Tag: Steam

Kickstarted MMO Edengrad Is Returning Thanks To Share Sales


Edengrad

Everyone’s favorite crowdfunded MMO Edengrad is coming back! Or at least that’s the plan.

For those of you not familiar with the game Edengrad, this game was Kickstarted to the tune of £41k by developer Huckleberry Games who released the title into Early Access on Steam in April 2017 and promptly stopped actively supporting it in December of the same year due to an apparent lack of funding. The servers have continued running for that time period but no active updates have been deployed in over a year and a half now.

The folks at Huckleberry Games posted a very cryptic message back in December 2018 that they were coming back, but nothing emerged until this June when Wyborcza posted some news about the company. It looks like Huckleberry has sold 1.5 million Zloty in shares, approximately $395,000 US Dollars. That money, according to the article, will go toward continuing development on Edengard as well as new titles.

“The F series issue was a very important step in the company’s history, thanks to which the company will be able to continue working on our flagship product, Edengrad, and support the development of new promising projects. companies, they believed in it and together with us they want to develop it, and in return we will provide them with new, better quality, “said president Patryk Borowski, quoted in the communiqué.

Developer Huckleberry Games has been promising updates via the Steam forums for several months now, only time will tell if they can actually come through on those statements.

[NM] Steam Launches Steam Lab Experiments


Valve is constantly working on improvements to Steam store visibility. After all, hundreds of new games are launching on the service every month, and sometimes dozens of games launching every single day. The average user just can’t keep up!

This week Valve launched the Steam Labs, three experiments being presented to the community as ideas on how to improve visibility. The first idea comes in the form of micro-trailers; five second clips of video game footage on a big page where the user can simply go down the list of recently released titles.

“Absorb every game in the Steam catalog in just seconds. Micro Trailers are six-second looping videos designed to quickly inform viewers about titles on Steam with a presentation that’s easy to skim. This experiment is a fancier version of the Twitter bot of the same name.”

The second idea is an interactive recommender, a slider that shows you recommended titles based on your library as well as your weight by popularity and release date.

“This experiment looks at how much you’ve played each game in your Steam library, and uses the magic of machine learning to recommend games you might like. Filter your results by picking games that are popular or niche, and drill down by release date and tags.”

And the third idea is an automated show about games, kind of like #1 except presented as something of a very long, half-hour clip show of six second clips of recently released games.

There are certainly more experiments to come. Check out the Steamlabs and see how it works for you at the link below.

Source: Steam

Steam Powered: Valve Negligence Lets Developers Impersonate Them


Meet Wizhood, a game developed and published by Valve. Well not developed or published by Valve. Or maybe it is? The Steam store says it is.

On the latest edition of “Valve Is A Negligent Publisher,” it looks like the folks at Rakarnov Studios noticed that Valve will allow anyone who pays $100 on Steam to impersonate anyone else, including Valve themselves. The game Wizhood was noticed by intrepid Steam watchdogs to have changed its name, unabeited, to Valve itself. Maybe for nefarious reasons, maybe to see if it would actually work, maybe for poops and giggles. Either way, the name change was allowed with absolutely no oversight or confirmation required from Valve.

Even better, looking up Valve’s catalog of games now includes Wizhood as a title right under Half Life 2: Deathmatch and above Half Life 2: Episode 2. Unfortunately for Wizhood, it does not automatically include the game in the Valve Complete Pack.

Looking at the Steam database it appears that this change was made back on June 26 and may have been a tactic to increase visibility with the Steam summer sale having started just a day prior. Incidentally you can pick up Wizhood for 49 cents, a 75% saving over the standard $2. If you have any inclination of picking this game up, we suggest you do so now before the sleeping giant that is Valve wakes up.

PSA: How To Get Early Access To Steam New User Interface


The big UI overhaul is coming to Steam in the next few weeks, but if you are just too excited and don’t want to wait, you are in luck. As it turns out, the new interface is already publicly available thanks to some assets dropped in the Chinese Counter Strike: Global Offensive launcher.

You can get your hands on an early version of the launcher by following the steps below. Keep in mind that the interface is going to look a bit ugly right now as many developers have not yet uploaded assets to fit in with the new box design on the library page. On the other hand, it appears that the new interface has dumped the random Rock Paper Shotgun articles that you all loved seeing spammed in your game news feeds.

MMO Fallout can confirm that this works, the images included in this article were from my own test.

Quality Control: Valve Approves Obvious Attack on Titan Ripoff


Quality control: On Steam, it is virtually non-existent where Valve has a $100 interest in every game submitted. Between fraudware, malware, rape games, publishers heading over to Epic, and secret bitcoin miners being uploaded to the platform, Valve has had quite the PR nightmare on its hands. That being said, it’s been a while since Valve has had a genuinely embarrassing misstep.

Until today.

Twitter user Lekon brought attention to an Attack on Titan unlicensed game being approved by Valve titled none other than Attack on Titan The Game. The title is available in early access for $5 and appears to be a low quality endless runner hastily cobbled together and tossed on Steam.

Koei Tecmo America has provided an official response that the game was not approved to use the Attack on Titan property and that their legal team has already been notified. While this is hardly the most controversial thing to happen on Steam, it is another reminder on how little effort Valve puts to prevent the same troll/illegal games it promised to keep off the store.

Source: Twitter 

Daybreak Laid Off More People


Daybreak Game Company may be currently best known for their string of layoffs, and it appears that the pendulum is coming around again for another swipe.

The folks over at Massively OP noticed that multiple developers on the PC version of H1Z1, known lovingly as Z1 Battle Royale, are no longer with Daybreak and NantG. This includes Z1’s lead game designer who posted about the layoffs just a few hours ago. Massively OP was able to confirm via Twitter that Z1’s combat designer was also laid off, as well as the community representative.

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The move comes not even a week after NantG posted an announcement on its Twitter account that they are in planning mode and “discussing many things.”

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Neither the Daybreak Game Company or NantG Mobile have made an official statement. Perhaps ironically, Z1 Battle Royale has experienced a notable increase in players following a massive decline over the past year.

Source: MassivelyOP

 

Valve Combats Workshop Scams With New Update


When it comes to updating the quality of life of its store, Valve is like a particularly slow iceberg. That said, they do tend to get to their destination. Eventually.

If you pay attention to the drama of the Steam community, you’re probably well aware of an issue plaguing specifically Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. The workshop for both games, and others, has been the target of an onslaught of scams. The scams generally come in the form of ads for free skins, free items, rare skins, giveaways, promotional content, etc. The actual guides lead to phishing websites, infect the user’s computer with malware, keyloggers, etc, and ultimately all you’re left with is a VAC-banned Steam account and an empty inventory. Generally these guides were posted by accounts stolen from other similar scams.

With this week’s update, Steam will now send an email to the account owner when a new item is posted for the first time, asking them to review and confirm the item that was posted. The goal is twofold, to plug the endless stream of scam guides without creating unnecessary hassle for frequent workshop creators, and to inform a user that their account has been compromised without their knowledge. The effectiveness of the new system will have to be seen.

Source: Steam

[NM] Deep Silver Disables Stolen Steam Keys


Metro: Exodus publisher Deep Silver released a statement earlier this week that they will be disabling Steam keys that were flagged as stolen and resold by an unauthorized reseller. The keys were allegedly taken from the factory where the physical keys were printed.

These keys have been obtained illegally from the factory where physical key printing had taken place prior to the announcement of exclusivity with Epic Games, due to the criminal nature of these keys, all unlicensed keys have been deactivated and activation / download of Metro Exodus without the executable file is no longer possible. In addition, the software will be removed from the Steam library of any players using an unauthorised code. The keys being sold on this platform are stolen goods, and are therefore illegal.

The announcement notes that the only authorized key sellers were Humble Store and Razer. Those affected are recommended to contact the seller for a refund, or possibly the cardholder to reverse the transaction.

Source: Steam

Survived By Is Being Survived By Everything Else, Sunsetting In April


Early Access bullet-hell roguelite Survived By has been officially declared deceased. Human Head Studios announced the impending closure today with supporters receiving full refunds. The title released on December 5, 2018, and unfortunately just hasn’t gone as well as Human Head had planned. Steam Charts shows that Survived By launched to a peak of 2,500 players in December which quickly plummeted to 369 in January and slightly over 100 in the last month. As of this publishing there were 13 people online.

The announcement has been posted below for brevity.

After much deliberation and sadness, beginning today, we will be ceasing development of Survived By. We greatly appreciate the time you’ve spent playing Survived By since our launch in Closed Beta and all of the feedback you’ve provided.

This decision hasn’t come easily. We still believe in the core idea of Survived By, but after careful consideration of the game’s progress since its inception, we feel we won’t be able to reach the vision we originally conceived.

We plan to keep the Survived By servers up until April 19th, 2019 and disabling all in-game real money purchases later today. To anyone who has supported Survived By’s development, we’ll be giving full automatic refunds to everyone who has ever purchased items or packs in the coming weeks.

Thank you all, Ancestors.

–The Survived By team

Source: Steam

Valve Promises To Nuke Review Bombs


It’s safe to say that (outside of the revenue share) one of the best promises that Epic Games has made to potential games is the option to avoid a phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent on Steam and the internet as a whole: Review bombs. A review bomb, for those living in bomb-proof shelters, involves large numbers of people leaving negative reviews for a game. In the last few years, this has ranged from insertion of DRM, something stupid said by a community manager, the developer entering a publishing deal, an anti-China joke, bad updates, etc.

Valve, in their consistent refusal to deal with community issues, has remained silent on the problem of review bombs. They have instituted what amounted to a bandage in the form of a graphical chart where customers can see if the negative reviews are consolidated to a very short time span.

In a blog post released this morning, Valve has announced that the company will revisit user reviews starting with off-topic review bombs. According to the post, once Valve identifies a review bomb, it will mark the time period and remove those scores from the review score calculation. The reviews will not be deleted. If your review is caught in that time frame, unfortunately you are out of luck as well as the system does not go into each individual review to curate them.

“Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we’ll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched – if you want to dig into them to see if they’re relevant to you, you’ll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we’ve made it clear when you’re looking at a store page where we’ve removed some reviews by default, and we’ve further improved the UI around anomalous review periods.”

Source: Steam