Steam

RobertR1 said:
https://wccftech.com/steam-achieves-37-2-million-concurrent-players-breaking-all-previous-records/

Insane numbers. PC gaming continues an upward trend.
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iirc, I read here that the numbers of the PC are unexpectedly good, like a 20% increase every year during the last 4 or 5 years. That's utterly nuts.

It's even better taking into account other devices seem stagnated. I guess the use of PC for work, programming, etc, and the easier way to install/play games, did skyrocket the PC sales. Also the society we live in, where almost everything is a computer, has shifted the paradigm.

The golden era of PC has cometh.
 
I think one of the main reason of this is because consoles used to have special designed hardwares, making them better at running games, at least in some aspect. For example, when PlayStation was released, the majority of PC did not have 3D acceleration chips. PlayStation 2 has this crazy embedded RAM which has insane memory bandwidth, and PlayStation 3 has this Cell architecture thing. It's even more profound before that, such as SNES which has a lot of specialized chips such as the sprite engine and audio processor, where PC at that time had to do everything with the poor CPU.

However, it becomes clear probably around the time of PS4 that designing special chips specifically for consoles can no longer compete with the economy of scale of a PC. So consoles gradually went from special machines specifically designed for running games to a medium range PC. They are still cheaper, but when people want better hardwares, they don't have choices other than going for a high end PC.

This problem could go away if you can sell more consoles, achieving some sort of economy of scale. Unfortunately, in recent years it's clear that the market size of consoles is not growing. PC is probably not growing a lot either, but in terms of market size, PC (including all kinds of PC) is many times larger than consoles. Around 200M PC shipped every year for recent years even after a downturn. That's more than the all time sales of the PS2, which is probably the best selling game consoles of all time.
 
I think another reason is games scale down so hardware doesn't become obsolete. You get a new PC, you pass the old one on. Tech doesn't die that readily (ignoring the latest Intel CPUs :p ) so you now have a new PC and the old one active, but the old one still gets games.

But we also see the same in consoles AFAIK so that...
Cyan said:
It's even better taking into account other devices seem stagnated.
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...if you look at the total number of active consoles, it's up because people are still happy to use PS4s. If you want to just look at sales of PS5/XBSX and see those sales are down, you'd need to compare sales of high end GPUs to see if that's growing or slowing down also (sales of desktop GPUs are trending downwards).

I think basically the latest, greatest gaming experience is getting too expensive for people to move on en masse, but the improvements are so mediocre that using older tech is fine. Unlike PS1 to PS2 or PS2 to PS3 where the old hardware didn't receive games within a couple of years of the new hardware, PCs are getting games they can scale down and run for 15 years, including the biggest titles like Fortnite on potato laptops, and last-gen consoles are still getting new games ten years in.

The gaming market grows with more users while the software landscape largely slows as devs want simpler games that scale down to simpler hardware and won't push the envelope of a more powerful baseline.
 
Generally AAA games that push the presentation envelope do have more initial appeal and staying power.

Cyberpunk, Wukong, Spider-Man pushed the limits and got accolades and longevity out of them. I’m sure Wukong will age as well as others. Whereas something like Starfield and Diablo which stuck to being same ole came and went quickly.

Also in this generation high end PC’s can objectively separate themselves from consoles thanks to ray tracing. In the past generations a high end pc was just playing the same game with some better polish, higher resolution and frame rate.
 
RobertR1 said:
Cyberpunk, Wukong, Spider-Man pushed the limits and got accolades and longevity out of them. I’m sure Wukong will age as well as others. Whereas something like Starfield and Diablo which stuck to being same ole came and went quickly.
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What do you mean by longevity? Are we talking about sales over time, or player engagement over time, or some other metric. I would assume that both Starfield (Gamepass) and Diablo (Battle.net+Gamepass) don't use Steam as their primary sales platform, but Starfield has a 7-10k concurrent daily player base, and Diablo has a 15-26k daily. Spider-man, in comparison, has .9k-1.6k. Your inclusion of Diablo in particular puzzles me. Games usually launch into their highest player numbers and decline from there, getting a bump when new DLC or sales happen. You can see that with Starfield and Spider-Man. But Diablo, of the 11 data points available on Steamcharts, 6 of them are gains, and only 4 of them are declines, with the final number being the launch month. Diablo's highest concurrent player was just a couple of months ago. And this is after the game got released on Gamepass, which should have cannibalized sales, if not player base on Steam.
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/yu3woq/there_needs_to_be_a_way_for_developers_to_remove

there-needs-to-be-a-way-for-developers-to-remove-tags-that-v0-4ix6hkdafqz91.png


Also I think there should a rule where writing a review should void your right to get a refund for a game.

If you buy a game, it doesn't run properly, it's no fun and you want to return it, fine, but if you buy a game and write a review you should keep the game forever. Starfield ate a lot of shit from people doing that, buying the game to rate it poorly and then return it is a very low move.
 
hughJ said:
Do you have any examples of good games where people do that? :p
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Sure that Bethesda needed a tremendous slap in the face to wake up from 2011 and create modern games with modern mechanics and design, but buying to rate a game poorly and then asking for a refund is a very low thing.

Now that you mention it, I haven't played most of these games but some of them are well regarded.

www.watchmojo.com

Top 10 Times Video Games Got Review Bombed | Articles on WatchMojo.com

Review bombing has become a recent way for players to voice their disatisfaction of games. For this list, we'll be looking at instances where players took to review sites to flood it with negative game reviews for various reasons.
www.watchmojo.com www.watchmojo.com
 
Most/all of those look to me like the ire was rooted in real dissatisfaction, not something that was manufactured. Even in the case of something like TLoU2, there really wasn't any miscommunication about what those people were unhappy about, y'know? The protest wasn't driving some false narrative that the gameplay was badly designed or that it had technical problems or some other FUD.

Whether or not there's some people misusing the return policy just to game the review system doesn't strike me as a justified reason to remove the ability for all people to post reviews at all if they return the game. If you keep chipping away at what type of customer is allowed to give a negative review you're going to end up with a consensus with so much selection bias that it'll be as toothless as a metacritic score where nothing gets a failing grade. If someone dislikes a game so much that they opt to return it inside of a couple hours then frankly that's a review I'd like to hear, and I'd rather have that information surfaced directly through Steam rather than social media channels which are algorithmically biased at best, or at worst, directly controlled by an entity that's invested in the success or failure of the game.
 
Maybe what we need is an AI system which can categorize what kind of a negative review is. For example, I've seen a lot of negative reviews about games failed to launch or having similar serious technical problems. Understandably, they tend to have very little play hours. These reviews are still useful, because if the number is high, the possiblity of other people facing similar technical problems is going to be high. However, for people looking for gameplay related reviews, these are not very useful.

So if we have an AI reader which can summarize these reviews and paints a picture about what the propotions of these reviews, it could be easier to see what the real picture is and also deliberate review bombs may also be filtered out.
 
Even without the AI writer, I still would prefer to read the "bad" reviews of those who asked for a refund -- specifically, why did they ask for the refund? To @pcchen 's example, is it because the app couldn't even open correctly? Maybe due to the company's craptastic 3rd party launcher? Does it absolutely force-require a PSN account on a PC platform?

I find these sorts of things somewhat like reading Amazon reviews. If a game only has 19 reviews and averages five stars, I'm actually more suspicious than if it had 4000 reviews and 3.8 stars. Every game is going to have detractors for some reason, and I'm OK with reading those opinions. Maybe I'll share one of those opinions, or maybe not? You can usually parse out the "negging" reviews by bad grammar, poor spelling, and somewhere between eight and twenty total words in the review. I just mentally check-out of badly written reviews as a rule.
 
If I'm being honest I don't think I've ever actually used a Steam review to inform a purchasing decision other than by glancing at the aggregate "Overwhelmingly positive/negative" score shown on the product page or the Steam charts. The only time I bother digging into the reviews themselves is to reaffirm/sanity check my own thoughts on a game I've already played and have strong feelings about, or maybe to check up on how sentiment has changed for a game that's been through a rollercoaster of a launch. The real purchasing direction for me comes from Youtube or Twitch and actually watching some extended play of the game. In ye olden days it was rentals, shareware, and later piracy. There's probably room for some kind of AI summary that can pre-digest all the reviews and spit out some analytics that highlight what's driving the positive and negative sentiment towards a game, and how that's changed over time. Things like technical issues, content updates, too-many/not-enough black lesbians, etc shouldn't require you to skim and eye-ball what's pissing people off.
 
hughJ said:
Whether or not there's some people misusing the return policy just to game the review system doesn't strike me as a justified reason to remove the ability for all people to post reviews at all if they return the game.
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the point I made is the other way around, I mean, imho, Steam should force those who buy a game just to review bomb it and then ask for a refund -a very low move- to keep the game and pay the full price if they write a review, thus they'd remove most -if not all- of the review bombing from the site.
Albuquerque said:
Even without the AI writer, I still would prefer to read the "bad" reviews of those who asked for a refund -- specifically, why did they ask for the refund? To @pcchen 's example, is it because the app couldn't even open correctly? Maybe due to the company's craptastic 3rd party launcher? Does it absolutely force-require a PSN account on a PC platform?

I find these sorts of things somewhat like reading Amazon reviews. If a game only has 19 reviews and averages five stars, I'm actually more suspicious than if it had 4000 reviews and 3.8 stars. Every game is going to have detractors for some reason, and I'm OK with reading those opinions. Maybe I'll share one of those opinions, or maybe not? You can usually parse out the "negging" reviews by bad grammar, poor spelling, and somewhere between eight and twenty total words in the review. I just mentally check-out of badly written reviews as a rule.
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having asked for a refund of quite a few games, specially games that I thought would be ideal to play co-op with my nephews, I can tell you that most of those reviews to ask for a refund might just chew the fat or show very inane reasons.

Sometimes you don't even write a mini review telling what issue/s you found with the game, you just select an option -like "it runs poorly", "it's not what I expected", etc. I write brief reviews on the reasons I found to ask for a refund.

i.e. in the case of some of the games that I thought would be ideal to play with my nephews and I returned, most of the actual reasoning behind the refund -for which I wrote the reasons behind that decision- was that the game's controls were too complex for my then 6 y.o. and 4 y.o (now 7 and 5) nephews, or that the game didn't have co-op in the expected way -like certain rally game- and so on and so forth. It would be unfair to rate those games poorly, most of them were excellent games in essence.

Then there are also Youtubers who purchase a game, play it for about 50 minutes or 1 hour to create content for their channel and then once they recorded the video, they ask for a refund on Steam..... 🫤
 
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Cyan said:
the point I made is the other way around, I mean, imho, Steam should force those who buy a game just to review bomb it and then ask for a refund -a very low move- to keep the game and pay the full price if they write a review, thus they'd remove most -if not all- of the review bombing from the site.
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I think if Valve can be that confident that a customer's purchase and review was done in bad faith in order to game the review score then the review should be scrubbed and their review privileges permanently revoked at a minimum. I'd imagine the problem there is that it's not nearly that cut and dry for most negative reviews.

There should be a lot of room to get creative with the review system beyond what Valve is currently doing. There's really no ethical or legal reason why review scores need to be purely democratic where every Steam user account is counted equally. They could have weighting of reviews based on any number of factors; people that have a lot of upvoted reviews, or age of the Steam account, or tendency to refund games, or quantity of games purchased, or variety of games purchased, or playtime of related games, etc, etc. And all of that could be a customizable setting in the Steam settings for people that just want to see the vanilla vote.

Cyan said:
Then there are also Youtubers who purchase a game, play it for about 50 minutes or 1 hour to create content for their channel and then once they recorded the video, they ask for a refund on Steam..... 🫤
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I'd think in most cases that results in a net positive for the developer. No matter how much a Youtuber shits on your game there's going to be some non-zero amount of people exposed to the game that might buy it. The enemy of sales isn't negativity, it's obscurity. I know for certain I've bought games after seeing a Youtuber/streamer dislike a game, usually because they failed to read instructions or missed some UI element. It's a, "Surely it can't be as difficult as they're making it out to be" response from watching someone else fail and bounce off it. Perfect examples would obstacle course games like 'Getting Over it' or 'AltF4'.
 
hughJ said:
There should be a lot of room to get creative with the review system beyond what Valve is currently doing. There's really no ethical or legal reason why review scores need to be purely democratic where every Steam user account is counted equally. They could have weighting of reviews based on any number of factors; people that have a lot of upvoted reviews, or age of the Steam account, or tendency to refund games, or quantity of games purchased, or variety of games purchased, or playtime of related games, etc, etc. And all of that could be a customizable setting in the Steam settings for people that just want to see the vanilla vote.
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Valve already have selectable reviews types, like recent and lifetime. What you suggest sounds like a sensible evolution - suggest it to them!
 
are they actually working on a Steam Machine? (Steam Deck 2 and other stuff aside)

If so, I'd certainly get one, although I guess there would be some considerations like royalties to MS for emulating Windows.

 
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