Tag: Steam

Gigantic Is Still Here, Starts New Community Events


Gigantic developer Motiga has announced the latest community challenge for players. Gamers have one week to deal 2.1 billion damage to enemy guardians, or face the horrible defeat of not being rewarded a solar flair skin. You’ll have to ask yourself, are you a bad enough dude to kill the guardian and go out for burgers?

COMMUNITY CHALLENGE! You have exactly one week to deal 2.1 BILLION total damage to the Guardians. Up to the challenge?

Gigantic is available on Arc, Steam, and Xbox One.

(Source: Twitter)

Valve Updates Steam Groups To Curb Gambling Spam


If you play Counter Strike: Global Offensive, odds are you are probably not unfamiliar with the mass quantities of spam groups that have popped up related to gambling websites. Thanks to Valve not implementing a way to automatically block group invitations, players were at the mercy of whether or not a bot group had you in their sights. With today’s update, Valve hopes to curb Steam spam by preventing level 0 bot accounts from spamming invites.

First off, we see that more and more organized spammers are using bots to create groups on a huge scale. At some times, the number of new groups created explicitly for spamming outweigh the legitimate groups. Once a spammer has created a bunch of new groups, they then use bots to invite random players into the group. Even if only a small percentage of players that were invited end up joining any one of these groups, the spammer still can end up with a significant audience. The spammers then use these groups to advertise various websites or offers by posting frequent announcements to the members.

Starting today, you will only be able to invite your friends to groups, and likewise in regards to receiving invitations. It seems fairly likely that this will lead to friend request spam replacing group request spam, but it is a step in the right direction.

(Source: Steam)

Failure of Direct: Fidget Spinner Simulator


Valve’s dream for Steam is to have any open platform where virtually anyone can get in and sell their wares, and if you’d like a glimpse of the future under this branding than look no further than Fidget Spinner Simulator, an asset flip developed and pushed onto Steam by a hack Russian developer known for pushing mediocre asset flips under the name bcInteractive. Now operating under the user berdyev, fidget spinner simulator is available for 79 cents.

It doesn’t have trading cards, because Valve smartly updated their systems to prevent parasites like Berdyev from profiting even further off of games that would hardly pass muster at itch.io. For more information on Berdyev, feel free to reference this video by SidAlpha:

But not content with merely being a terrible game, Berdyev dedicates two achievements to mocking autistic people because that’s what twelve year old internet edgelords do these days, and who doesn’t love a good maymay?

With Valve’s new system, the best that we can hope for is that Fidget Spinner Simulator will never be approved for trading cards, making the game utterly useless for the Russian trading card farming market, and that the Steam algorithm will ensure that Berdyev’s titles are buried with the rest of the trash, never to be seen by the average user unless specifically searched for.

NM Impressions: Crash Force


(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.

The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.

Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.

While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.

And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.

I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.

As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.

Dev Shenanigans: ZULA Offers Rewards For Positive Reviews


ZULA is described as an MMO FPS developed out of Istanbul by Lokum Games and available on Steam (your mileage may vary). The game has a lot of positive reviews, and if you look closely you’ll see players posting their usernames in the reviews for all to see. This is important, as the reason for posting such information is that Lokum is promising rewards in return for positive reviews.

The notice as posted on the main website (roughly translated into English by Google) promises a 3-day AWP sniper rifle as well as an entry for an even better gift in return for positively reviewing the game and marking said review as useful.

Here’s what you need to do to participate in the event.  We ask you to write a nice review article on your game in the store section  on Steam, and to recommend the game and mark it as useful. Also, do not neglect to write your in-game character name when writing a comment, because we have a wonderful surprise to support our players!

We present a 3 day AWP Samba to each participating actor . In addition, we will give a 30 day Cheytac Y?ld?r?m gift to our 3 players with the draw to be made at the end of 1 month . Event participation prizes will be sent every 3 days.

As an aside, if you don’t live in Turkey or have a way of falsifying your location, don’t bother clicking that Steam link, the URL will present as invalid and you’ll receive an error saying that the store page isn’t available in your region.

Offering rewards in return for positive reviews is against Steam’s Code of Conduct for sellers. It can and has resulted in games being pulled from the Steam store. Whether or not Valve will take action in this case will have to be seen.

(Source: ZULA)

One Month Later: Battleborn’s Free Trial Doesn’t Retain Numbers


It’s been one month since Battleborn started its free trial, and while the game received an early boost it looks like most of those customers aren’t sticking around. While the game peaked out on Steam at 1,561 concurrent users, the last week has seen those numbers fall to an average of 417.9. The number is still much higher than May’s average player count of 82.2, but complaints of long wait times for queues on the forums and the fact that this is just one month out of launch spells bad times ahead for Battleborn.

Overall, the free trial launch failed to bring the concurrency numbers to even 10% of Battleborn’s launch peak of 12,070 so while the number did increase over pre-trial numbers, it wasn’t by much and those numbers are falling quite steadily. Effects on population for the console versions is more difficult to determine.

(Source: Steam Charts)

Banned Steam Seller Is Back, Threatening Steam Users


Gennady Guryanov Alekseevich shouldn’t be selling games on Steam, he was banished from the service in April when Valve discovered that he was using Steam accounts to boost the reviews of his games. In fact, his entire library of games was destroyed: Zi, Julai, and K-Rolik.

Secret Doctrine is a game developed by Luma14Kulan, the alias of Gennady Guryanov Alekseevich and which is currently available on Steam at the high price of $50, despite the aforementioned individual being barred from selling products on it.

Through tough research, MMO Fallout was able to verify that not only is Gennady Guryanov the developer of The Secret Doctrine, but that he is in fact currently going by the username Lama14Kulan. How did we discover this information, you may ask? Via the not-so-subtle about page on the game’s own website.

And since Lama14Kulan is shady enough to get himself banned for underhanded practices, it may not be surprising to see that users are being threatened with lawsuits over their criticism of Guryanov’s business tactics.

For what it’s worth, as with most games of this stripe, while Guryanov may be back on Steam, it hasn’t stopped his game from flopping hard. As of this writing, there is one review of the game (Russian) by a user who is (unsurprisingly) friends with Guryanov. There isn’t a single person playing at this time and sales are expected to be miniscule as publisher Elena Schukina (seen above threatening to sue a user) is trying to play up the controversy as “black PR” to drive more sales.

Given that Guryanov is located in Russia and his game has sold virtually nothing, the threat of lawsuit falls on deaf ears. Members of the community should not allow empty threats from a shady creator stop them from exposing and criticizing problematic players in the Steam economy.

(Source: Guardians of Greenlight)

Greenlight Fraudsters: MechDefender Scams Greenlight Bundle


MechDefender is a recently released game by developer Elite Games Ltd, Vadim Starygin, and one that currently has zero concurrent players, a factor that probably won’t change much so long as Elite Games refuses to give keys to the customers who purchased them. You see, MechDefender was partnered with the OtakuMaker Greenlight Bundle, a Steam bundle where players are given the ability to buy games before they are greenlit on Steam at a major discount in return for a key once the game is approved and on the store (this is not a Valve-sanctioned bundle).

Except that while MechDefender was successfully Greenlit, the developer has no intention of actually giving players keys. Why? Despite no doubt knowing how much money he’d be making from each sale, the developer decided after already taking part that it just wasn’t enough.

So I`m about to close this topic. I`ll give out a few keys to play&test in next topic after patch.
Here is bottom line of this disccusion:
1) At this moment I do not have money from “this bundle”.
2) If you wanna get your four cents back – ask for refund at place where you “spend” your cents.

So the developer sold copies of his game cheap in order to get it approved through Steam Greenlight, and then reneged and has decided that the price is too cheap and the buyers won’t be getting their copies. Normally MMO Fallout takes a position of presuming incompetence over malice, but this practice is an outright scam, one that were it to be pursued in a western court would most definitely result in Elite Games on the losing end.

But Elite Games will happily provide a refund, which it has valued at 4 cents.

And, no, I didnt get any ‘real money’. I would love to give it back. It is around 4 cents per copy. At this point we trying to work out a solution. Any suggestion is welcome.

The developer goes on in the linked thread to begin awkwardly going through the play histories of people criticizing his business decision, questioning their play styles and making conclusions to not give them keys based off of perceived motivations which, as far as consumer law goes, is none of his business.

Alright, alright, he’ll send out the keys. But only to people who have been nice…

Since MechDefender is moving towards release candidate.
Lets try first round of keys? To nice ppl – who wasnt calling me names or put in his??????list.

But you people aren’t real customers in his eyes…

“Just wanna add – you are not my customer. I dont consider you a customer – even if you spend four cents and demanding a gift a 5$ value…”

“…I meant not you personaly – but all users who want copy for four cents. They are not customers – including or excluding you – depens on your deeds. I did lost count and stuff.”

And don’t think you scumbag customers thinking you’re entitled to a product just because it was sold to you are going to get this deal again in the future, because you won’t.

And for other games – I can only do this with MechDefender. You have to meet me at half-way.
If you dont like this plan, and insist on more games for four cents – that will not happen. Ask for refund.

A quick glance at the forums shows a familiar field of banned accounts that has become so common with developers engaged in shady practices. While Elite Games has sworn off of Otaku bundles going forward, perhaps it is best for consumers to keep in mind exactly how Starygin feels about his customers, or whatever he calls them because they aren’t customers in his eyes.

Elite Games was founded by Russian developer Vadim Starygin and his wife Tatiana Budarina. The company operates out of Kaliningrad and has been releasing titles for nearly ten years.

Black Desert Online Hits Steam: 40% Off This Month


Black Desert Online is available to purchase on Steam, right now! To celebrate the launch of the action MMO on Steam’s platform, players can snag a copy for 40% off for the rest of the month. That means getting in on the action will cost as little as $6. There will also be several in-game sales as well as a few drop events going on until the end of the month. In anticipation of a flood of players, Kakao Games has set up extra servers to share the load.

To better support the additional influx of players, Kakao Games will employ extra Olvia speed servers, some of which will be exclusively reserved to cater for new players that are coming through Steam. Users can choose to play on the exclusive servers or to jump into the greater community straight away. Special “Olvia” servers will help players to level-up quickly and catch up with the existing Black Desert Online community.

For more information, check out the link below. While you’re here, take a gander at Black Desert Online’s latest trailer.

(Source: Steam)

Valve’s Trading Card Update Shoots Shovelware Games In The Heart


Those of you who use or follow Steam in any capacity are no doubt aware of the high volume of low effort shovelware being heaped onto the service, increasingly from developers out of Russia, that have popped up on Steam for one purpose: Farming trading cards. These games use unscrupulous methods, through bot voting or through key bribery, to get their games greenlit, after which the game is immediately besieged by thousands of bots who idle the game and then sell the trading cards for money or break the cards down into gems which are then sold for money. The bots make money, the developer gets a cut of the sales, and others have more incentive to throw their shovelware onto Steam for an easy, if ill-gotten, profit.

The practice has become so popular that there are entire Steam groups dedicated to buying up these low quality games for the purpose of farming cards in large quantities.

Today’s Steam update takes those bad actors out back and buries them next to the rose bushes. In order to be eligible for trading cards, a game must obtain a certain confidence level showing that people are actually playing. In the update notice, Valve attributes changing the trading card system as being to cut down on faux data.

As we mentioned in our last post, the algorithm’s primary job is to chew on a lot of data about games and players, and ultimately decide which games it should show you. These Trading Card farming games produce a lot of faux data, because there’s a lot of apparent player activity around them. As a result, the algorithm runs the risk of thinking that one of these games is actually a popular game that real players should see.

Thankfully this system is retroactive, meaning you’ll receive any cards you should have once they are made available.

Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we’re going to move to a system where games don’t start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it’s actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who’ve played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you’ll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.

Valve has confidence that this system will function better than Steam Greenlight, whose failure to curate allowed the games onto the marketplace to begin with, due to the extra variables and larger base compared to the relative few who use Greenlight. Most recently, Valve made major changes to gifting Steam games in order to combat bad hombres.

(Source: Steam)