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Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

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Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#31

Post by mrskeltal »

researcher11 wrote: post #30

I'm an applied researcher in search science. This is a very typical domain specialized search problem. These days it uses Big Data, Machine Learning, constant experimenting / prototyping, A/B testing. I get to geek out each and every day. It is my dream job :) I consider it one of the main reasons Apple lost so much content market share to Amazon despite Apples first mover advantage - Amazon has better search and you…

Can you recommend some readings for developers who aren't familiar with search science?

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#32

Post by zerocrates »

spatulon wrote: post #20
Shivetya wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish to understand why they need an application update so often to what should be a simple distribution product. Do they hard code item availability or such?

There have been 12 updates in the last 12 months - do you really consider that to be "so often"? Anyway, there's a detailed changelog[1] for all the updates, so you can have a look at the kinds of things they change. [1] http://www.steampowered.com/platform/update_history/index.ph...

A fair number of those updates go out 2 or 3 times with little fixes but the same "release notes," so that's not a particularly accurate count of the number of times Steam will want to update.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#33

Post by sp332 »

elthran wrote: post #4
legitster wrote: post #2

I don't get what the ask is. Steam should be even more heavy handed? They should hire people to playtest other people's games? I don't see any alternative reality where they have already taken these actions and are less hated for them.

I think the author wants to suggest a solution where anyone can submit a game, but there is still some sort of quality check before it goes on sale. Currently, we have floods of garbage hitting Steam, with no curation at all. Pre-Greenlight, Steam was a closed shop that was hard to get into. What is needed is a healthy balance, that doesn't have zero chances for an indie game to be seen because it's buried under all…

People would be more willing to put money down if they knew they weren't getting garbage in return. A little QA can improve sales.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#34

Post by zamalek »

mjolk wrote: post #23

Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed): 1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing. 2. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad). 3. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam. 4. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be…

> Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed

6. Games that received poor reviews are relegated to the trash bin forever.

Response:

Untrue.[1] The converse also applies, games don't keep their good reviews forever - this helps identify abandonware or post-hype truth.

[1]:http://store.steampowered.com/news/21695/

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#35

Post by tdb7893 »

elthran wrote: post #8
gwbas1c wrote: post #5

Uhhhh... Steam needs a decent startup time. I only play computer games about once a month. When I click on the link on my desktop, Steam always takes 5-10 minutes to update itself. This is ridiculous. I never have this problem with games on my Nvidea Shield.

Steam's startup time is completely reasonable. What would a reasonable time for startup be in your eyes beyond 5-10 minutes before you play your games once a month? 1 minute? Instant?

I would prefer it if the update is unimportant if it downloaded it while steam was running and installed it when it starts up next time. But at least for me I seem to always have to wait for a download, which is especially annoying when trying to play with friends

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#36

Post by chrisdbaldwin »

striking wrote: post #27
drivingmenuts wrote: post #25

I'd rather Steam get back to the core business of selling games, rather than trying to be some sort of oddball social network. Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interfac…

The trading cards are part of the Steam economy. It's a money-making ploy. I don't know if it works or not, but it probably does. If they dropped everything that isn't about selling games to players (Steam Matchmaking, social features, the Steam economy especially wrt CS:GO and Dota) I don't think Valve would be able to sell and host games as cheaply as it does, and I think more people would pirate games rather than…

Ding ding ding! Each one of those trading cards facilitates trade. When there is more trade, there are more transactions for valve to skim. It's simple broker economics, and it works great for everyone involved.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#37

Post by ramy_d »

mjolk wrote: post #23

Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed): 1. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing. 2. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad). 3. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam. 4. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be…

Asking review sites to sift through the dredges in the spirit of "more business is better!" is naive. Jimquisition comments regularly on this and it has turned into a longstanding and ever constant critique of Valve and its "Whatever goes" attitude to getting on their Steam platform. At 20 or 30 new games _a day_ consumers don't have time to go on review websites and see what's on the "do not touch list". What a monumental task for consumers! If steam would block games that, out of the gate, did not work, that would be great. As the author stated:

  This morning in half an hour I got through three interesting-looking games that didn’t have functioning controls.
You can't even play them! How are unplayable games on Steam!? Additionally they should make sure that the min spec IS an actually min spec that run the game in a playable state. No studio should be immune to such a level of scrutiny (see Rocksteady's Batman Arkham Knight).

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#38

Post by researcher11 »

mrskeltal wrote: post #31
researcher11 wrote: post #30

I'm an applied researcher in search science. This is a very typical domain specialized search problem. These days it uses Big Data, Machine Learning, constant experimenting / prototyping, A/B testing. I get to geek out each and every day. It is my dream job :) I consider it one of the main reasons Apple lost so much content market share to Amazon despite Apples first mover advantage - Amazon has better search and you…

Can you recommend some readings for developers who aren't familiar with search science?

It's basically the union of Information Retreival, Big Data, and Machine Learning. There is a lot of good and bad info out there.

It's best to tailor your learning around a problem so you can get feedback on what works. Building bespoke search engines is expensive and often not worth it until the problem is big enough. Machine Learned optimization is even more expensive.

So in the likely instance that your problem is small; I'd stick to an off the shelf Lucene. If you need more specialization write plugins for it. If you need more speed then DIY OkapiBM25 in native (maybe Rust these days). If you need Big Data I'd use Spark. If you need ML then GDBT in R. If you need advanced NLP then Deep Learning. At each stage it's usually diminishing returns. So quit once you start losing money on the additional effort.

Edit: As a fun aside. Page Rank doesn't work very well and AFAIK Googles major advance was from creating 'meta documents' using anchor text and search queries. Google has a habit of sending out red herrings to guard their important ideas. So if some blogger is waxing lyrical about Page Rank you know they're full of it.

Re: Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems

#40

Post by arca_vorago »

Honestly I have been thinking more and more about the problem with steam, and I realized that even as a foss, anti-drm proponent, steam is one of the few things I have bended for on those positions because of the quality of the marketplace. If they continue to fail, I truly hope something like Lutris or Desura or GoG steps up to the plate and open sources a game store (bonus if DRM free like GoG is). I mean, does anyone remember the days of hating games that required you to have a CD in the tray so you would get a noCD warez just to play? Steam solved those issues, which is what propelled it to it's current state. I don't think that's a problem with modern games though, so perhaps steam is weaker than Valve realizes if people ever actually thought about it. Now it's main function is as a game library stored in a cloud.

That makes me really sad to realize too, because I feel like Valve is one of the only companies that has the resources to really push linux gaming into a new zone, but this hasn't been delivered on yet. I highly suspect they are waiting for Vulkan, but the time can't come soon enough to offer many people the last reason they need to switch to linux from windows: gaming.

I have also noticed this sort of let the customers do the work for us attitude far too often lately. For example, I am loving working in Unreal Engine 4, but they promised a native linux editor and then ingored it for a long time, only once linux native users submitted enough patches to their own fork(s) before Epic finally spent some time to push those changes to the official repo. I think sometimes open source users who want things do work to get them but some companies abuse this process. In Epic's case, we still don't have a marketplace launcher on linux, and there are tons of editor bugs, such as I can't even edit skeletal animations/rigging without crashing the client.

There is a balance to be had between user help and the companies that need it, but that pendulum seems to have swung far too far over to the user lately, and it needs to readjust.

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