Tag: Store

Steam Cleaning: Banned Developer Creates Shell-Accounts


Where would we be if Steam’s worst developers weren’t so stupid?

There have been hundreds of developers banned from Steam for various reasons of scumbaggery, and Valve doesn’t do a fantastic job of vetting the identity of creators so many of them have come back in one form or another. The latest developer to do this is apparently Sun Lucky Industries who have taken to creating numerous shell accounts to put their copy-pasted, low quality games on Steam.

Thankfully they aren’t very intelligent. Their games Monster Planet, Urban Riots, Desert Monsters, Animal War, Alien Creatures, and Desert Lost contain the exact same price (99 cents) and the exact same product description. They also look like exactly the same game but with different assets packs.

“This is a third person action game,The player is surrounded by a group of monsters represented by the leader,Players can explore the surrounding area freely, but need to kill the monster or avoid the monster’s attack, the leader of the attack and vitality is very high need attention,Players need to survive as long as possible.”

Will Valve react? More than likely.

Big thanks to the folks at Sentinels of the Store for their diligence.

Epic Condemns “Disturbing Trend” Of Abuse After Fake Ooblet Developer Comments


Epic Games has released a statement today to condemn the circulation of false information intended to incite harassment against one of its developer partners over the weekend. This weekend fake screenshots and even a falsified video appeared on the net alleging to show evidence that one of the developers of the game Ooblets making a statement in their Discord chat. The images purported to show the developer advocating for the gassing of gamers, apparently in response to outrage following the decision to make the game Epic Store exclusive.

The fake photos and videos were circulated and promoted by a number of people over the weekend, including Youtuber SidAlpha who publicly berated the developer, Tim Sweeney, and those who were skeptical of the claim. SidAlpha later deleted his tweets claiming the photos/video as authentic, and has posted a video to spread the message about the fraudulent claim.

Epic’s statement about the event has been posted below in its entirety and can be seen here.

We at Epic Games have often shared our views about the game business and companies in it, and we support the entire game community’s right to speak freely and critically about these topics, including the topic of Epic, our products, and our store. When everyone shares their earnest views, the best ideas ultimately prevail.

The announcement of Ooblets highlighted a disturbing trend which is growing and undermining healthy public discourse, and that’s the coordinated and deliberate creation and promotion of false information, including fake screenshots, videos, and technical analysis, accompanied by harassment of partners, promotion of hateful themes, and intimidation of those with opposing views.

Epic is working together with many game developers and other partners to build what we believe will be a healthier and more competitive multi-store world for the future. We remain fully committed, and we will steadfastly support our partners throughout these challenges. Many thanks to all of you that continue to promote and advocate for healthy, truthful discussion about the games business and stand up to all manners of abuse.

NM: Grab Enter the Gungeon Free on Epic Game Store


Epic Game Store has unveiled their next free title: Enter the Gungeon. Available at no cost outside of downloading and using the Epic Game Store, Enter the Gungeon will be available until June 20 after which the free game will be Rebel Galaxy. Add it to your account now, keep it forever.

It should be noted that the Epic Store edition is notably missing platform achievements as the client does not currently support them. Enter the Gungeon does have in-game achievements.

Source: Epic Games

Sony’s Digital Refund Offers Crumb Of Refund Rights


Sony’s refund policy just got a fair bit better.

As noted by Push Square, the Playstation terms of service have been updated to note that you can refund a digital purchase within 14 days of purchase assuming that the product has not been downloaded. It also includes a notation making allowances for cases of faulty content.

After purchasing this type of content through PlayStation™Store, you have 14 days from purchase to request a refund to your wallet on PlayStation™Network. If you started to download or stream the purchased content you are not eligible for a refund unless the content is faulty.

In addition, subscription services can be cancelled within 14 days of auto-renewal, with the pro-rated refund depending on how much you have used the service. The money from the refund will go to your Playstation wallet.

Source: Push Square

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

Deep Silver Latest To Snub Valve For the Epic Store


Another day, another publisher picked up by the lure of more money. Deep Silver is the latest publisher to become ensnared in the growing Epic Games Store, with Steam players being notified that Metro Exodus, which has been up for pre-order on Steam, will no longer be on sale as of today. Metro does not release until February 15, and Deep Silver has assured Valve that those who pre-ordered will still be able to access the game and future updates.

Notice: Later today, sales of Metro Exodus will be discontinued on Steam due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store.

The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam.

We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.

The initial reaction by the Metro community has not been positive, with the announcement being very quickly deleted following a wave of negative feedback. Negative reactions have already begun flooding the Steam forums with players assuring developer 4A Games and publisher Deep Silver that the store shift has convinced them to not purchase the game period. We will most likely know in a few months time whether the exclusivity deal was as lucrative as 4A Games hopes.

Source: Steam

Tim Sweeney: Tencent Not A Parent Company, Offline Mode Coming 2019


Epic Founder Tim Sweeney took to Reddit last week to clarify a few things regarding the Epic Store and what role Tencent has to play in it. The original poster in the thread laid down a number of accusations against Epic and Ubisoft, among others, over questionable practices. Included in the list was the allegation that Epic is collecting data to hand over to its “parent company” Tencent and thus the Chinese government.

“Their TOS states they have the right to monitor you and send the data to their parent company. And who is Epic’s parent company? The Chinese dev that’s known for spying for the Chinese government. Tencent. The same Tencent who’s working hand in hand with the Chinese Government to work on tools to spy on their own citizens. Escentially Epic Games is owned by the Chinese Government.”

Sweeney showed up later in the comments to refute that Tencent is a parent company, as Sweeney himself is the controlling shareholder. Tencent owns a minority investment in Epic Games and does not have access to any customer data. He posted in the same thread responding to a user asking if the Epic store will have an offline mode, confirming that it will be released in “early 2019” for games that are playable offline.

Comment from discussion Ubisoft needs to stop with this Always Online bullshit; Epic Games Store is literal Spyware and worse..

https://www.redditstatic.com/comment-embed.js

Source: Reddit

Epic Games Offers 88% Revenue Cut To Developers


Epic Games this week has announced the unveiling of the Epic Games store, a new digital distribution platform that aims to court third party developers and publishers with lucrative rates. The digital platform will launch with a library of hand-curated titles on PC and Mac and will eventually expand to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.

What Epic is offering is a platform where developers take a cool 88% cut of revenue. This puts the platform in stark contrast to Steam where the developer takes home 70% (65% if using the Unreal engine). For developers using the Unreal engine, Epic is willing to eat the usual 5% royalty fee. Epic also promises that developers will have control of their news feed with no store-placed ads or cross-marketing of competing games visible.

More information on Epic’s store will be available on December 6 at the Game Awards.

(Source: Epic Games)

Steam Introduces Updated Filtering, Adult Only Games


Several months after announcing impending changes to its storefront, Valve this week implemented a number of changes to Steam to alter what players see and what they can opt to ignore.

First and foremost, the upcoming release list is being changed to “take into account the pre-release interest in a game — that is to say, data we gather through wishlists, pre-purchase, and a developer’s or publisher’s past titles.” Users will be able to see a customized list of upcoming titles generated based on the developers they follow, their wishlists, their play data, and more.

The raw unfiltered list will still be available for those who prefer it.

Secondly to this update are improved tools that users can take advantage of to ignore certain things that they do not want to see on the Steam store. In addition to it now being possible to ignore games by developer/publisher, users can ignore up to ten tags as well as set their filtering to ignore games with mature content, or allow mature content but block sexual content.

A second set of changes was focused on improving how you can ignore things you’re not interested in. In the past you’ve been able to ignore individual games or product types (like VR, or Early Access) you didn’t want to see again. But now we’ve added ways for you to also easily ignore individual developers, publishers, and curators.

Developers will now be required to contextualize the mature content in their games, if there is any, similar to how the ESRB collects data to determine ratings. Valve will simply collect that data and use it to allow gamers to filter out titles that they do not want to see.

Finally, Valve noted action taken against a number of developers publishing titles that fell under the trolling rules that Steam has in place, noting that the wide variety of games and publishers were actually a very small number of bad actors. In regards to the new requirements above, Valve will be going through the back catalog to ensure compliance with titles that are already on the Steam store.

Valve also detailed how it determines a “troll game” in vague wording, which we have quoted in its entirety below:

“Our review of something that may be “a troll game” is a deep assessment that actually begins with the developer. We investigate who this developer is, what they’ve done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more. All of this is done to answer the question “who are we partnering with and why do they want to sell this game?” We get as much context around the creation and creator of the game and then make an assessment. A trend we’re seeing is that we often ban these people from Steam altogether instead of cherry-picking through their individual game submissions. In the words of someone here in the office: “it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people.”

PSA: Shadowrun Returns Free Until Saturday


The Steam Summer Sale might be bumping, but right now you can get your hands on the isometric game Shadowrun Returns for the virtually free price of $0. Available via the Humble Store and delivered as a Steam key, the Shadowrun Returns Deluxe Edition still retails for $25 and includes the base game as well as the Anthology DLC and soundtrack.

But like any great deal, this one is time limited and will end mid-day Saturday. Our time wizards peg this promotion as ending at 1p.m. EST on June 23.