Tag: Valve

Reminder: Steam Will No Longer Function On Windows XP/Vista Tomorrow


Does anyone still use Windows XP or Vista to play Steam? Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. According to a November 2018 Steam software/hardware survey, approximately .12% of Steam users are still on Windows XP while Windows Vista is, to put it bluntly, presently unlisted. Presumably Vista users are lumped into the .09% currently running “other” versions of the Windows operating system.

At least, Windows XP users will making up .12% of the population until tomorrow, as January 1 not only marks the beginning of a new year but the official end of life support for Steam on both systems. Valve announced the end of support back in June of this year, and as of tomorrow the client will no longer function for owners of either operating system.

As far as the internet goes, Valve is one of the few remaining companies to have continued support for Windows XP through 2018 along with League of Legends. Blizzard ended support for DirectX9 and 32-bit operating systems in 2017, as did Neverwinter, while Heroes & Generals left the OS behind in 2015.

Discord To Allow Self-Publishing AND 90/10 Revenue Split


If you thought Epic Games offering an 88/12 split along with a curated store was the pinnacle of digital distribution, think again. Discord today announced that as of 2019, not only will their service serve as a self-publishing platform where any developer can place their game, but that developers will enjoy a 90% revenue share to sweeten the deal.

So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.

Epic Games recently announced that its store would offer an 88/12 revenue split compared to Valve’s standard 70/30. Valve comparatively announced that it will offer better rates in an attempt to bring big name publishers back to the platform.

Source: Discord

[NM] How Counter Strike: GO Keeps Its Battle Royale Poppin’ Fresh


Counter Strike: Global Offensive recently went free to play, adding in its own Battle Royale mode in the form of The Danger Zone. Danger Zone is a bit different from your normal battle royale jazz, chiefly being that it’s a faster game with up to 16 participants in each fight on a smaller map (18 in teams). The mode initially leaked more than two and a half years ago when files referring to a survival game mode were discovered in the base game.

That said, I wanted to discuss some of the features that separate CS: GO from the crowd.

1. The PDA

The PDA is your best friend in Danger Zone, it’s an upgradeable device that tells you where you are, where you should probably be going, and generally where other players are located. The map is divided into hexagonal slices which at the start of each round serve as locations you’ll pick a spot to land in. You can order weapons with money found throughout the map and have it delivered to you by drone. Fun tip: You can drop your PDA on the ground and the drone will drop whatever you purchased on top of it rather than you. If you think someone might follow your drone, you can set up an ambush.

Which brings me to upgrades: You can buy upgrades that allow you to track other player’s drones, as well as an upgrade to see which zones are about to become unsafe as well as an upgrade that makes enemy positions more specific. These upgrades can rarely be found in the wild.

2. Buying Weapons

Danger Zone just wouldn’t be a proper Counter Strike mode without the ability to buy equipment and thankfully Valve haven’t overlooked that feature. You can buy some pretty rudimentary weapons from the shop with your hard-stored dollars, including weapons, armor, ammo, grenades, and upgrades for your PDA. Money is found strewn about the level and if you manage to kill someone you get to watch as their body explodes into a pile of cash.

Weapons and equipment can be found throughout the level, however guns tend to be far less available and with very low ammunition sources than finding cash and hunkering down and ordering through express Amazon Prime delivery. You can also choose to be even more of a jerk and shoot down someone else’s drone to grab whatever they are delivering, or just keep your eye on the sky and follow them to their destination, pop the guy in the head once they come out to claim the delivery.

3. The Explosives

One item you’re bound to come across while playing Danger Zone are grenades, and plenty of them. Other battle royale games have grenades as well, but those who play Counter Strike will be familiar with how grenades in this game can save your life when properly used in a pinch. Among the items available to you is the distraction grenade, an explosive that simulates gunfire wherever it is tossed. The molotov cocktail is great for creating a buffer between you and someone else, or for flooding a room if you know someone is hiding inside of it.

But here’s where CS: Go gets even fancier. While PUBG and its many clones might also have grenades, molotov cocktails, and smoke grenades, CS: GO has breaching charges, remote activated bombs that can be used to cover your ass or more likely to catch someone by surprise as they walk into a room.

4. HVT and Hostages

High Value Targets, or HVTs, are a great addition to The Danger Zone. The gist of the feature is that a random player becomes your target and if you manage to kill them the game will give you an additional $500. One benefit of this system is that you are constantly aware of where that person is on the map, letting you set up an ambush or avoid them if you aren’t properly armed up yet.

Hostages meanwhile are a holdover from the standard Counter Strike game types, and don’t really need any explanation as to why they’re there or who is holding them hostage. Picking up a hostage will slow your movements and obscure part of your screen, but if you manage to safely get them over to one of two extraction points on either side of the map, you’ll net a cool $500. Given the length of time this will take compared to the relatively short length of each round, you’re going to have to dedicate most of your time to this activity.

5. In Conclusion

Given how overloaded the battle royale scene is becoming with cheap knockoffs, it’s good to see not just Valve putting out a big update but also leaving an interesting spin on the genre that makes The Danger Zone worth playing.

Steam Cleaning: Valve Bans Yet Another Title For Impersonating Dota 2


It must be a day ending in Y, because Valve has terminated yet another Russian developer for publishing a game on the Steam marketplace with the express purpose of scamming items from established Valve titles. In this case, the creator in question was able to change the title of his game to Dota 2, including adding the official Dota 2 logo as his own, and began uploading items with the same art, description, and titles as those in Dota 2. The developer would presumably be able to distribute items to himself and friends in order to better facilitate their crimes.

Thankfully Valve implemented changes the last time this incident occurred, adding a warning to players trading for items from a game they do not own. This developer went even further and apparently discovered an exploit that allowed him to upload items without approval. In order to stem scams, Valve requires that games past a certain trust threshold before they can make use of Steam inventory and trading cards.

A Valve representative posted that the exploit has been patched.

“Scammers figured out a way to get items in the Steam economy without having their game approved for release first. We fixed that today.”

The title was quickly removed and has been virtually scoured from Valve’s systems, going as far as deleting the app and its community hub entirely.

(Reddit)

Steam Cleaning: Valve Has Banned More Than 150 Games This Month


Who says Valve doesn’t clean up their trash? Other than everyone.

Back when Valve issued a new directive that the company would no longer be curating titles with the exception of illegal games and troll titles, opting instead to merely allow its algorithm to bury lower quality titles in the furthest depths of the Steam store where nobody will see them anyway. More recently, the company has been on a bit of a ban spree, seemingly taking out developers releasing shovelware and asset flip titles.

According to Steam Tracker, Valve has banned more than 150 titles this month alone. Most of the titles appear to fall into categories of asset flips, obvious troll titles, and low quality flash-looking games. We were unable to ascertain how many developers this list spreads across, but Valve often deletes a developer’s entire catalog when one title is banned. Many of the titles had initially released as far back as January/February, but some others hadn’t even hit the market yet.

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.”

[Steam Direct] Valve Isn’t Doing Basic Checks On Marketplace Items For Scams


Actions speak louder than words, and for Valve and Steam nothing furthers the allegations that the company doesn’t put much stock in the quality of its services than the repeated instances of outright fraud that have occurred on the Steam platform over the past few years. We’ve seen meme games, troll games, asset flips, abusive developers, Greenlight vote fraud, a developer taking critics to court, and of course the repeated return of Ata Berdiyev who Valve repeatedly ignore until whatever latest game he is involved with starts bringing embarrassing attention to the Steam store.

Our latest controversy comes to us in the form of scam artist indie developers and Steam items. Valve has opened up the floodgates allowing developers to give their games inventories with tradeable items on the Steam market and, as usual, they have put absolutely zero effort into quality control and as a result, some shady developers have come out of the woodwork to start exploiting the unchecked system. Reports are popping up from numerous communities of developers uploading items that are visually identical to items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, in order to con unsuspecting players into making trades.

This type of scam is different than what we’ve seen in the past, although it has been spotted before, because it directly implicates that game developers themselves are knowingly taking part and likely even perpetuating the scams. In addition, it shows that Valve is doing next to nothing in regards to checking against its sellers shenanigans. Are they vetting logos? No. Are they vetting tradeable items? No.

In the case of Abstractism, that includes tradeable items like the Team Fortress 2 rocket launcher knockoff shown above, the game has shown that Valve isn’t even properly vetting their games for viruses or other malicious programming. Abstractism has numerous negative reviews noting that the game is being flagged by several anti-virus programs as containing a trojan horse virus, uses a shady looking steam services executable that may or may not be authentic, and thanks to the work of several sleuths on the net, has more or less been shown to be a cryptocurrency mining operation.

Both games we’ve shown in this article, Abstractism and Climber, have been removed from Steam and their developers presumably banned from selling further titles. It does show, however, that Valve’s commitment to dealing with troll or illegal games is hollow, if not mostly fabricated.

The Netherlands Litigated On CS:Go Lootboxes, So Valve Killed Trading In the Netherlands


Gamers in the Netherlands woke up this week to find out that they are no longer able to trade or market items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2. Following a ruling by the Dutch government that Valve’s systems constituted a violation of its laws on gambling, threatening criminal prosecution unless the word of the law was met, which according to Valve wasn’t actually detailed in said threat.

So in response, until Valve can better understand how to work under Dutch law, they have gone ahead and disabled trading entirely for users in the Netherlands. This change affects Counter Strike: GO and Dota 2, however since the ruling affects any game where items can be won by chance and then traded outside of the game, more Steam titles may be caught up in the future. So far the Dutch government has only noted the two of Valve’s titles.

(Source: Gamer Revolution)

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)