Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

[pcchen]

Valve takes a 30% revenue cut from developers without providing much value in return for them and it's not like they're using it to do modern game development in any significant capacity. I don't think other competitors need to be held accountable for using underhanded methods if they are willing to put forward more equitable arrangements that are both attractive to themselves or other developers in other ways ...

I wouldn't say the services provided by Steam is not "much value." To me it's actually a lot of value, because otherwise many indie games wouldn't be able to sell to a world wide audience. This alone is worth the 30% IMHO.
As for other competitors, I'm not saying they shouldn't do marketing tricks. They already do, and I don't fault them for doing that (for example, I still have Epic games store installed, and I did purchase a few games on it). It's just that they still can't challenge Steam in any real capacity. My point is that this is really not Steam's fault, and it's not fair to curb Steam just because they are doing very well.

 

[Albuquerque]

Let's also talk anti-competition, which often shows up in conversations around "storefronts" like the recent Apple lawsuits from the EU.

Steam is the reason my little boy can play Space Engineers with me, a game which was only ever made for Windows, and he plays it from an Ubuntu 23 machine. Steam is also available on Mac, and the Steam 2FA and chat clients are available on IOS and Android. Steam obviously sells and supports their own handheld Steam Deck, yet take no offense to having Steam run on the ROG Ally and ... well, the other nameless and myriad handheld units which compete with the Deck. Steam provides their own game-streaming mechanisms, yet also happily plug into other streaming services (NVIDIA's being a big one.) If you want, you can even integrate your own non-Steam games into Steam so you have a singular interface for all gaming, but only if you choose. You can also just launch the Steam-installed games from their own shortcuts, rather than forcing you through their GUI (albeit Steam still has to be running for license authentication.)

And let's also talk about "providing much value." My saved games float between all my machines, even my really old games. My ability to obtain, download and install updates is automatic, no matter the game developer's website status. I can share my games with other people when I'm not using them. I can enable family mode and my little boy can check out the games in my catalog which I deem appropriate. I can and have registered physical copies of games with Steam to then convert them to a digital format so I can easily install them on my laptop without a CD or DVD drive.

I dunno, these guys seem to be playing pretty fair right now IMO.

Edit: a few typos from my mobile. Bleh.

 

[chris1515]

 

[Cyan]

I personally purchased The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on GOG, not just because I like DRM free, but also because I believe CD Project RED will get more of my money, but apparently most people don't think that way, and I won't say they are wrong either, because these are still the only two games I have purchased on GOG.

same here, it's my favourite store because it is from CD Projekt RED. When I see a game on Steam and GoG and I like it, I prefer to get the GoG version and I had more game on GoG 3 years ago (I have like 400 now) but I have 450 games on Steam nowadays, between the games I purchased and the ones I got for free.

But to each its own, while I couldn't care less about Steam, it's by far the best platform in basically every way. They have good mod support with Steam Workshop, which makes it very easy to install mods for games like Divinity Original Sin 2 and so on and so forth, community features like forums even if they are sometimes a cesspool as @Flappy Pannus pointed out already, but sometimes they help to find solutions to common issues people experience under certain conditions, great refund support, you can easily tinker with the game files, etc.

That being said, it's not without its flaws. Games are published there without any kind of quality control, leaving their users unprotected, pc gamers must find the flaws themselves and deal with UE badly optimised games and complain in their steam reviews. This leads to lots of refunds and bad reviews of otherwise good games -gameplay wise-, just because of the lack of optimisation.

PC gamepass added a feature some time ago indicating whether your machine was fine to run a certain game or not. They seem to have removed it ever since, but it was a little step in the right direction.

 

[Below2D]

Is it ShiftUp’s first crack? Pretty impressive.

 

[chris1515]

Is it ShiftUp’s first crack? Pretty impressive.

First non mobile game

 

[cheapchips]

Is it ShiftUp’s first crack?

 

[Remij]

Yea, I'm quite impressed with the polish of the game from what I'm seeing in that video.

Those Sony $$$'s put to good use.

 

[Cyan]

As for other competitors, I'm not saying they shouldn't do marketing tricks. They already do, and I don't fault them for doing that (for example, I still have Epic games store installed, and I did purchase a few games on it). It's just that they still can't challenge Steam in any real capacity.

well, Rusia seems to be working on a Steam alternative, if they proves to be better, I am all in. It might take them 10 to 15 years I guess. GoG is based on classic games with some modern games mixed in, but it isn't competing in the same league as Steam. My first games ever on Steam, purchased in 2014, Age of Mythology and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (I was constantly playing games like Heroes of Might & Magic 3 and 5 back then, which I had on GoG...).

I still trust that Microsoft will improve PC gamepass so I don't need to use Steam except for those games that I already have, but I don't know if I'll get to see it, we'll see what Phil Spencer says in the upcoming months, and how this evolves.

 

[Cyan]

I never said young people were normalized to open platforms... I said they want their games to follow them. The next step for publishers is to do their own thing and the platform holder to get out of the way.

All the big games DO allow you to play across platforms... Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft... I mean..

What do you notice about most of those games? They have cross-play and cross-progression. These people playing these games will 100% expect that their progress... that they've worked so hard over the years to build up.. will continue with them, regardless of whether they buy and Xbox or Playstation or PC, or Switch next time...

You have a very narrow view of how consoles will evolve in the future.. Nobody said it's happening tomorrow.. but the walls will continue to fall. Like I said, just one generation ago, there was simply NO WAY that Sony would put their games on PC period.

yeah, this world is changing, so is Sony. Time ago when talking about the PC, people defined a classic PC gamer. What is the classic player on PC? The one who plays tactical games, boomer shooters and RTS? That doesn't fit the definition.

Steam is the largest platform in the world, in terms of number of users, and that is without counting the hundreds of millions of people who are outside of Steam, between Blizzard games, DOTA, LOL, other MMOs...

Although I see it quite clearly that it brings the dividends to Sony releasing exclusives on other devices, how many people don't want to buy a Playstation because they have a PC and/or other consoles but are willing to buy a Sony "exclusive" for PC? I think many.

There is a market on Steam to satisfy any release.

On the other hand, it is an income stream to Sony that so to speak "did not exist before."

But how do you calculate what you have gained and what you have lost from a Sony's fan perspective?

I have colleagues with the Steam Deck who don't give a damn about waiting 10 years for Last of Us 2 to come out on PC, they will never buy the PS5 for the Last of Us. But if you release the game on Steam, they are most likely to buy it.

 

[GhostofWar]

Will leave this here so arguments about steams revenue cut being fair or not can work with the whole picture, because it's not a straight 30% cut like other places it is often compared against.

Valve’s new Steam revenue agreement gives more money to game developers

An unprecedented change to Valve’s financial agreement with game makers

www.theverge.com

edit: apparently didn't follow the right chain back far enough, thanks @Flappy Pannus ,

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Will leave this here so arguments about steams revenue cut being fair or not can work with the whole picture, because it's not a straight 30% cut like other places it is often compared against.

Valve’s new Steam revenue agreement gives more money to game developers

An unprecedented change to Valve’s financial agreement with game makers

www.theverge.com

This was mentioned.

Conservatively if we look at Steam as taking a 20% cut (down from 30% with the sliding scale pricing)

 

[Cyan]

Will leave this here so arguments about steams revenue cut being fair or not can work with the whole picture, because it's not a straight 30% cut like other places it is often compared against.

Valve’s new Steam revenue agreement gives more money to game developers

An unprecedented change to Valve’s financial agreement with game makers

www.theverge.com

edit: apparently didn't follow the right chain back far enough, thanks @Flappy Pannus ,

more reasonf to continue to remain unbeaten (only MD could become serious competition but....), and they make loads of money -admitted by Newell in an interview when Steam Deck was launched-.

Another advantage of Steam is the seamless installation of games in different drives. I have two W11 different partitions, a 2TB NVMe one (much much faster) for gaming and a 1TB SSD one for productivity. I can play games on Steam when I launch Steam in one partition or the other, regardless of where I am, which is superb.

This also talks about Windows opening different native Windows partitions to being modified and stuff, but in this case it's a good thing, since when I am on my SSD, the SSD partition detects the NVMe partition as a D:\ disc drive) and I can launch any game on Steam from the SSD partition even if they are installed in the NVMe partition. That's a super quality of life feature.

 

[Shortbread]

A wide range of Hellblade 2 previews emerged last week, but what have we learned about the game and is the dynamic resolution 30fps revelation in any way surprising? John, Rich and Alex share their thoughts while also sharing reactions to the latest chapter in the PS Portal hack story and Nightdive's POed remaster non-April fool. Alex shares news of his experiments with Intel's PresentMon 2.0 - and how it will change our PC games and hardware coverage - while there's intrigue and some level of excitement surrounding Intel's latest XeSS news.

0:00:00 Introduction
0:01:04 News 01: Hellblade 2 previews drop!
0:26:53 News 02: PS Portal hack patched before release
0:34:41 News 03: 90s FPS PO'ed getting Nightdive remaster
0:41:07 News 04: C-Smash VRS hits Meta Quest
0:52:03 News 05: Alex’s PresentMon experiments
1:06:57 News 06: Campaign demands: stop killing games!
1:16:19 News 07: Intel updates XeSS with revised modes
1:22:04 Supporter Q1: Would it be more practical to target 1440p than 4K for performance modes?
1:28:11 Supporter Q2: Dragon’s Dogma 2 has unimpressive NPC density, so why can’t it hit 60fps on consoles?
1:35:17 Supporter Q3: Why do some developers implement incorrect 30fps frame-rate caps?
1:43:36 Supporter Q4: Why isn’t low frame-rate compensation the default with 120Hz and VRR on PS5?
1:50:05 Supporter Q5: Could the PS5 Pro be powerful enough to run advanced path traced games?
1:55:04 Supporter Q6: With Microsoft potentially opening Xbox to third parties, was the 3DO approach right all along?
2:01:21 Supporter Q7: Would it have been better to forgo the PS5 Pro and instead shorten this console generation?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Funny, I took a quickly look at PresentMon 2.0 and didn't clue in that gpu busy and cpu busy were in milliseconds. I thought they were %. I'm definitely making a graph for frametime, gpu busy and cpu busy.

One thing I noticed is if I turn on the overlay it switches the presentation of fortnite to composed flip, but if i put the overlay on my second monitor fortnite stays in hardware composed independent flip. Need to refresh my memory on presentation modes, but the nivida overlay doesn't have any impact on the presentation mode. I could leave the intel overlay on my 2nd monitor and toggle the nivida overlay on/off over the game and the presentation mode did not change.

 

[DavidGraham]

Analysis of Hellblade 2. It's probably running between 1080p and 1440p, with reduced resolutions for transparencies and volumetrics.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Funny, I took a quickly look at PresentMon 2.0 and didn't clue in that gpu busy and cpu busy were in milliseconds. I thought they were %. I'm definitely making a graph for frametime, gpu busy and cpu busy.

One thing I noticed is if I turn on the overlay it switches the presentation of fortnite to composed flip, but if i put the overlay on my second monitor fortnite stays in hardware composed independent flip. Need to refresh my memory on presentation modes, but the nivida overlay doesn't have any impact on the presentation mode. I could leave the intel overlay on my 2nd monitor and toggle the nivida overlay on/off over the game and the presentation mode did not change.

The NVIDIA one may be injecting code into the actual game process (or perhaps some driver hook), like the Steam overlay does and similar. Doing it with a separate composition layer is IMO highly desirable these days as it means you don't have to hook graphics APIs, potentially run afoul of anti-cheat and all the nonsense that comes with having the hooks running before launching the process. It's really nice that with PresentMon if I run into a place during regular gaming that seems to be doing something weird I can just alt-tab and bring it up and see what's going on rather than having some hooked overlay always running in the process on the off-chance that I *might* want to get metrics.

It's not as if putting the composition within the process is free or anything, it's just hidden and now looks like part of the game cost. In neither case should a simple blit/blend be much more than noise on a modern GPU though.

The only case in which I could see it potentially mattering is if you are trying to measure something specifically related to full screen tearing with vsync off and an overlay putting it into composition mode could affect that. In theory some hardware can actually be implementing this with multi-plane overlay which happens at scanout and doesn't involve any GPU resources at all, but for various reasons that path is rarely very well hooked-up for desktop applications (it's more reliable for the conventional windows store apps).

In either case having a separate monitor for performance outputs is usually desirable. That said, people also ignore that having multiple displays can cost a % or 2 of the GPU time and thus have a small effect on game performance as well. The reality is our measurement noise floor here is not really down to single digit microseconds or anything, so the cost of these windows composition steps is mostly ignorable these days. (It does become *somewhat* more relevant if you are trying to get to like 500+Hz counter-strike style, but usually there you are CPU bound anyways).

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Andrew Lauritzen Thanks for the input. I was meaning to go back and read up on the presentation modes in Windows as there's so many between the flip modes and the legacy ones. Wasn't sure what the implications were for the various ones.

In terms of gaming, I've considering disabling my second monitor because of potential weird impacts to micro stuttering etc, but I'm getting to the age where I don't care quite as much and it's just nice to have a second display that I like to have convenience because my gaming doesn't feel that serious.

I do hope that PresentMon adds a little more presentation customizability so I can have a single line for a bunch of metrics for temperatures and fan speeds, which is usually what i'm most interested in during the summer when my apartment is hot.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

In terms of gaming, I've considering disabling my second monitor because of potential weird impacts to micro stuttering etc, but I'm getting to the age where I don't care quite as much and it's just nice to have a second display that I like to have convenience because my gaming doesn't feel that serious.

Agreed, and I also don't think it's *normally* relevant these days. A lot of microstutter stuff involves CPU timing things and these days there are enough free cores that other processes generally aren't going to interfere as much with the critical path on that front. The % or so of GPU use (more if you're running video or something) may drop game performance a little bit, but not usually in a way that it introduces stutter or inconsistency. YMMV of course, but same with borderless window I think the advantages are far more than the pretty small (or non-existent) disadvantages these days unless I specifically run into some trouble.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Agreed, and I also don't think it's *normally* relevant these days. A lot of microstutter stuff involves CPU timing things and these days there are enough free cores that other processes generally aren't going to interfere as much with the critical path on that front. The % or so of GPU use (more if you're running video or something) may drop game performance a little bit, but not usually in a way that it introduces stutter or inconsistency. YMMV of course, but same with borderless window I think the advantages are far more than the pretty small (or non-existent) disadvantages these days unless I specifically run into some trouble.

I do like to keep things low latency, and I'm not sure I've seen any good comparisons between borderless and "fullscreen" with the new presentation modes. I know fullscreen has been changed a lot, so it's more similar to borderless. Just not sure how much of a difference it really makes anymore. As long as I have good vsyncing with gsync, I'm pretty happy.

I use Fan Control which is VERY nice for configuring the fans in my pc so it doesn't sound like a rocket ship while gaming, but unfortunately it has a very measurable gpu consumption if you keep the ui up on a second screen, so it's nice to have temps on an overlay. My apartment gets really hot.

I also don't think the histograms were working for me in PresentMon, but I'll have to try again. Looked like it was drawing a few random lines that didn't mean anything.