy or VPN software, please test the issue again. Let us know if this does not resolve the issue.


So I ditched the VPN and I can play freemium games fine, but I still can't fucking buy anything. So I sent them this email:

I wrote:Hello again.

I am an American citizen who currently resides in Spain and has a Greek credit card. Therefore, I cannot buy ANYTHING from your store. I tried:

1. The $50 in my account. No good.

2. My Greek credit card. No good.

3. My Spanish PayPal account. No good.

Will you PLEASE press whatever buttons you need to press over there so I can use your ***damned store?

Sincerely,

An extremely pissed off potential client.


Unless you are the typical user, their store is a nightmare to use.
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Sep 2014 17:53

Finally! A method to DELETE files stored in Steam Cloud servers!
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2470784
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 03:42

Steam now has a horribly pretentiously titled "Curator" feature, which I however chose to use, because why not. The title aside, it's a good idea. Here's all the pseuds and the casuals:

http://store.steampowered.com/curators

And here's Insomnia's page:

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6528969/

If you follow it you are helping my recommendations rise in the rank of curators, and become more visible in the Store pages of these games, so if you like what you see there, click on the "Follow" button. I can't see who is following and who is not, so don't worry about upsetting me if you don't :)


EDIT: For some reason, my Shattered Horizon recommendation appears here:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/insomniacult

but not in the curator page...

That poor game. Steam is doing all it can to make sure no one plays it again.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:19

lol I got an extra follower by following myself. I wonder what I will think of all the games I haven't yet played. Best keep an eye on myself then.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:48

I also wrote a review of PA and then clicked on "Yes" where it asks "If this review was helpful". This review that I wrote was helpful to myself. It was helpful to me to read this review that I wrote so I clicked on the button and said so.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:50

I mean what's to stop me from making 150,000 Steam accounts and "following" myself to catapult my page to the top of the curator pages? They are free after all. Even a few hundred would do the trick to get into the top five or ten pages of curators.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 04:50

l e l

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6856209/

Read the descriptions too.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2014 05:06

I mean, you gotta love my Far Cry description. Who else can write this shit?

I'll make that page the best curator page on Steam, and once I have a few hundred games on it I'll advertise it on the frontpage. It'll be the only such page without a single "indie" abortion in sight.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 06:27

Guide to Level Up your Steam Profile
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =212414540

I am level 5 now because I just reached 250 games. Wonder if it's worth getting into the trading card bullshit to reach level 100. I do like the perks (e.g. profile showcases, etc.), but I am not sure it's worth the effort. Can't I just buy all the cards I need? How much money are we talking about to get to level 100? I might pay $50 or so for it. Hell, maybe even $100. Otherwise, at the rate I am finding cards by simply playing games, I think it'd take years.
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Unread postby recoil » 25 Sep 2014 07:56

You can buy all the cards you need to craft a badge and gain XP. The cheapest and fastest way to do it is to buy cheap sets of cards. There's a tool to check card set prices here: http://steam.tools/cards/

To get to level 100, you'll need 55000XP. Meaning you would need to craft 550 badges.

Using the current CS:GO price at $0.29US (assuming the price doesn't change and you can buy the same set over and over), you would need $159.50US.

The whole process to buy and craft the badges takes about 5 minutes, so it would be a bitch to do it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 14:12

Wow, this is how your profile will look if you get to level 367:

http://steamcommunity.com/id/sinsrebellion

Damn, Valve. They know how to push my buttons.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 14:25

Maaaan, one thing I hate about these kickstarted games like PA and Wasteland is that the devs are too understaffed to make achievements from the get-go, so you play the game, put a hundred hours into it but get no achievements for it, and then when they add them later you have zero and you look like a loser to everyone who looks at your profile and doesn't realize what happened.

Plus, I really WANT the goddamn achievements, but I am not going to replay a game like Wasteland just to get them. PA is better off in this regard, since I am bound to keep playing it, but what if it were mediocre and I didn't feel like playing it anymore? They should unlock achievements retrospectively when they add them. It's definitely a reason to hold off on playing a game, and therefore to also hold off on buying it.
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Unread postby Some guy » 22 Dec 2014 18:42

Steam Gifts can no longer be traded across regions
http://www.vg247.com/2014/12/18/steam-g ... s-regions/

Brenna Hillier wrote:Steam’s gifting system has been tweaked, preventing users from trading between certain regions.

gifts_presents.jpg

Steam users in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe can no longer freely trade Gifts with users in other territories.

Although Valve hasn’t made an announcement regarding the change, Reddit users have gathered screenshots of notifications warning users of the restrictions in a large number of countries.

There’s no confirmation as yet, but we assume Valve is looking to block users from taking advantage of major currency fluctuations through Gifts, trading and proxy purchases.

As Gamespot notes, the recent collapse of the Russian ruble motivated Apple’s decision to close the Russian App Store, so it’s quite likely something similar has happened here.

This is the second batch of changes to Steam Gifts and trading in as many months. With these actions Valve is gradually chipping away at a slightly dodgy culture of occasionally unscrupulous traders – sort of like cracking down on gold sellers. It’s a bit of a shame for those who bend the rules to access cheaper prices (say, transferring money to a friend in another country where a game is cheaper, who then buys the game and Gifts it to you) but it may help prevent scams, too.
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 Jan 2015 06:54

Bitchin' profile is bitchin' http://steamcommunity.com/id/icycalm

recoil wrote:The whole process to buy and craft the badges takes about 5 minutes, so it would be a bitch to do it.


I managed to cut down on the time by buying 4 or 5 copies of each card at a time. So I can more or less create 5 badges in a little more than the time it normally takes to create 1. Still a pain, but a lot faster than otherwise. And you can't have more than 1 instance of a badge. Once you've leveled up a badge to level 5 that's it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Jul 2021 00:16

So I just found out that you no longer need to bother with those stupid badges to unlock additional profile displays, you can just buy them with those Steam points you get for buying games. I have 100k+ points, and it only costs 3-6k to unlock or upgrade displays, so I went wild with the "Featured Games" one.

Image

That's my legit top 13 games, i.e. unlike the GOTY feature, I have played all of these, which is why I list Civ3 rather than 4, as I haven't played 4 yet. Actually I'd rather list Alpha Centauri, but it's not on Steam. So, not so legit after all, but as close as I can get it on Steam. Moreover, only spent a few minutes thinking about it, so I will likely slightly modify the list once I think about it some more. The top 4 though are rock-solid, that's my top 4 games as of now.

I still have a ton of Steam points to spend, so at some point I'll sit down and totally pimp my profile.
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