The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Infinitron]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/3695810094442050670

Updated Online Conduct and Rules and Guidelines for Steam
Beginning today, you’ll see we’ve made some updates to Steam's Rules and Guidelines and Steam's Online Conduct Rules.

These updates are intended to add context and specificity to how we already apply these in practice to all behaviors and content across Steam.

You can read both in their entirety here:

• Online Conduct Rules
• Rules and Guidelines for Steam

 

[Caim]

They should've had a before/after segment to show what changed.

 

[Konjad]

Steam Now Offers 90-Minute Game Trials, Starting With Dead Space​

The Dead Space remake is playable for 90 minutes for free.

By Joseph Yaden on May 15, 2023 at 11:37AM PDT
4 Comments


Valve now offers Steam game trials, starting with 2023's Dead Space remake. Previously, players could buy a game on the platform and then return it within a two-hour window, but this new trial feature makes things a bit easier for consumers.
It seems only Dead Space has a trial available on Steam right now, but the feature may come to other games later on. With Dead Space, you don't need to purchase the game to play during the 90-minute trial period. The Dead Space trial isn't restricted to a certain point in the game, allowing players to explore as much as they want within the 90-minute period.



Now Playing: Valve Talks The Next Steam Deck | GameSpot News
Valve and other publishers are likely watching this new feature closely to see if it's worth implementing across other games. The Dead Space remake is currently available for $48 on Steam. Game trials on Steam are noteworthy since recent PC ports of popular games such as The Last of Us Part I and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor have been poorly received, mainly due to performance issues.
Giving players a chance to try games first could alleviate some of the frustrations of poorly optimized PC games, though it's unclear if Steam trials will become more ubiquitous.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/s...trials-starting-with-dead-space/1100-6514177/

 

[deuxhero]

90 min time limit really makes me suspect this is inspired by people trying and refunding games. Hour and a half is way too short for anything more than making sure it runs on a machine, especially with most intros being slow.

 

[Konjad]

90 min time limit really makes me suspect this is inspired by people trying and refunding games. Hour and a half is way too short for anything more than making sure it runs on a machine, especially with most intros being slow.

It's still a huge incline. We rarely get demos nowadays, and this is close enough. If it gets traction you can easily check if the game is good without going through the hassle of returning it if it's complete garbage. 1h30m is enough to play an online match or get the idea how the game plays. Sure, you won't know yet if it's a great game or not, but you will certainly notice if it's trash.

 

[Modron]

There are 10,058 demos on steam available to try right now plus who knows how many hundreds (thousands?) more standalone demos designed to be added to your library so developers have a direct news feed to the top of your library. Let us also discount games which had demos months and months before release and removed after launch or the tons of games with limited festival demos.

 

[Dexter]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3719453992486109638

The future of traffic reporting on Steam
New Steamworks tools coming to help understand your store traffic and to protect player privacy
Today we are announcing a set of upcoming changes to the traffic data reporting provided to game developers by Steam. This reporting provides aggregated data on overall traffic to store pages, as well as measuring the effectiveness of external sourced traffic, while continuing to protect player privacy and preferences.

There are three major parts to this update, which will be rolling out over the next few months:

• Adding new data and features to the Store & Steam Platform Traffic reporting.
• Updates to our built-in UTM integration to improve measurement of conversions to wishlist/purchase/activation.
• Ending support for Google Analytics.

Lets dig into some details:

Player Privacy First
All the tools and features that we discuss here are built with player privacy in mind; Steam will continue to not share personally identifiable information. This approach to privacy means that some trade-offs have been made along the way that limits how specific some reporting can be. In most cases, it simply means that any traffic sources that are below a threshold of volume will get reported as "other". We intentionally don't collect or store demographic information about users such as age, gender, or race.

If you're interested in more about our privacy policies, please see our Privacy Policy Agreement.

Updates to Store & Steam Platform Traffic Reporting
The Steamworks back-end already provides detailed reports on traffic within Steam as well as from external sources so you can tell a good deal about how players are finding their way to your store page. For more on the existing traffic reports, please see Store and Platform Traffic Reporting Documentation.

But, through feedback we’ve gathered from game developers, we know these reports don’t include all the information that would be useful in understanding the whole picture of traffic to your store page.

Here are a few of the key planned updates based on the most-requested additions:

• Geographic breakdown
  - Traffic reporting will soon include regional breakdowns for the visitors to your store page. This can be most useful when considering the languages you might support in your game or where you might need to locate servers for a multi-player game.
• Better Identification of external sources
  - Developers have asked to know more about which websites are sending traffic to their store pages. So we'll be expanding the presentation of external traffic sources to detail more common domains.

Updates to Steam's UTM System
UTM helps developers measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by providing aggregated data on user conversion. Learn more about UTM by checking out the UTM Documentation.

Here are the key updates coming to the UTM system:

• Increased tracking percentage
  - We've been working on better tracking the cases when a player has followed a UTM link from a website and then subsequently hopped to their Steam desktop client to complete the transaction. This conversion data will be reported in aggregate without disclosing any further personal information.
• One-Day Conversion Tracking
  - We're working through some technical issues that were previously limiting our conversion tracking to update on a slower cadence. Soon you'll be able to see UTM campaigns start reporting conversions within 24 hours. Our conversion window then lasts for 3 days, so you may see the traffic and number of conversions increase when looking at stats from previous days.
• Geographic breakdown
  - Traffic reporting will soon include regional breakdowns for the visitors to your store page. This can be most useful when considering the languages you might support in your game or where you might need to locate servers for a multi-player game.
• Visitor device category
  - We'll be reporting the split of device types (just "mobile" vs "desktop") for each campaign so you can generally tell how your audience is learning about your game.
• New vs Returning users
  - We'll be breaking out stats so you can tell what percentage of visits are from new players just learning about your game versus returning players that already know about your game.

Ending Steam Support For Google Analytics
As of this coming July, Google will no longer operate Universal Analytics (UA), which is a third-party traffic reporting system that we've had available for measuring traffic sources to Steam store pages. Their announced replacement will be a system called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). You can read Google's help article about the topic.

As time has gone on we’ve come to realize that Google’s tracking solutions don't align well with our approach to customer privacy, and so with the migration to GA4 we’ve made the decision to end our support of Google's analytics systems on Steam. Instead, we're focused on building the most useful parts of aggregated reporting into Steam itself, as described above.

If you are currently making use of UA, you will find that as of July 1st, your Google Analytics reporting will no longer be getting data from Steam.

 

[ScarredBushido]

Some fuckery has gone down

 

[Melcar]

90 min time limit really makes me suspect this is inspired by people trying and refunding games. Hour and a half is way too short for anything more than making sure it runs on a machine, especially with most intros being slow.

It's still a huge incline. We rarely get demos nowadays, and this is close enough. If it gets traction you can easily check if the game is good without going through the hassle of returning it if it's complete garbage. 1h30m is enough to play an online match or get the idea how the game plays. Sure, you won't know yet if it's a great game or not, but you will certainly notice if it's trash.

90 minutes is more than what most play a game before they get distracted.

 

[deuxhero]

There are 10,058 demos on steam available to try right now plus who knows how many hundreds (thousands?) more standalone demos designed to be added to your library so developers have a direct news feed to the top of your library. Let us also discount games which had demos months and months before release and removed after launch or the tons of games with limited festival demos.

Is that counting the 5+ games (Just Cause, Just Cause II, Hexen II, Grand Ages: Rome, Pathologic 2) where the demo can only be accessed by visiting a direct link to it?

 

[Modron]

Is that counting the 5+ games (Just Cause, Just Cause II, Hexen II, Grand Ages: Rome, Pathologic 2) where the demo can only be accessed by visiting a direct link to it?

Probably I just checked the demo box in a blank search on steam.

Edit: Codex goty 2023 got released.

 

[Outlander]

Probably some low life zoomer scum at Valve just discovered Postal 2 and took offense.

 

[Caim]

It's back now.

 

[ScarredBushido]

yeh its back now

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

If it gets traction you can easily check

fahrenheit.

 

[Modron]

So now Steam has advertisements you have to dismiss at the top of your library's homepage to see the normal owned items' news. Saw a Street Fighter 6 advert with just two buttons purchase or dismiss.

 

[Elttharion]

So now Steam has advertisements you have to dismiss at the top of your library's homepage to see the normal owned items' news. Saw a Street Fighter 6 advert with just two buttons purchase or dismiss.

This section of the Steam Client library should only display when a game that you have pre-purchased is ready for pre-load or has released and is now ready to play.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in the current Steam Client that causes this section to get confused when you add a demo to your account for a game that has not yet been released. So, in the current Steam Client, if you add the Street Fighter 6 demo to your account, you will most likely see this section incorrectly.

We are working on releasing a new Steam Client today that corrects the issue. Thank you for reporting this issue and we apologize for the confusion.

I had the same thing and google search led me to that reddit post.

 

[Modron]

I got like a 100 demos installed at the moment... sheeeitt.

 

[normie]

FUCK YOU STEAM

 

[Fargus]

How do you all like new steam client layout?

 

[Fedora Master]

How do you all like new steam client layout?

The UI designers needed to justify their continued employment it seems.

 

[Modron]

How do you all like new steam client layout?

Mine is unchanged did you opt into that beta a few weeks back?

 

[PulsatingBrain]

How do you all like new steam client layout?

I like the new overlay features. The actual interface doesn't seem to have changed much.

Only briefly played around though

 

[PulsatingBrain]

How do you all like new steam client layout?

Mine is unchanged did you opt into that beta a few weeks back?

Full release was this morning. Try restarting maybe?

 

[Fedora Master]

lol Steam