Community MetaSteam | September 2019 - Valve, I Know What You Did Last Summer!

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Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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I tried out the Steam Deep Dive thingy and somehow got directed to a lot of really interesting looking free Horror or Adventure or Puzzle games, lol.
I'll be giving them a try and report back :)
 

Mivey

MetaMember
Sep 20, 2018
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Has anybody else here played Recore? I can't decide if I like this game or hate it. The core gameplay loop is actually really nice, and I like the platforming, for the most part, but god does this game hurt itself with the fucking UI. So many notifications, and popups and things going on. Half the challenge in any fight is to read the screen.
Kinda hard to imagine a veteran game designer was the helm of this, and never figured out that less is so much more.

On an unrelated note, no matter what I do I can't get achievements on gamepass to work. How do I even tell if I'm properly connected to Xbox live services? Whoever decided to split this stuff across a dozen apps is a moron.
 

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
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France
On an unrelated note, no matter what I do I can't get achievements on gamepass to work. How do I even tell if I'm properly connected to Xbox live services? Whoever decided to split this stuff across a dozen apps is a moron.
It used to work, but it has been bugged recently for me as well.
 

gabbo

MetaMember
Dec 22, 2018
3,506
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Toronto
I'm starting to see some of the things indie devs say about steam discoverability when I tried Deep Dive.
I almost always ended up with the same games regardless of where I started. If you dont start with an unknown game, you'll never land on them
 
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derExperte

MetaMember
Dec 9, 2018
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You dudes and dudettes
No Berry Blue? :blobyikes:

Has anybody else here played Recore? I can't decide if I like this game or hate it. The core gameplay loop is actually really nice, and I like the platforming, for the most part, but god does this game hurt itself with the fucking UI. So many notifications, and popups and things going on. Half the challenge in any fight is to read the screen.
Kinda hard to imagine a veteran game designer was the helm of this, and never figured out that less is so much more.
Me! All the way through. I did hate myself occassionally, especially when I had to go back and collect more cores to progress but the UI didn't bother me too much, gameplay was indeed fun enough to get over some minor and some major annoyances and the whole thing eventually became quite addictive. Couldn't agree more about too much clutter but aimed at the whole game, needed someone to through and throw stuff away, make it shorter, less empty scenery for example. A better story would've helped too.
 
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BO7AMMOOD

Lucas isn't sure what to do anymore
Apr 18, 2019
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Has anybody else here played Recore? I can't decide if I like this game or hate it. The core gameplay loop is actually really nice, and I like the platforming, for the most part, but god does this game hurt itself with the fucking UI. So many notifications, and popups and things going on. Half the challenge in any fight is to read the screen.
Kinda hard to imagine a veteran game designer was the helm of this, and never figured out that less is so much more.
I did play it for $1 using game pass back when it had 3 pc games two years ago. Like you say the gameplay itself is pretty fun, especially the platforming, but it did feel like it was made with a shoestring budget. It performed pretty well too so there's that. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of a certain part of it if you go all the way through and beat it.
 
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Trisolarian

Junior Member
Jul 12, 2019
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I'm calling it.

Spoopy season begins today. Spoopy Friday!!

So, any interest in me putting a little compliation of free horror games together in thread form? It would show up sometime next week.
 

Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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Does this ever end? I am confused..it keeps going...
Not sure, lol.
You're supposed to choose a game, "dive deeper" and wishlist the neat stuff, and I guess start over with a different game if you run out of interesting things.
My personal expereince so far has been that starting with a popular game just populates the thing with stuff that I've already wishlisted. I suppose that shows it does it's job in recommending me stuff I would be interested in, but it's reather useless in that scenario :p
I got much more interesting results when starting with Anima: Gate of Memories, which I really enjoyed, but is a pretty little known game I guess.



Here's free Dive game #1

Took me 20 minutes and it was neat. It's actually a full-blown action game with combos and evade/block (including perfect block) that is somewhat clunky due to the underlying engine, but fun.
Good art and music and stuff and a neat, short story.
 

beep boop

MetaMember
Dec 6, 2018
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I'm starting to see some of the things indie devs say about steam discoverability when I tried Deep Dive.
I almost always ended up with the same games regardless of where I started. If you dont start with an unknown game, you'll never land on them
Made a post about this a few days ago in a topic on another forum about the that recent drop in wishlists following the changes to recommendations. Quoting it because I'm sure lashman would like me to (and because the thread died as soon as I posted that) :p My thoughts were that because of how tags work and some being way more common than others, compounded with niche games likely primarily being surfaced to people already looking for niche games, it's possible you'll be recommended the same things quite often. I thought Deep Dive could do something about that, but having tried it I also often came upon a lot of the same games or semi-high profile (indie) games I was already aware of. The interactive recommender is a bit better about it when I go all the way niche, but only if I also specify a more niche tag. That's still much better than any other tool on the internet though. And I think the people in this community also have just played and seen more games than most.

Discovery is complicated and Valve is in a lose-lose situation whatever they do, because some views will come at the cost of others. I've been thinking about this topic a bit over the last few days because this stuff does interest me and rambling about it without being the actual person working on it is easy. Haven't read the thread all that much, so I'll probably be repeating what others have said already.

The most important question you can ask when looking at metrics, analyzing them and trying to change something for the better is: how do you define success? If Valve can see on their end that this change has been significantly increasing avg. views per game and increasing avg. unique games viewed per user, that's a net good -- assuming something didn't go haywire when implementing it store-wide. It's good for users/consumers, good for Valve and good for many developers. They managed to get more people to look at games but those views weren't limited to a select popular group of games. If success is defined purely as "more visibility for smaller games", it might not be achieving that, but I didn't see that said specifically in the announcement -- only more "diverse" games.

They talk about the recommendation streams ("more like this" and front page recommendations) being more personalized, so just thinking about it on a very simple level, it means that people see what they're already interested in. The increase in unique games viewed suggests as much. As we know, a lot of people are pretty basic. They're probably not going to be interested in super niche stuff. Niche is niche after all. And people who like niche tend to seek out niche already, so the gains from that audience would likely be minimal.

What is odd then is that supposedly wishlist adds are dropping for certain games. If we believe that popular games are now surfaced less than before, perhaps the games shown are still popular but just less of the mega hits like Monster Hunter or Hollow Knight. So the previous algorithm did surface comparatively niche games more regularly even though Valve said it was biased toward popular games. My guess is that the new algorithm quite likely shows you more diverse games, but that doesn't mean it shows more niche games to a person who isn't already interested in niche since we're to believe the new system is more personally tailored.

I think Wok who said earlier that a possible reason why upcoming games are shown less is because they don't yet have enough tags that will get them in the eyes of people those games might be targeted at. That is possibly an unintentional side effect. Together with what Valve put out in the announcement, tags seem very important. If part of the algorithm is also based on people with similar tastes as you having played it (e.g. based on library similarity and narrowed down by occurrence of tags), it can't feed that data into the recommendations. In addition to that, not all tags are created equal as we know. I'm sure this isn't an original idea and hopefully it was taken into account, but stuff like "action", "shooter" and "adventure" inherently come up a lot more than "visual novel" or even "platformer". There's possible bias resulting from that. Assuming people already view "basic" genre games more often than niche ones and so also games with common tags (i.e not niche) more often than those without, "more like this" will just do what it says. If this is even remotely how it works, these two factors just feed into each other to show you a lot of similar stuff that you probably like, even if the selection is more "diverse".

It can't recommend something out of left field. But maybe it did before and that's why some devs see lower traffic. Coupled with the front page recommendation steam being more personalized, if we assume that personalization (aside from very popular games being shown less) means less randomness, you can expect games shown to start gravitating toward those with the most common tags. I would expect there to be measures to avoid that from happening such as tag weighting (tricky) or recommending games that, while related to whatever you're viewing, are a few steps removed from what you're looking at.
 

Tizoc

Retired, but still Enabling
Oct 11, 2018
7,622
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Oman
ko-fi.com
Bundlefest has some 10 days left on it
So i will be waiting to see if fanatical will send a 10% discount cose my way, apply it on my initial purchase then use further discount codes on the rest of the bundles i would want.

Edit
Just need a focus entertainment bundle then i am set.
 
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Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
5,119
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I'm calling it.

Spoopy season begins today. Spoopy Friday!!

So, any interest in me putting a little compliation of free horror games together in thread form? It would show up sometime next week.
Sure!
 

gabbo

MetaMember
Dec 22, 2018
3,506
5,542
113
Toronto
Made a post about this a few days ago in a topic on another forum about the that recent drop in wishlists following the changes to recommendations. Quoting it because I'm sure lashman would like me to (and because the thread died as soon as I posted that) :p My thoughts were that because of how tags work and some being way more common than others, compounded with niche games likely primarily being surfaced to people already looking for niche games, it's possible you'll be recommended the same things quite often. I thought Deep Dive could do something about that, but having tried it I also often came upon a lot of the same games or semi-high profile (indie) games I was already aware of. The interactive recommender is a bit better about it when I go all the way niche, but only if I also specify a more niche tag. That's still much better than any other tool on the internet though. And I think the people in this community also have just played and seen more games than most.

Discovery is complicated and Valve is in a lose-lose situation whatever they do, because some views will come at the cost of others. I've been thinking about this topic a bit over the last few days because this stuff does interest me and rambling about it without being the actual person working on it is easy. Haven't read the thread all that much, so I'll probably be repeating what others have said already.

The most important question you can ask when looking at metrics, analyzing them and trying to change something for the better is: how do you define success? If Valve can see on their end that this change has been significantly increasing avg. views per game and increasing avg. unique games viewed per user, that's a net good -- assuming something didn't go haywire when implementing it store-wide. It's good for users/consumers, good for Valve and good for many developers. They managed to get more people to look at games but those views weren't limited to a select popular group of games. If success is defined purely as "more visibility for smaller games", it might not be achieving that, but I didn't see that said specifically in the announcement -- only more "diverse" games.

They talk about the recommendation streams ("more like this" and front page recommendations) being more personalized, so just thinking about it on a very simple level, it means that people see what they're already interested in. The increase in unique games viewed suggests as much. As we know, a lot of people are pretty basic. They're probably not going to be interested in super niche stuff. Niche is niche after all. And people who like niche tend to seek out niche already, so the gains from that audience would likely be minimal.

What is odd then is that supposedly wishlist adds are dropping for certain games. If we believe that popular games are now surfaced less than before, perhaps the games shown are still popular but just less of the mega hits like Monster Hunter or Hollow Knight. So the previous algorithm did surface comparatively niche games more regularly even though Valve said it was biased toward popular games. My guess is that the new algorithm quite likely shows you more diverse games, but that doesn't mean it shows more niche games to a person who isn't already interested in niche since we're to believe the new system is more personally tailored.

I think Wok who said earlier that a possible reason why upcoming games are shown less is because they don't yet have enough tags that will get them in the eyes of people those games might be targeted at. That is possibly an unintentional side effect. Together with what Valve put out in the announcement, tags seem very important. If part of the algorithm is also based on people with similar tastes as you having played it (e.g. based on library similarity and narrowed down by occurrence of tags), it can't feed that data into the recommendations. In addition to that, not all tags are created equal as we know. I'm sure this isn't an original idea and hopefully it was taken into account, but stuff like "action", "shooter" and "adventure" inherently come up a lot more than "visual novel" or even "platformer". There's possible bias resulting from that. Assuming people already view "basic" genre games more often than niche ones and so also games with common tags (i.e not niche) more often than those without, "more like this" will just do what it says. If this is even remotely how it works, these two factors just feed into each other to show you a lot of similar stuff that you probably like, even if the selection is more "diverse".

It can't recommend something out of left field. But maybe it did before and that's why some devs see lower traffic. Coupled with the front page recommendation steam being more personalized, if we assume that personalization (aside from very popular games being shown less) means less randomness, you can expect games shown to start gravitating toward those with the most common tags. I would expect there to be measures to avoid that from happening such as tag weighting (tricky) or recommending games that, while related to whatever you're viewing, are a few steps removed from what you're looking at.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, the interactive recommender is the better option right now, but i'll see if deep dive changes over time. Clearly Six Degree of Steamed Bacon isn't going to be perfect, but hopefully it can get better.
 

Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
5,119
11,978
113
Me yesterday: "Phew, finally made my Tyranny character, looking forward to actually starting the game tomorrow."
Me today: "Oh hey the Steam Deep Dive suggested me half a dozen of interesting looking short free indie games. Oh hey Fanatical has a bundle with 3 games I'm interested in."
Proceeds to download and play games that are not Tyranny.
Welp.
 

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
 

BlueOdin

Dec 3, 2018
995
2,665
93
Bought that Fanatical Sahdow Bundle in the second tier. Wanted Legrand Legacy, Shadwen and The Hex. Seemed like a good deal.
 
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NarohDethan

There was a fish in the percolator!
Apr 6, 2019
8,942
24,801
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Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
What the fuck
 
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Stone Ocean

Proud Degenerate
Apr 17, 2019
2,265
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yea i really liked them i actually preferred nameless chronicles
I'm at the final dungeon but honestly I think the first game is better. I expected Nameless to be more fleshed out than the other two combat wise, but he plays more or less the same plus the extra gimmick.

Game feels really padded out with a lot of reused stuff from the first game, including bosses.
 

sk2k

Steam New Releases Warrior
Dec 8, 2018
610
1,411
93
Somewhere else
Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
Epic needs the money.
 

KainXVIII

DOS forever!
Dec 19, 2018
957
2,047
93
Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
Fuck you Timmy! :blobxorcism:
Also 4-pack purchase with discount disappeared..
 

RionaaM

Vogon Poetry Appreciator
Sep 6, 2018
887
2,187
93
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
This is bullshit of the highest caliber. Fuck off and die already Epic.
 

fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
9,637
25,857
113
Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
 
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Linkark07

IDKFA
Apr 18, 2019
30
90
18
Rocket League completely dropped regional pricing.

Argentina: AR$ 224,99 to AR$1153,00
Brazil: R$ 36,99 to R$ 83,05
India: ₹ 565 to ₹ 1435
Mexico: Mex$ 179.99 Mex$ 400.05
Russia: 419 ₽ to 1331,05 ₽
Taiwan: NT$ 468 to NT$ 628
Turkey: ₺31,00 to ₺116,05

GOTY version pricing hasn't been updated yet tho.
'U see, that's the price you have to pay for keep Rocket League in Steam. You want regional pricing? Come to our store!

Lyin' Timmy is really a piece of shit.
 
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