Tag: Steam

Steam: Devs Cannot Discount Within 30 Days Of Price Increase


With the Steam summer sale upon us, it might be useful to look back at a not-so-new but not-so-well-known policy laid out by Valve in terms of how and when developers can put their games on sale. According to the terms of service as laid out by Valve, vendors are not allowed to discount their games within 30 days of a price increase, cannot change prices while a promotion is live, and cannot run another discount for two months following a launch discount.

These rules were likely put into place to prevent a repeat of previous years where some developers would increase their costs right before a big Steam sale and then discount it to make it look like the game is at a big markdown, such as a $20 game boosting its price to $50, then offering 50% off and selling at $25 so people think they’re getting a great deal when really they’re paying even more than the regular cost.

The full rules breakdown as follows:

  • You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 2 months.
  • It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase.
  • Discounts cannot be run within 2 months of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events or other specific Valve-organized sale events.
  • Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title or 30 days from when your launch discount ends.
  • You may not change your price while a promotion is live.
  • It is not possible to discount a product 100%.
  • Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

Chaturday: The Seeming Lack of Non-Trolling Offensive Games


I’ve been thinking long and hard about Valve’s new policy regarding offensive games and how this could negatively affect their user base, by which I mean I haven’t been giving it much thought at all. My attention, however, has turned to the idea that Steam will be flooded by horrifying, bullying, aggressive, abusive, games designed to be abusive and bullying, because the media told me to prepare for it and when have they ever published sensationalist material?

If you consider the history of offensive or controversial games, the list is actually pretty small once you filter out the titles that were deliberately cobbled together in a week by a guy using pre-built assets. A guy whose motivation is little more than a stupid joke for his friends or to intentionally bait the games press into writing outrage clickbait about his title, thus increasing its sales potential from zero to three because such coverage rarely results in sales if the game is genuinely awful.

Even then, what you are left with is a pile of games that were controversial for other reasons than its direct content, like Persona 5 bullying streamers or Baldur’s Gate pushing a low quality expansion. You just don’t see serious developers, or even semi-serious indie devs, trying to create games in the same vein as Active Shooter Simulator. As incredible as it may sound, there isn’t much money in that sort of controversy, and the negative blowback can be more damaging than any potential sales revenue. Just ask Konami what it thinks about Six Days in Fallujah.

Which leads us to the group that will for the most part be making these games: Tiny fly-by-night indie developers that nobody has ever heard of before, virtually indistinguishable from the troll accounts. If a game like Active Shooter is submitted again to Steam, would it even be given the consideration that it might not be a troll title? Or Gay World? I have my doubts.

I suppose the goal here is two-fold to discourage troll developers: You’re spending $100 to submit a game that has a high chance of being flagged and dumped as a troll game and you’re not getting that $100 back. If, by chance, the troll game gets through the initial screening, odds are it will either be drowned in the sea of Steam games and nobody will see it or the wrong person will see it, raise a ruckus, and we’re back at square one.

Will that discourage trolls? Hell no, and to further my point I point toward the Something Special for Someone Special, a wedding ring in Team Fortress 2 that broadcasts a global message to all servers upon activation. The ring costs $100 and that price hasn’t stopped thousands of people from purchasing it and some using it to broadcast messages like “Anne Frank has accepted Adolph Hitler’s apology ring,” because those messages aren’t checked. $100 for a joke is nothing for a large swath of people, even if the payoff is people see it for five seconds and then it’s gone.

The developer behind Active School Shooter denies that his game was meant to troll the public, a claim that ultimately falls on deaf ears considering his previous list of published titles including White Power: Pure Voltage and Tyde Pod Challenge. Most trolls will deny that they are in fact trolls, meaning Valve will need to use their critical thinking skills to determine if the next Active Shooter Simulator is a troll game.

On second thought, Valve only declared the game a troll title because of its association with Ata Berdiyev, so we might be doomed in that department.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Valve Addresses Fake Steam Games Again, Again, Again, Again


Valve is once again taking on fake games plaguing Steam, this time focusing on achievements. In a leaked post to the private developer forums, Valve announced that games will now be subject to confidence constraints that will limit how many achievements a game can have and how those achievements affect your account, until the game is validated as being an actual product that people are buying and playing.

The post notes that, until a game is validated as being genuine, it will be limited to 100 achievements and progress will not be visible, nor will it count toward global achievement numbers. Achievement games have become more prevalent on Steam due to Valve’s lax restriction and quality control on products, with an entire genre forming around games that offer thousands of achievements with no real underlying game, generally simply requiring the game to be launched and idling to generate achievements.

This move is very similar to one that Valve took against trading cards, where Valve placed limits on which games would be eligible for the marketable, tradeable cards. It is important to note that unlike trading cards, where an entire black market of mostly Russian bots formed to farm games developed purely to profit off of fraudulent card sales, that achievements are absolutely worthless in Steam other than for decoration and ego purposes.

(Source: Twitter)

[Video] Remedy Entertainment Unveils Control


Remedy Entertainment and publishing partner 505 Games have announced Control, set for PC and consoles in 2019. Players take on the role of Jesse Faden, director of a secretive agency in New York when the world is invaded by aliens. Players will have to master a variety of powers, loadouts, and reactive environments.

“Control represents a new exciting chapter for us, it redefines what a Remedy game is. It shows off our unique ability to build compelling worlds while providing a new player-driven way to experience them,” said Mikael Kasurinen,game director of Control. “A key focus for Remedy has been to provide more agency through gameplay and allow our audience to experience the story of the world at their own pace”

Remedy Entertainment is known for their work on Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break.

Lawbreakers Will Shut Down In September, Now Free To Play


When Boss Key Productions announced its closure back in May, the question of its two titles sunsetting became a matter of when, not if. As of today, competitive shooter Lawbreakers has been made officially free to play in preparation for the servers to sunset in September. No information has been posted to Radical Heights, which is already free to play, on when that game will follow suit.

The announcement in its entirety has been posted below. All in-game purchases have been disabled and no refunds are being granted.

(Source: Steam)

Dear LawBreakers,

In light of the unfortunate news regarding Boss Key Productions shutting down, we regret to announce that we will be sunsetting our support of LawBreakers on September 14, 2018 as we are not able to operate the game.

Our servers will remain open until then and the game will be made free-to-play on Steam for all players effective immediately. Please note that any and all new in-game purchases will also be disabled and we will not be able to accept any refund requests.

We truly appreciate your understanding in this difficult time and we want to thank you all your support and being a part of the passionate LawBreakers community.

Thank you for staying with us throughout this journey.

-The LawBreakers Team

Chaturday: The One in Which I Get Myself Blacklisted, And That’s a Good Thing


I had some extra time to work on today’s Chaturday article, so I thought I’d make this one extra long. Sit back and enjoy.

This week I’d like to take a look at Valve’s recent decision to no longer curate games on Steam, barring games that are illegal or blatantly trolling. This has prompted an immediate and unsurprising backlash from a population of the internet whose income and livelihoods are directly proportional to the amount of drama that they can stir up. The doomsayers came out of their holes to proclaim that the service is now damned to be a hellscape of disgusting pornographic games where Nazis and white supremacists murder babies! The National Center on Sexual Exploitation claimed that there were one thousand games on Steam with sexual content, and every single one without exception was objectifying in nature.

It’s important to note here that none of the games journalists you may have seen talking about this are trying to take your games away, and I know this because they’ve been telling us repeatedly for the past five years. If I am repeatedly slapping food out of the hand of a small child, it doesn’t mean I’m against that child eating or trying to control him, I’m just saying that his hands can’t hold the food that I don’t personally like.

And for what it’s worth, I think that a lot of these recent decisions at Valve come down to the flat corporate structure. The decision to remove Hatred all those years back was done and then reversed because there is no real managerial structure in the company. Nobody to come out and squarely lead with a vision for how the Steam store should exist. As a result, factions form with differing opinions which arguably led to the warning letters being sent to certain developers a few weeks ago, and you have a company that massively disagrees on how to police the store with nobody around to pull rank and say “my word is final.” Nobody can agree on who gets to push the big shiny “approved” button, so nobody gets to push it at all.

I could spend a year going over quotes from our friends in the games media losing their collective sanity over this announcement, but I don’t have that kind of time. Inverse posted a piece saying that Valve’s response to trolling was to monetize it, despite that being a complete lie, saying that Valve’s answer to bigotry is to monetize it, despite not having any evidence of games genuinely advocating bigotry appearing or attempting to appear on the platform. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera wrote a piece with the subheading “anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut,” a blatantly false statement followed by paragraphs of trying to connect how Valve is wrong for deciding what constitutes an “illegal game” as it makes them the arbitrary decision maker, but also wrong for not acting as arbitrary decision maker on which games pass muster for the store. Freelance writer Nick Capozzoli compared the statement to Valve essentially saying “We believe we should bring Nazis together,” a flagrant misrepresentation.

Even the founder of Itch.io got in on the salt-throwing, posting “A platform that allows “everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling” is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off . Our ban buttons are ready.” Incidentally, within five minutes of searching, MMO Fallout had managed to pick up a lengthy list of titles hosted on, and thus presumably endorsed, by itch.io, including hentai games with less-than-consensual sex, games where the objective is to beat up aggressive, beautiful girls, and a game that simply describes itself as “Learn Japanese You Faggot!” Itch.io is a veritable dumping ground for virtually everything that would never make its way on to Steam, be it meme games, troll games, outright piracy, and unfettered copyright infringement. If there are any stores that have no standing to criticize Valve’s curation, it’s itch.io.

It’s not entirely surprising to see outlets deliberately misinterpreting Valve’s statements, bringing up titles like Active Shooting Simulator and conveniently passing over either the fact that the game was removed, or why it was removed, and presenting hyperbolic questions on whether or not Valve will accept certain games, pointing to titles that a reasonable person could conclude to fall under the trolling rule. I say unsurprising because many of these writers are the same people whose bread and butter lies in outrage bait, throwing out accusations and feigning offense to drive hate-views by the thousands, otherwise known as trolling for profit. If these articles had been video games, they’d be banned from Steam.

One subject in which I will agree with my fellow press on is this: If Valve is claiming that they are going to only block illegal games and troll games, they damn sure better start actually doing that. As I said previously, Valve has pretty explicitly stated that they had no intention of selling Active Shooter Simulator on Steam, a statement that would hold more water if Valve weren’t clearly getting ready to sell Active Shooter on Steam. The same goes for titles like Aids Simulator, Gay World, and that shooting game where the only goal is to kill gay people. Titles that are so obvious from the slightest glance to be troll titles and yet they managed to get their way on to Steam before being removed.

In reality, the media should be happy about these changes, as should Youtubers. After all, the idea of Steam being flooded with dozens of games on a daily basis just means that people will be going back to modern and traditional games media in order to find the titles worth playing. It also grants a fantastic opportunity to the portion of games media that really likes writing troll bait but hates actually playing games. If Steam actually becomes the cesspool that you predict, you will have a lifetime of articles to express faux outrage.

The only people who have a genuine right to be angry about these changes are the developers, for whom many this open door policy means drowning in an even larger ocean of competing voices.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Valve’s Steam Policy: Aids Simulator, No, Suicide Simulator, Yes


(Update: Since this posting, all of the developer’s titles have been pulled from Steam)

Aids Simulator was a game set to launch on Steam on June 12, 2018, at least until Valve shut it down and ripped it off the game store (still available in its archived state) According to its developer, BunchOD00dz, Aids Simulator is a game where you play as someone who goes to Africa and gets HIV, and must now kill all of the Africans who gave you HIV. It bills itself as an asset flip that performs poorly and isn’t fun. In short, it’s exactly the troll game to make the press go nuts.

The developer’s other titles include Suicide Simulator, which has apparently been deemed not a troll game and thus suitable for Steam, and Blackscreen Simulator, a title that is not in fact a black screen but instead a zombie shooter using flipped assets that similarly bills itself as short, low quality, and prone to crashing.

With Valve’s new stance on lowering the barrier to entry for Steam while toughening its stance on troll games, we’ll have to see how games like Aids Simulator and Suicide Simulator are handled going forward.

Wild West Online To Offer Free Trial As Traffic Drops


Wild West Online is preparing to implement a free trial as its Steam numbers continue to drop. Having released barely a month ago, Wild West Online launched to a peak of 559 players on Steam and currently sits at less than 40 as of this writing with a 24 hour peak of 84.

“We’re adding free trial version of the game. It’ll be available both at our website as well as thru Steam on a game’s store page. Free trial version will let users to play game as a normal player, but with some restrictions.”

Trial accounts will be restricted to level 20 and will not be able to unlock achievements or receive rewards. Wild West Online currently sits at a 37% “mostly negative” rating on Steam.

(Source: Steam)

Bless Online Is A Mess Online; Neowiz Apologizes, Compensates Players


Bless Online launched into early access this week and the launch was a bit of a mess. Between server lag, outages, maintenance, and the existence of a rather treacherous item dupe exploit, players were up in arms with some demanding refunds for their founder’s pack purchases.

In response, Neowiz posted an apology, promising fixes and outlining plans for the weeks ahead. Since the game initially launched with just a few servers, more servers have been added and much of the lag seems to have subsided.

Bless Online’s Early Access was always intended to be a growing experience, with systems and content being added in the weeks and months ahead; this is why we chose the Steam Early Access program. We are sincerely sorry that our players were led to believe otherwise, and we are happy to allow refunds for those who feel they cannot wait for the new content to arrive. We hope that you will return to the world of Bless when the features you expect are in the game and ready for your participation.

As part of its compensation, Neowiz has granted accounts approximately $20 in Lumena, the game’s premium currency.

(Source: Steam)

PSA: Only The Basic Bless Online Pack Is Eligible For Refund


Bless Online launches its head start into Early Access right now, and those of you interested in taking part can do so via one of three early access packs. Available for $40, for $70, and for $150, these early access packs grant various goodies for your in-game characters.

It should be noted, however, that of the three packs only one is refundable should you decide that the game is just not up to snuff within two hours of gameplay or two weeks of purchase, whichever comes first. The $70 and $150 packs are listed on Steam as not eligible for refund. It appears that this is linked to the founders packs constituting DLC, which Valve tends to be more restrictive of when it comes to refunds.

Those of you not too certain on your purchase may want to spring for the cheapest option, or simply wait it out as launch issues are dealt with. Launch issues with crashes and server overload may result in your game time going over the normal refundable period.

(Source: Steam)