Finished 4th game this year. It was American Arcadia and i really enjoyed playing it. Gameplay is simple (especially in side scrolling parts) but music, atmosphere and visuals are amazing. Also voice acting is big part of enjoyment (even though because main character is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal i often thought that i am playing with Peter Parker xD) But i really did enjoy spending time with the game and story wasn't that bad either. That development team really has great art department because both of their games (Call of the Sea and American Arcadia) are visually stunning.
Community MetaSteam | January 2024 - Let's get this year started!
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yep Steam should be curated, it's a pain when you want to buy and find your Hentai Nekomimi game and you have to sort between all those Baldur's Gate 3, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Infinite Weath games...
Reading that article by Walker, it sounds to me like he wants a job at Valve.
It’s a pretty fact-free analysis, relying on tired old assumptions (like the algorithm not working) to make its point.
The only problem I see is that there’s too many good games on Steam. The number of releases on Steam could be 1000, 5000 or 10,000 a year - most of them are always going to be shit.
If we restricted the releases on Steam to the legitimately good ones, and the error rate in picking games to appear on Steam was magically 0% (as in, every good game was picked, and every bad game was filtered), that’s still dozens of games a month that are really good. More than anyone could ever play. There would still be viral hits in amongst those games, and most them would be failures.
In the real world, no one can curate a perfect slate. Great games will be filtered out.
I will always be for surfacing great games, and if anyone finds a new and novel way of doing that, that’s a win for all of us. But this moaning about there being too many games is a direct consequence of the same journalists crying because their developer friends got rejected by Steam back in the pre-Greenlight times.
It’s a pretty fact-free analysis, relying on tired old assumptions (like the algorithm not working) to make its point.
The only problem I see is that there’s too many good games on Steam. The number of releases on Steam could be 1000, 5000 or 10,000 a year - most of them are always going to be shit.
If we restricted the releases on Steam to the legitimately good ones, and the error rate in picking games to appear on Steam was magically 0% (as in, every good game was picked, and every bad game was filtered), that’s still dozens of games a month that are really good. More than anyone could ever play. There would still be viral hits in amongst those games, and most them would be failures.
In the real world, no one can curate a perfect slate. Great games will be filtered out.
I will always be for surfacing great games, and if anyone finds a new and novel way of doing that, that’s a win for all of us. But this moaning about there being too many games is a direct consequence of the same journalists crying because their developer friends got rejected by Steam back in the pre-Greenlight times.
Booooom!
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Community - MetaCouncil's Games of the Year Awards 2023 Results
Welcome to our annual games of the year awards! Thank you all for voting! Let's get directly into the fun! Top 10 Games of the Year Trails into Reverie represents the swan song of the merry band of characters we've been following for almost 20 years in the best way possible, but while it...
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But
Assassins Creed is shit
Call of Duty is shit
Starfield is shit
EA Sports is shit
Destiny 2 is shit
Overwatch 2 is shit
Street Fighter 6 is shit
Warhammer 40k is shit
in my opinion
and/or rather games I don't care about
And I am absolutely certain, that even in your fantasy scenario there would be games not allowed on the store that I absolutely love.
In case someone wants a helping hand for searching an obscure Steam game they may like consider Steampeek
It's not perfect, but it uses as many steam algorithms to at least provide a starting point. You just need a similar game you already know of
It's not perfect, but it uses as many steam algorithms to at least provide a starting point. You just need a similar game you already know of
I had a case like this a couple of weeks / months ago: I was looking for a game and only remembered how it looked, that it was kinda like Lara Croft Go, that it was based on a movie, and also delisted. I looked through plenty of pages like this but I eventually found it by looking through a page dedicated to delisted Steam games (it was "Geostorm" ). Its was the kind of game that you have at the back of your wishlist, then forget about, or maybe delete it; and at some point think of it again and go nuts when you cant figure out what it was (happens with other stuff too, Im currently trying to figure out a couple of childrens books I read in the 80s
)There's another game I couldnt figure out yet, it was a Steam Next Fest demo (so, unsure if it even released) took place in an African village, and you played as a girl that runs some errands, and I dont remember much more (3rd person game, shitty performance, didnt look like much, looked like a run-of-the-mill Unity game).
I finished jedi survivor late last night and I enjoyed it more than the first game even though there's still a lot of problems I had with it but I guess that's the magic of strong level design and pacing (in the story sections at least). The story is mostly your typical extremely dumb star wars writing which I guess shame on me for expecting more than that from star wars at this point. They mostly used the same janky animation system the first game had so I had a rough time with the combat and some traversal just like last time. They did a little better job with customization and collectibles, I was mildly interested in customizing Cal's hairdo and clothes (only 1 poncho in the game thankfully), but they still think finding tiny bits of lightsaber parts is a rewarding feeling...you can't see any of that in action!
I liked the layout of the hub worlds as they felt large but not open world and still kept that metroidvania-like feeling to them. The downside to them is Respawn's technical "prowess" means large parts of them run awful. I don't want to think about how bad it was before all the patches because in its current state, that everyone wanted to celebrate as "the game being fixed", there are large parts of Koboh that either have big framerate dips on PS5 or tons of screen tearing. Screen tearing in 2023/2024!!! There's enough performance issues still here that if I was reviewing this game now I'd knock at least 1 point off just for that, it affected my experience more than a few times.
But I think it says something about the design of the game that despite all these issues I still had a good enough time and felt myself wanting to go back and play more when I wasn't playing it. If they can just clean up their persistent technical issues and make some tweaks to the game design the 3rd game could be really special.
I liked the layout of the hub worlds as they felt large but not open world and still kept that metroidvania-like feeling to them. The downside to them is Respawn's technical "prowess" means large parts of them run awful. I don't want to think about how bad it was before all the patches because in its current state, that everyone wanted to celebrate as "the game being fixed", there are large parts of Koboh that either have big framerate dips on PS5 or tons of screen tearing. Screen tearing in 2023/2024!!! There's enough performance issues still here that if I was reviewing this game now I'd knock at least 1 point off just for that, it affected my experience more than a few times.
But I think it says something about the design of the game that despite all these issues I still had a good enough time and felt myself wanting to go back and play more when I wasn't playing it. If they can just clean up their persistent technical issues and make some tweaks to the game design the 3rd game could be really special.
So with all the discussion about Steam needing curation, too much games being released, there's only trash in Steam and what not I decided to look through my Discovery Queue and see what games it could appear there as recommendations. This post are just my overall impressions about the way the system works, some numbers and curiosities.
In Valve's own words the Discovery Queue is "a mix of products that are new, top-selling, and similar to what you play and use on Steam."
I went through 127 games and put them into a spreadsheet. So first let's have a look in the genre breakdown:
Almost 12% of games that appeared in my Queue were from the Horror genre, followed by Simulation and Survival. Keep in mind that genre classification is a mess as some games can have more than one genre, so I decided to choose what seemed to be the main one for each game. Those genres being recommended weren't a surprise at all, as according to SteamDB there was 3230 with the tag Simulation, 1626 with the tag Horror and 1258 with the tag Survival.
Being honest I was expecting more entries in Platformer, RPG and Metroidvania. The number of Bullet Heaven (Vampire Survivor-likes) games kind of surprised me as I wasn't expecting any to show up since I haven't played any entry in the genre lately, and there isn't that tag for that kind of games so I put it manually.
Mostly of the DLC that appeared to me were positive, the only exception being Forza Horizon 5 Fast X Car Pack (Mostly negative) and Crusader Kings III: Legacy of Persia (Mixed).
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Looking through the year of the recommended games, the vast majority (80%) where from 2023, the column labeled as N/A were games with no release date, they just had a Coming Soon as release date. Q4 2023 games represented around 56% of the suggestions so it seems like these were the busier months regarding releases in 2023!
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One stat that I payed attention while navigation through my queue was the number of user reviews. Years ago people were estimating the number of copies sold using the amount of user reviews, though I'm not sure if it was a reliable number, but while I'll not be trying to estimate what those games sold it's interesting to see they are getting a lot of reviews or not.
For the graph I only took in consideration games that were released
As one can see, mostly of the games aren't get a lot of reviews. From the ones that were recommended for me only two managed to get more than 10k reviews, they were Gorilla Tag and STALCRAFT. Meanwhile 2 games didn't even manage to get more than 10 reviews. With the amount of games being released it's kinda of expected, nowadays you can't expect to release a mid game and have success, as even good games may not have success.
That's it, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
In Valve's own words the Discovery Queue is "a mix of products that are new, top-selling, and similar to what you play and use on Steam."
I went through 127 games and put them into a spreadsheet. So first let's have a look in the genre breakdown:
Almost 12% of games that appeared in my Queue were from the Horror genre, followed by Simulation and Survival. Keep in mind that genre classification is a mess as some games can have more than one genre, so I decided to choose what seemed to be the main one for each game. Those genres being recommended weren't a surprise at all, as according to SteamDB there was 3230 with the tag Simulation, 1626 with the tag Horror and 1258 with the tag Survival.
Being honest I was expecting more entries in Platformer, RPG and Metroidvania. The number of Bullet Heaven (Vampire Survivor-likes) games kind of surprised me as I wasn't expecting any to show up since I haven't played any entry in the genre lately, and there isn't that tag for that kind of games so I put it manually.
Mostly of the DLC that appeared to me were positive, the only exception being Forza Horizon 5 Fast X Car Pack (Mostly negative) and Crusader Kings III: Legacy of Persia (Mixed).
---
Looking through the year of the recommended games, the vast majority (80%) where from 2023, the column labeled as N/A were games with no release date, they just had a Coming Soon as release date. Q4 2023 games represented around 56% of the suggestions so it seems like these were the busier months regarding releases in 2023!
---
One stat that I payed attention while navigation through my queue was the number of user reviews. Years ago people were estimating the number of copies sold using the amount of user reviews, though I'm not sure if it was a reliable number, but while I'll not be trying to estimate what those games sold it's interesting to see they are getting a lot of reviews or not.
For the graph I only took in consideration games that were released
As one can see, mostly of the games aren't get a lot of reviews. From the ones that were recommended for me only two managed to get more than 10k reviews, they were Gorilla Tag and STALCRAFT. Meanwhile 2 games didn't even manage to get more than 10 reviews. With the amount of games being released it's kinda of expected, nowadays you can't expect to release a mid game and have success, as even good games may not have success.
That's it, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Stardew was the only one Valve ever mentioned as an example of why curation would not work. There were in fact many more games that were denied distribution. One of the games I remember was denied was The Sea Will Claim Everything. It was a surreal and fantastic yet deeply personal point and click adventure game made by a Greek dev around the time of the Greek financial crisis. It was fairly well received at the time from a few sites that gave it a chance. Valve said no to putting it on Steam. Then the author went through Steam greenlight and got approval but, if I remember still correctly, waited several years before finally putting it on Steam. It didn't find a huge audience on Steam either but those who did play it like it a lot as you can see from the reviews. The point here is that a lot of games you've never heard of got denied on Steam and the reason you've never heard of them is because they were denied on Steam. I absolutely cannot get behind a reality where smaller, weird and wonderful games get denied on Steam just to make life easier for people who somehow get distressed by the existence of too many games.
This argument has been done to death in the past. You don't stop listening to music because there are too many songs on Spotify. You don't stop watching movies because there are too many movies on Netflix. You don't stop reading books because there are too many of them on the Kindle store. If you went to a supermarket to buy chips you wouldn't walk away because there were 47 flavours of chips in the aisle. Why is it that video games are the one thing where people demand that others make the choice for them?
You talk about how you would prefer that 80% of all the 'trash' doesn't show up on stores. Well, the PSN and Xbox stores don't have all these 'trash' games. You know what the outcome is? There has never been a single indie game that came out of nowhere and became a blockbuster on these platforms. Not even once. The closest I can think of is when they marketed the shit out of the mediocre Stray or when they gave away Rocket League for 'free'. Maybe back in the day when XBLA marketing made Braid a big hit. Those games needed an extraordinary marketing push from console platform holders to succeed. You know who didn't? Lethal Company. And Among Us. And Undertale. And Stardew. And a whole bunch of other games that found success because they started on the uncurated platform. And those are just the blockbusters. You know how Baldur's Gate 3 won all those GOTY awards at console centric award shows? That game would not exist if it wasn't for Larian's kickstarter for Divinity Original Sin which probably would not have happened without Obsidian's Kickstarter for Pillars of Eternity. The CRPG genre was dead and buried until it got revitalized by Kickstarter and open distribution on Steam. Entire genres of games exist because of open distribution. Boomer shooters for example. They are usually fairly primitive looking games (which is a part of their appeal). You think any console curators would allow those onto their stores? As mentioned, would you, personally, ever allow Cruelty Squad onto a store if you just looked at the screenshots?
No way man, there is no argument that curation makes gaming better. The rich and vibrant indie scene in particular would be much less so if there were a small group of people picking winners and losers instead of the audience doing so. And ask yourself how does this uncurated store make your life worse anyway? Do you open the Steam home page and then think about how 14000 games released on Steam and then decide there's no way you can find something good and then close Steam? (Btw Derrick, this is not directed at you personally, I'm using the royal 'you' here). Valve has done a lot of work to only surface games that it assumes you would like or that are already popular and you will virtually never see the crappy ones that seem to be such a big problem for some folks. It's crazy how this non issue keeps getting dragged up every few months.
EDIT: Just to add one last thought. This was one of the only games I picked up during the winter sale. I had never heard of it before the sale and only found out about it because of some chatter on Twitter. It seemed like something I'd like so I picked it up. It clearly hasn't done too well commercially with the number of reviews it has but I'm glad it exists because it seems like my kind of game. I have to imagine it would never have even been made if not for the fact that the dev knew he would be able to put it up on Steam without someone deciding whether it was good enough to be on the store or not.
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Very good post.
Especially the last point gets overlooked quite often when we talk about "only getting good games onto the store".
When someone starts their gaming project they won't know if it would become a banger or not. The people who have such confidence that they would absolutely get onto a curated store and bet all their money on getting on a curated store, are quite minuscule. Most won't make that leap of faith.
But with Steam? You can at least try! The hanging damocles sword that you waste away years of your money and time and then can't even get to the point of selling your game is gone with Steam. You can sell your game!
The same happened in the novel writing space. So many authors just started writing and posting the chapters on the internet, some did it to start their career, some did it for fun, and many are just mediocre or bad. But there are some authors who just started writing because the barrier of entry was so low and now they are quite successful. Having book deals, Audio-book releases, monthly Patreon income, etc.
Many of those successful authors wouldn't have started writing if the first barrier was getting a script to an editor.
Finally completed Judgment story and side missions. Surprisingly enough, the Amon fight did not involve tailing him.
Ladies and gentlemen:
Behold! The Akko X Waigua Cat Wireless Mouse!
Gaze upon its chonky majesty!
Ponder the deep irony of wielding a mouse... that is a cat!
I wasn't able to resist, I bought the orange catto for 20 bucks.
Behold! The Akko X Waigua Cat Wireless Mouse!
Gaze upon its chonky majesty!
Ponder the deep irony of wielding a mouse... that is a cat!
I wasn't able to resist, I bought the orange catto for 20 bucks.
Tell me where.Ladies and gentlemen:
Behold! The Akko X Waigua Cat Wireless Mouse!
Gaze upon its chonky majesty!
Ponder the deep irony of wielding a mouse... that is a cat!
I wasn't able to resist, I bought the orange catto for 20 bucks.
Now.
Well, I'm based in Asia so I got it from the local etailer/amazon equivalent, but I googled and found this:
Akko Cat Theme Mouse | Akko Official Global Site
Cat Theme Design; 2.4G Wireless; Plug and Play; Skin-Friendly. Note: 1*AA 5# Battery is needed but not included as regulated by air shipment.
en.akkogear.com
Prices are in USD, and theres an Amazon link, so they presumably ship to the US. (Small 5$ price bump for the yanks, but its not too bad)
Fun fact all 4 games i have beaten this year so far (Oxenfree 2, The case of the Golden Idol, Little Nightmares 2 and American Arcadia) i got this holiday season XD i bought Oxenfree 2 and rest were gifts. So basically my backlog wasn't impacted XD
You inspired me to finally play LN2! I played through the dlc for LN1 first since that was also on the backlog but I loved it all. Just have the speed run and a couple collectibles to grab in LN1 which I’ll try to do before 3.
I mean the thing is, the screen is cracked and all I see is vertical lines. The issue is I was using Google 2FA, and the old version didn't have cloud sync. So this issue is quite old, I just got around to it now because uber (the app I need access to) sucks.
I contacted uber's support multiple times but no reply and I'm stuck where I can't use it because my phone number and gmail are already registered lol.
In the important news of the day boomer shooter is officially recognized by Volvo
www.gamingonlinux.com
Edit: Apparently I am late to the party lol
Okay boomers, you get a shooter category on Steam now
Valve have finally done it, they've actually gone and made Boomer Shooter an official category on Steam. Since there's quite a lot of them now, and more releasing every day, it makes a lot of sense.
www.gamingonlinux.com
Yup. Sign in with your Steam account on SteamDB and use this link
This is what I don't get about the curation advocacy. It's like how self published books are a thing on amazon now -- when I go to the kindle store, I see exactly none of these, although the number of them is effectively limitless. I have to seek them out. It's like they don't even exist. I literally can't remember a single time I've ever seen obvious low effort trash or an asset flip on a game storefront.
Hey, now.
just a little tip for those who want to launch a game on their prefered language with Steam Deck OLED (or later SteamOS updates)
Months ago Knurek solved this issue I had with older SteamOS and SteamDeck version.
metacouncil.com
Well since I got Steam OLED this didn't work anymore and yestearday I was trying to get the solution, well If anybody had this issue too and is interested there's another way to make it work on the later versions of Steam OLED.
apart of local file language rebuilding...
instead of LANG the steam game launch parameter that works is HOST_LC_ALL
this code will make your multiple language game which doesn't have ingame language options run in your preferred language.
Months ago Knurek solved this issue I had with older SteamOS and SteamDeck version.
|OT| - Valve's Steam Deck - OLED refresh shipping to folks
Fuck yeah! Can finally play Vampire Survivors again.:D
metacouncil.com
Well since I got Steam OLED this didn't work anymore and yestearday I was trying to get the solution, well If anybody had this issue too and is interested there's another way to make it work on the later versions of Steam OLED.
apart of local file language rebuilding...
Code:
sudo pacman-key —init
sudo pacman-key —populate archlinux (or just "sudo pacman-key —populate" if you have conflict with signature keys)
sudo pacman -S glibc
Code:
HOST_LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 %command%
50 Years of Video Game Industry Revenues, by Platform
As technology has evolved, so too has the video game industry, consumer preferences, and drivers of growth. We do a deep dive.
www.visualcapitalist.com
Thx Alexandros
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Consoles are basically stagnating since 2005.
50 Years of Video Game Industry Revenues, by Platform
As technology has evolved, so too has the video game industry, consumer preferences, and drivers of growth. We do a deep dive.
Thx Alexandros
Yeah, I am trying to tell the people on otherforum that for years!
It's even going down if you include handhelds.
"Switch is a handheld!" ---> so it's not a console ---> Console userbase is way down
"Switch is a hybrid!" ---> so we take 50% of the handheld market into consideration ---> console userbase is down
"Switch is not a handheld! (but it still counts as the same market as consoles!) ---> so we take the whole handheld market into consideration --> Console/handheld market is way down
"Playstation made more money than ever last year!" ---> Yeah, they are just milking you more.
About this, I think sony has said many times that they don't plan to expand the userbase but rather extract as much money as possible from the existing market. I could be making that up, cause i can't remember where i read it but it feels inline with their approach.
This is an example of how you should NOT visualize data and I'll be using this specifically in meetings as a negative example
50 Years of Video Game Industry Revenues, by Platform
As technology has evolved, so too has the video game industry, consumer preferences, and drivers of growth. We do a deep dive.
Thx Alexandros
Too bad GTA6 won't launch on Steam next year. It would probably push the number to like 50 million.
So many nerds
Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) on Threads
Sins of the Flesh, the next free update for cute cult sim Cult of the Lamb, offers loyal Followers a slew of worldly pleasures on January 16! Praise the Lamb.
www.threads.net
RTX 4080 Super - $999/1109€
RTX 4070 Ti Super - $799/889€
RTX 4070 Super - $599/659€
RTX 4070 - price drop to $549, dunno about €, but at least the USD price is not a good enough price drop... :/
RTX 4070 Ti Super - $799/889€
RTX 4070 Super - $599/659€
RTX 4070 - price drop to $549, dunno about €, but at least the USD price is not a good enough price drop... :/
Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) on Threads
Sins of the Flesh, the next free update for cute cult sim Cult of the Lamb, offers loyal Followers a slew of worldly pleasures on January 16! Praise the Lamb.
Absolutely ridiculous... At least they have a 16GB card below 1k now, that's something.
At this point I fully expect the 5070 to be >1k and the 5080 to be >1k5, 5090 will be almost 3k... and AMD is still too stupid to not take advantage of this.
and keep in mind there's currently no plans to drop the price of the 4080. They're going to leave it at 1100-1200 despite the 4080 super being cheaper because they have that little respect for people.
I'm not the most tech savvy guy in here so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
For 1080p or 1440p I'd pick a 4070Ti Super because of the 16GB VRAM, as I don't see a future for any card with fewer memory than that. Granted it's overkill for 1080p but it'll last 5 or 6 years easily and most of the time at high settings.
For 4k I'd rather wait for the 50 series since the 4090 is stupidly expensive and I don't believe any of the 4080s are too future-proof.
I say this while still rocking a 1070 so what do I know...
Dungeon Village 1
Dungeon Village 2
I love the changes they did to dungeon village 2
from the interface adjustment and quest progress preview to how you build your town and are rewarded.
i still wish they would remove the save\menu buttons for the pc\console versions.
btw is the forum loading slow for anyone else today?
Dungeon Village 2
I love the changes they did to dungeon village 2
from the interface adjustment and quest progress preview to how you build your town and are rewarded.
i still wish they would remove the save\menu buttons for the pc\console versions.
btw is the forum loading slow for anyone else today?
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I think 4080 and 4070 Ti are just slowly going to be gone from shops, the super versions of these 2 are intended to replace the originals.
Only the 4070 and 4070 Super are meant to coexist.
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