Community MetaSteam | July 2019 - Racing Towards Empty Wallets

Status
Not open for further replies.

sprinkles

Junior Member
Dec 8, 2018
613
1,173
93
I got the GOG invite as well. I don't know if I want to put all my stuff in one place.
If they had a controller-friendly UI, I would definitely take a look at the new GOG launcher. But even with all its flaws, BPM still is the best way to play on a TV.
 
  • Like
Reactions: xinek
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,364
85,133
113
I see they subscribe to the James Cameron school of franchise building. Let's hope it works out for them.
i REALLY hope it does ... i'm soooooo looking forward to Man of Medan
 

Wibblewozzer

Robot on the inside
Dec 6, 2018
1,095
1,646
113
Which other games were not lucky to keep the original name?
In the end they kept the name but don't forget the whole Edge Games bullshit involving Tim Langdell. He did get Edge taken off the iOS App Store and went after Mirror's Edge and other games. It seems he played a part in Soul Edge being changed to Soulcalibur.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lashman

bobnowhere

Careful Icarus
Sep 20, 2018
1,665
4,288
113
Got another Humble survey today, pretty clear that they are aiming to up the Monthly price in the coming months.

Dunno how most people would answer to a possible increase in price followed by an increase in the store discount (from the standard 10% to 20% off), but I would go from 'wondering if I should subscribe' to 'not even looking at it'.
I got it as well, the only option I choose was I think the choose 8 of 10 for $15. Some of the options were pretty mean, Choose 3 for $12 etc...
 

NarohDethan

There was a fish in the percolator!
Apr 6, 2019
8,942
24,801
113
Got another Humble survey today, pretty clear that they are aiming to up the Monthly price in the coming months.

Dunno how most people would answer to a possible increase in price followed by an increase in the store discount (from the standard 10% to 20% off), but I would go from 'wondering if I should subscribe' to 'not even looking at it'.
If PS plus taught me anything is that increasing the price does not mean better games.
 

fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
9,631
25,846
113
Anyone here owns a Switch with a US account and can tell me if any of these are pre-orderable? Thanks.

Astral Chain
Zelda
Fire Emblem
Pokemon
 

derExperte

MetaMember
Dec 9, 2018
1,890
5,443
113

Hektor

Autobahnraser
Nov 1, 2018
5,682
15,493
113
The Vampire the Masquerade preorders still haven't been cancelled*, seems they are going to honor them

*unless you were on of those people using different email adressed
 

AHA-Lambda

MetaMember
Oct 9, 2018
2,811
7,247
113
I take back what I said about EDF 4.1 before; it's certainly not dull and tedious now, it's swung the other way to being brutally difficult, bloody hell!

I'm about ~30 missions in now (so about 1/3 of the way in from what I gather) and am still playing Solo on Normal as a Ranger, and each mission since about the ~20 mark has been a push at the very least, and brutal/unfair at the worst. I think see where the recommendations for co-op came in now?
If the difficulty maintains this curve I genuinely don't think I'll be able to beat it, at least not on Normal mode anyway, which seems nuts given there are 5 difficulties?

Oh, and having no checkpoints on really long tough missions is the kind of infuriation I thought we'd left behind quite some time ago.
 
Last edited:

Digoman

Lurking in the Shadows
Dec 21, 2018
854
2,390
93
Crap.. forgot that it was Bamco game and now I have to wait for some deep discounts.

i wouldn't call 50% a win :p
I would take that over our +15%.

What I want to know is that Uruguay did to Bamco to have the only "good" regional price in South America...
 
  • Like
Reactions: lashman

ezodagrom

JELLYBEE
Nov 2, 2018
1,677
4,391
113
Portugal
www.youtube.com

Oh wait, not coming to PC immediately, right?
Indeed. It's announced for winter, so probably between December~February, though it could end up happening in November (MHW PC was announced for fall 2018, yet it came out in early August).

While it's still coming out later than the consoles versions, it's still going be a smaller gap than the base game, going from 6+ months gap to somewhere between 2~5 months (though I find it more likely for the PC expansion release to end up 2~3 months after consoles).
 
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,364
85,133
113
Crap.. forgot that it was Bamco game and now I have to wait for some deep discounts.


I would take that over our +15%.

What I want to know is that Uruguay did to Bamco to have the only "good" regional price in South America...
yeah, their regional pricing is COMPLETELY fucking random from game to game ... the only thing that's pretty consistent is the fact that the prices are going up and up for the cheapest regions (whichever they happen to be this week)

What kind of game is Man of Medan? Like Until Dawn? That game is great.
yes
 

Arulan

Lizardman
Dec 7, 2018
538
1,877
93
So some issues finally forced me to buy a new monitor (last one was a few months away from 9 years old). Got a 1440/144 gsync monitor and while I still haven't really put it through the paces yet I did play some forza horizon 4 at 100-120 fps and it was pretty impressive. It was my first experience with both gsync and framerates over 60fps and while it fluctuated a lot in that 100-120 range I didn't notice a thing on screen. Only way I could tell was having the fps display on.

So yeah I'm finally a believer in VRR. Going through a plague tale now and that's a shit ton more demanding especially at 1440 so I had to lock it to 60. Still feels incredibly smooth though.
VRR might be my favorite display technology ever. I was using a 120Hz display for a few years before VRR. To achieve absolute smoothness you were mostly looking at either a fixed 60 or 120. There is a vast gap between those points where you'd often have to give up smoothness or frame rate. VRR is the no-compromise and no-hassle solution.

There is some room for improvement though. Windows and Linux won't G-Sync (Borderless) Windowed applications. The former used to until (I believe) a Windows update broke it. This is important because there are a good number of games that don't offer an exclusive fullscreen mode. I find this is pretty common in Unity titles.
 

Tizoc

Retired, but still Enabling
Oct 11, 2018
7,622
18,766
113
37
Oman
ko-fi.com
Does anyone know when the HUmble 20% discount offer ends?
For that matter, where can I manage my charities? Originally I had set it to give the 10% as humble credit but I am worried if I buy now with 10% discount, the credit doesn't go to me :p
 

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
Does anyone know when the HUmble 20% discount offer ends?
For that matter, where can I manage my charities? Originally I had set it to give the 10% as humble credit but I am worried if I buy now with 10% discount, the credit doesn't go to me :p
Humble hasn't said when it will end but I'd guess that it would last until the last friday of the month. Anyway, here's the page where you can manage your wallet cashback / charity split.
 

Nabs

Hyper˗Toxic Pro˗Consumer
Oct 23, 2018
3,681
12,256
113

Le Pertti

0.01% Game dev
Oct 10, 2018
8,278
21,202
113
45
Paris, France
lepertti.com

derExperte

MetaMember
Dec 9, 2018
1,890
5,443
113

---


Why is there a YT video about RDR2 in the Reviews section? Seen this nonsense on other game's store page, did Valve really automate what gets put there?
 
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,364
85,133
113
for lazy people:

Behind the scenes at Steam, we create many experimental features with codenames like The Peabody Recommender and Organize Your Steam Library Using Morse Code. For the first time, we're giving these works-in-progress a home called Steam Labs, where you can interact with them, tell us whether you think they're worth pursuing further, and if so, share your thoughts on how they should evolve.

We've selected three initial experiments to share as we launch the Labs. Each of these is designed to help people find the games they'll love.

Micro Trailers are lovingly-generated six-second game trailers, arranged on a page so you can digest them all at a glance. Check out our new micro trailer collections for adventure games, RPGs, builders, and more.

The Interactive Recommender looks at your top-played games and uses machine learning to recommend other titles it thinks you'll love. Find old classics by directing it toward popular titles released in the past ten years, or discover that diamond-in-the-rough by zeroing in on niche games launched in the past six months.

The Automated Show is a half-hour video featuring the latest Steam launches. Leave it on a second monitor while you work, or glue your eyeballs to it and let hundreds of games wash over you.

So pop on your lab coat, try the experiments, and then share your feedback to help shape the future of Steam.

To follow future news and additions to Steam Labs, join the Steam Labs Community Group, where we'll share announcements and updates.

Cheers!
-The Steam Team
 
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,364
85,133
113

Today we're introducing a new interactive recommender as one of the experimental features in Steam Labs. Check it out at: Steam Labs - Interactive Recommender



Find the games you'll love on Steam
One of Steam's strengths is its massive catalog of great games from developers large and small, spanning almost every genre. With so much stuff to choose from, we've heard from users that you'd like better tools to help you find games you'll enjoy. While existing store features like tag-based searching can work well, we think we can do better by bringing to bear the power of machine learning to give players personalized recommendations based on their own individual play patterns. Combine that with real-time controls to adjust your results, and the recommender becomes a fun and powerful tool for exploring Steam and connecting you with games you'll love.

How it works
Underlying this new recommender is a neural-network model that is trained to recommend games based on a user's playtime history, along with other salient data. We train the model based on data from many millions of Steam users and many billions of play sessions, giving us robust results that capture the nuances of different play patterns and covers our catalog. The model is parameterized so that we can restrict output to games released within a specified time-window, and can be adjusted to prefer games a higher or lower underlying popularity. These parameters are exposed to the user, allowing you to select whether to see only recent releases in the results, or go all the way back to include games released a decade ago. Similarly, you can choose whether to see mainstream hits, or deep cuts from the catalog. Regardless of the settings of the sliders, the results will always be personalized and relevant to the individual user.

Machine learning across the Steam store
Unlike more traditional approaches, we don't explicitly feed our model information about the games. Instead, the model learns about the games for itself during the training process. In fact, the only information about a game that gets explicitly fed into the process is the release date, enabling us to do time-windowing for the release-date slider. It turns out that using release date as part of the model training process yields better quality results than simply applying it as filter on the output.

Notably, we do not use information about tags or review scores when creating the model. This means reviews or tags alone simply cannot affect results. The model infers properties of games by learning what users do, not by looking at other extrinsic data.

We do allow users to filter the final results by tag, so they can narrow down to the kind of game they're in the mood for at that time, but this isn't part of underlying model.

A neural network informed by the Steam Community of players
One direction is to gather every single piece of information about a game, and then make guesses about what games are similar, and then recommend those “similar” games. But that allows for all sorts of weird distortions— just because you play a lot of Beat Saber, doesn’t mean we should only ever recommend you VR rhythm games. This model takes a different approach. It disregards most of the usual data about a game, like genre or price point. Instead, it looks at what games you play and what games other people play, then makes informed suggestions based on the decisions of other people playing games on Steam. The idea is that if players with broadly similar play habits to you also tend to play another game you haven't tried yet, then that game is likely to be a good recommendation for you.

Popularity
We chose “popularity” just because there might not be a more accurate term, but you could also think of it as "mainstream-ness". Just like books or music or movies, there’s a huge range of what people are looking for. One person wants to know the newest and most popular games around, and the next person wants the opposite: games that are interesting and relevant but not necessarily well-known. We think this tool will be helpful to those on both ends of that spectrum. We've found that, especially for people who play a lot of games, digging into the "niche" end of the range can be a very effective way to find hidden gems.

Recommendations on Steam
Rather than introducing a big change to the way customized recommendations are determined on Steam, we’re introducing this new recommender as an experiment customers can seek out and try. This will help us get better usage data while avoiding any sudden shifts that we know can be frustrating for customers and developers who are accustomed to Steam. Should the interactive recommender or related experiments prove useful, we’ll share an update before rolling out any big changes to the way Steam recommends titles to people. The data driving Popular, New, and Trending is different from that of the Discovery Queue, this new recommender, and so on. We view this new interactive recommender as one discovery element among many, and look forward to introducing more ways to connect customers with interesting content and developers.

Recommendations and new games
New games in a system such as this one have a chicken-and-egg effect known as the "cold start" problem. The model can't recommend games that don't have players yet, because it has no data about them. It can react quite quickly, and when re-trained it picks up on new releases with just a few days of data. That said, it can't fill the role played by the Discovery Queue in surfacing brand new content, and so we view this tool to be additive to existing mechanisms rather than a replacement for them.

No need for developer optimization
Sometimes, computer-driven discovery makes creators focus on optimizing for "The Algorithm" rather than customers. You might ask, how is this any different? We designed the recommender to be driven by what players do, not by extrinsic elements like tags or reviews. The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing. While it's important to supply users with useful information about your game on its store page, you shouldn't agonize about whether tags or other metadata will affect how a recommendations model sees your game.

Let us know what you think
We want to hear feedback from both customers and developers, so, check out the The Interactive Recommender and join the discussions to let us know what you think. As we gather data about the recommender's usefulness, we'll share how things are going.

Note for developers
We designed the new recommender as a tool for customers to use, and ideally it will also help developers. Developers can see how many page visits the recommender is generating directly in the existing “Traffic Breakdown” page for each game, though note that this experiment might not generate much traffic relative to the rest of Steam. If developers have questions or feedback, you may use the “Support” button at the top of any Steamworks web page to quickly get a hold of us.


-The Steam Team
 
Status
Not open for further replies.