Valve's business-focused talk on how the platform is currently doing. The rest of the talk is reiterating existing Steam features to devs that they can integrate into their games. Steam is still...
Valve's business-focused talk on how the platform is currently doing. The rest of the talk is reiterating existing Steam features to devs that they can integrate into their games.
Steam is still growing and users are sticking around. Very strong growth around Asia, SE Asia, Central and South America.
Steam is a truly global service. 65% of Steam users don't have English set as a primary language. English is biggest at 35%, Simplified Chinese is next at 28%. Many developers are shocked when they have customers in markets they haven't predicted. Western developers traditionally focused on EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) localization.
"Big mistake to ship a game on Steam in 2024 and not at least consider Simplified Chinese."
People love sales. Average daily revenue from the major quarterly sales is increasing each year.
The themed fests bring in visibility to games even if it's not discounted nor released yet
Steam Families - explicit confirmation that accounts must be in the same country. Users will know about this restriction from an error message since it's not listed in Steam's FAQ.
Steam Input - 6.7 million daily active controller users, 19.2% increase in controller sessions over 2022
Rich Presence - some of the biggest impressions are seeing what your friends are playing. Sample case when Valve coworkers all played Balatro and had to see what the fuzz is about
Steam Datagram Relay - free to use for any game on Steam that needs multiplayer and online features
Steam Playtest - free and available for dev use to host open or closed betas/playtests, entirely self-service
Probably still going up is my guess as console sales give way to Deck Not investment advice just a very happy Deck owner who hasn't bought a new console since PS2, XBox 360, and Switch. The Deck...
Probably still going up is my guess as console sales give way to Deck
Not investment advice just a very happy Deck owner who hasn't bought a new console since PS2, XBox 360, and Switch. The Deck could well be my last - Steam, Steam sales, ease of mods, emulators make it a no brainer. I'm hoping they become big enough market to sway console exclusive titles.
Valve is (fortunately) a private company meaning it's impossible for outsiders to invest in them. Otherwise I would have invested a decade ago and I would still invest today. They're probably the...
Valve is (fortunately) a private company meaning it's impossible for outsiders to invest in them. Otherwise I would have invested a decade ago and I would still invest today. They're probably the most profitable company in the entire world (by ratio at least) maybe getting beaten out by designer clothing brands that sell $1 sweatshop garbage for 10s of thousands of dollars.
Oh, I see, thank you for the explanation. I don't know why I automatically assumed they are public. I'm glad they're not and that they're gonna try remaining private as long as Gabe is alive. I...
Oh, I see, thank you for the explanation. I don't know why I automatically assumed they are public. I'm glad they're not and that they're gonna try remaining private as long as Gabe is alive. I was going to make a joke about trying to seduce and marry Gabe, but in real life his divorce probably sucked for him and his family
Does anyone have any advice for getting your game translated? I’ve seen open source games and programs use crowdsourced translation websites before, but have tons of questions about that. For...
Does anyone have any advice for getting your game translated? I’ve seen open source games and programs use crowdsourced translation websites before, but have tons of questions about that.
For example, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead uses transifex and stores the translation files in the game’s GitHub repo. It seems like a pretty straightforward way to handle crowdsourced translations for open projects, at least on the technical side.
But if someone has advice for how to actually manage or oversee translations, or how to ensure quality translations for languages you don’t speak, I’d love to hear it. It’s just one of those parts of gamedev I’ve always been curious about but never read up on, so I don’t really know how to handle the “logistics” of translating a game.
Or maybe the neat part is that you don’t handle it and just hope for the best?
On the smaller end I've seen a lot of devs ask the community for assistance, generally hoping for 2-4 people on a given language to help zero in on acceptable choices and weed out trolls. That's...
On the smaller end I've seen a lot of devs ask the community for assistance, generally hoping for 2-4 people on a given language to help zero in on acceptable choices and weed out trolls. That's more common on games focused on mechanics rather than narrative, though. It's a lot easier to pick a translation for "Right shoulder button to use secondary attack." than "The title of the book you've discovered is In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed." If you can't afford professional translators, that's generally the best bet. Since you're sourcing the translations from the community, and presumably only the most passionate people will offer to help, you get translations that accurately convey the story and mechanics, which isn't something you could be sure to get otherwise. I have no insight to compensation, though I certainly expect that even non-professional translators are compensated in something more than fuzzy feelings, given the new markets that can be unlocked by new languages.
The other way is making your game accessible to modding and hoping that someone will be passionate enough to make a translation mod, but that's definitely far more hands off.
It's funny they just cite controller user counts there, since they obviously don't care about Steam Input itself, which is a UX trash fire full of major ignored bugs. I really wish Steam Input...
Steam Input - 6.7 million daily active controller users, 19.2% increase in controller sessions over 2022
It's funny they just cite controller user counts there, since they obviously don't care about Steam Input itself, which is a UX trash fire full of major ignored bugs. I really wish Steam Input weren't under Valve. It's conceptually a huge value for gaming and clearly someone there once dreamed big, but it needed a consortium behind it, not to just be tied to one platform that really doesn't care if it works or is usable.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate the UI for modifying my controller configurations. But in terms of how well they function once they're set up? I don't think any other controller mapping...
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate the UI for modifying my controller configurations. But in terms of how well they function once they're set up? I don't think any other controller mapping software comes remotely close. And the 'Apply community config' is good enough for casuals, which is probably why they're seeing such good improvements in spite of the terrible UI. Although terrible UI is pretty on-brand for Valve. How many years did we go without a proper improvement to the main interface, like 15?
Devs implementing the SteamInput library and being able to leverage game context, command names, and proper buttons even when adjusting the settings is huge, and I wish more would do it.
But they won't, because it's labor only relevant to Steam owners for things that need to be handled some other way anyway, which is exactly the problem. It needs to be broader than Steam, both so...
and I wish more would do it
But they won't, because it's labor only relevant to Steam owners for things that need to be handled some other way anyway, which is exactly the problem. It needs to be broader than Steam, both so it will actually get used on the dev side, and so someone who actually cares about it working will fix it once in a while.
It's good when it works, and in theory it's the best option we have, but I've seen Valve break things and then just write the brokenness into the documentation rather than fix it. Direct mouse positioning has been just broken for months now. It wasn't fixed in the beta client, and now it's broken in stable too. Will that get fixed, or will mouse positioning join other things that have just been relegated to no longer doing what they're supposed to do? We don't even know, because Valve never actually talks to us about anything, just asks us to post in the forums where it's either ignored or harassed. I've lost hours of work (tedious work) multiple times lately to different dumb bugs that end users shouldn't even be seeing in modern software.
It's almost great, which is frustrating, because it has such serious problems and we never know whether things will just get written off or further downgraded. Controller use is growing despite Steam Input, not because of it.
I doubt Steam Input is a factor in controller use one way or another. Steam Input is not something most users ever have to interact with or even think about. They plug in an Xbox controller and...
I doubt Steam Input is a factor in controller use one way or another. Steam Input is not something most users ever have to interact with or even think about. They plug in an Xbox controller and go. That stat is just their way of tracking if a controller is used or not.
It's certainly not a barrier to controller use. If anything, it allows for more instances of controller use than it prevents (if it prevents any controller use at all).
I was secretly hoping that Steam and Valve generally had larger ambitions to ship a general use Linux OS. I need a reason to leave Windows and I want a SteamOS to be it.
I was secretly hoping that Steam and Valve generally had larger ambitions to ship a general use Linux OS. I need a reason to leave Windows and I want a SteamOS to be it.
You could try Bazzite it's based on fedora but pretty close to the experience you'd get on the deck. It's immutable like Steam OS and ships with Flatpak enabled out of the box and all the tools to...
You could try Bazzite it's based on fedora but pretty close to the experience you'd get on the deck. It's immutable like Steam OS and ships with Flatpak enabled out of the box and all the tools to get up and running. Of course just about any distro is capable of doing what Steam OS does but they tend to take a bit more configuration. It also comes with distrobox so you can have applications installed the normal way as well.
Fortunately SteamOS has been working on meeting the community where they are. I already use Aurora, another Universal Blue image and looking at SteamOS's current features don't feel a need to use...
Fortunately SteamOS has been working on meeting the community where they are. I already use Aurora, another Universal Blue image and looking at SteamOS's current features don't feel a need to use Bazzite, however badly I want to, on my Deck since the latest SteamOS version has Distrobox, and a few of Bazzite's best apps are just Flatpaks.
There's always a part of me that wants to tool around with a distro again. I used Ubuntu 10 years ago and loved it, but the terminal stuff is beyond me.
There's always a part of me that wants to tool around with a distro again. I used Ubuntu 10 years ago and loved it, but the terminal stuff is beyond me.
I've been using Aurora, from the same community project that spawned Bazzite, Universal Blue, and it really does a good job of removing a need to get too deep into command line stuff. The three...
I've been using Aurora, from the same community project that spawned Bazzite, Universal Blue, and it really does a good job of removing a need to get too deep into command line stuff. The three things you might need a command line for:
Super happy to see community and team support on projects like this so many years into the future. If somebody managed to crack the mobile OS quandary, we'd be killing it
Super happy to see community and team support on projects like this so many years into the future. If somebody managed to crack the mobile OS quandary, we'd be killing it
Valve's business-focused talk on how the platform is currently doing. The rest of the talk is reiterating existing Steam features to devs that they can integrate into their games.
I wish I could invest in Valve stock. I would have been a millionaire by now
No you don't, the reason why people like steam is because they don't need to bow to shareholder pressure of company valuations and endless growth.
Yes, I said as much in my reply to chocobean
Valve has shareholders, they're just mostly Gabe and the people who work at Valve. Pretty much all of them are millionaires also.
Probably still going up is my guess as console sales give way to Deck
Not investment advice just a very happy Deck owner who hasn't bought a new console since PS2, XBox 360, and Switch. The Deck could well be my last - Steam, Steam sales, ease of mods, emulators make it a no brainer. I'm hoping they become big enough market to sway console exclusive titles.
Valve is (fortunately) a private company meaning it's impossible for outsiders to invest in them. Otherwise I would have invested a decade ago and I would still invest today. They're probably the most profitable company in the entire world (by ratio at least) maybe getting beaten out by designer clothing brands that sell $1 sweatshop garbage for 10s of thousands of dollars.
Oh, I see, thank you for the explanation. I don't know why I automatically assumed they are public. I'm glad they're not and that they're gonna try remaining private as long as Gabe is alive. I was going to make a joke about trying to seduce and marry Gabe, but in real life his divorce probably sucked for him and his family
Does anyone have any advice for getting your game translated? I’ve seen open source games and programs use crowdsourced translation websites before, but have tons of questions about that.
For example, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead uses transifex and stores the translation files in the game’s GitHub repo. It seems like a pretty straightforward way to handle crowdsourced translations for open projects, at least on the technical side.
But if someone has advice for how to actually manage or oversee translations, or how to ensure quality translations for languages you don’t speak, I’d love to hear it. It’s just one of those parts of gamedev I’ve always been curious about but never read up on, so I don’t really know how to handle the “logistics” of translating a game.
Or maybe the neat part is that you don’t handle it and just hope for the best?
On the smaller end I've seen a lot of devs ask the community for assistance, generally hoping for 2-4 people on a given language to help zero in on acceptable choices and weed out trolls. That's more common on games focused on mechanics rather than narrative, though. It's a lot easier to pick a translation for "Right shoulder button to use secondary attack." than "The title of the book you've discovered is In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed." If you can't afford professional translators, that's generally the best bet. Since you're sourcing the translations from the community, and presumably only the most passionate people will offer to help, you get translations that accurately convey the story and mechanics, which isn't something you could be sure to get otherwise. I have no insight to compensation, though I certainly expect that even non-professional translators are compensated in something more than fuzzy feelings, given the new markets that can be unlocked by new languages.
The other way is making your game accessible to modding and hoping that someone will be passionate enough to make a translation mod, but that's definitely far more hands off.
It's funny they just cite controller user counts there, since they obviously don't care about Steam Input itself, which is a UX trash fire full of major ignored bugs. I really wish Steam Input weren't under Valve. It's conceptually a huge value for gaming and clearly someone there once dreamed big, but it needed a consortium behind it, not to just be tied to one platform that really doesn't care if it works or is usable.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate the UI for modifying my controller configurations. But in terms of how well they function once they're set up? I don't think any other controller mapping software comes remotely close. And the 'Apply community config' is good enough for casuals, which is probably why they're seeing such good improvements in spite of the terrible UI. Although terrible UI is pretty on-brand for Valve. How many years did we go without a proper improvement to the main interface, like 15?
Devs implementing the SteamInput library and being able to leverage game context, command names, and proper buttons even when adjusting the settings is huge, and I wish more would do it.
But they won't, because it's labor only relevant to Steam owners for things that need to be handled some other way anyway, which is exactly the problem. It needs to be broader than Steam, both so it will actually get used on the dev side, and so someone who actually cares about it working will fix it once in a while.
It's good when it works, and in theory it's the best option we have, but I've seen Valve break things and then just write the brokenness into the documentation rather than fix it. Direct mouse positioning has been just broken for months now. It wasn't fixed in the beta client, and now it's broken in stable too. Will that get fixed, or will mouse positioning join other things that have just been relegated to no longer doing what they're supposed to do? We don't even know, because Valve never actually talks to us about anything, just asks us to post in the forums where it's either ignored or harassed. I've lost hours of work (tedious work) multiple times lately to different dumb bugs that end users shouldn't even be seeing in modern software.
It's almost great, which is frustrating, because it has such serious problems and we never know whether things will just get written off or further downgraded. Controller use is growing despite Steam Input, not because of it.
I doubt Steam Input is a factor in controller use one way or another. Steam Input is not something most users ever have to interact with or even think about. They plug in an Xbox controller and go. That stat is just their way of tracking if a controller is used or not.
It's certainly not a barrier to controller use. If anything, it allows for more instances of controller use than it prevents (if it prevents any controller use at all).
I was wondering why it was janky when trying to make a Starcraft:Remastered profile.
I was secretly hoping that Steam and Valve generally had larger ambitions to ship a general use Linux OS. I need a reason to leave Windows and I want a SteamOS to be it.
You could try Bazzite it's based on fedora but pretty close to the experience you'd get on the deck. It's immutable like Steam OS and ships with Flatpak enabled out of the box and all the tools to get up and running. Of course just about any distro is capable of doing what Steam OS does but they tend to take a bit more configuration. It also comes with distrobox so you can have applications installed the normal way as well.
Fortunately SteamOS has been working on meeting the community where they are. I already use Aurora, another Universal Blue image and looking at SteamOS's current features don't feel a need to use Bazzite, however badly I want to, on my Deck since the latest SteamOS version has Distrobox, and a few of Bazzite's best apps are just Flatpaks.
There's always a part of me that wants to tool around with a distro again. I used Ubuntu 10 years ago and loved it, but the terminal stuff is beyond me.
I've been using Aurora, from the same community project that spawned Bazzite, Universal Blue, and it really does a good job of removing a need to get too deep into command line stuff. The three things you might need a command line for:
Adding "layered" packages
Configuring distrobox (boxbuddy, includ3d, worjs around this).
rpm-ostree image management (pinning, rollback)
Bazzite on the Deck would only need the same tinkering as SteamOS, unless you have the OLED, but the Bazzite folks are working on that.
Super happy to see community and team support on projects like this so many years into the future. If somebody managed to crack the mobile OS quandary, we'd be killing it