And its back!
Huh. Down for me - are you on the beta or normal? I wonder if that has something to do with it.
edit - according to the “is steam down” website, it’s just simply down.
Beta here, its up for me.
Yeah, finally came up here. Just down for about 15 minutes. Ah, well - no big deal.
Steam released a recap of all their recent summer updates:
So here’s a question I have - why does Steam allow games that are clearly abandoned and unfinished (no content for easily 2 or 4 years) to continue to be sold? And if there a way to report these “games” to Steam, or do they even care (apparently not?)
Valve has continuously said they have no interest in curating. While I don’t think they’ve quite spelled it out, the assumption has always been it would cost too much for too little benefit.
In the right hand side there’s an option to flag content. It’s pretty far down the page:
No idea what, if anything they’d do though.
Yeah, but at this point, to continue to sell certain games is fraudulent - they were never finished.
Is it, though? IANAL nor am I trying to stand up for the practice, but they’re selling exactly what they’re offering: a license to game X from publisher Y. If game X is a garbage game, I’m not sure I’d put the blame at Valve’s feet for it, and especially now that they allow refunds.
With refunds within the first 2 hours and user reviews, I think the store does a decent job of giving tools to protect the buyer. Usually games that have been abandoned with major problems or unfinished having massively negative reviews (especially recent ones). It’s a big red flag for me when I look at the game and I immediately go take a look at what the fuss is about. Sometimes it’s review bombing, but it’s helpful to see a bunch of “this game barely works and the developer abandoned it”.
In news we already knew about:
Not new, as there are a few services that already do this (Parsec is mentioned in the article) but having it integrated should lead to a better user experience. To sort of tie in to the discussion about game streaming in the PS5 thread, Valve is recommending a 10Mbit/s connection for the best experience at 1080p60.
This is great, but what I really want them to do is to open source really great and easy-to-use networking tech, so that those local multiplayer devs can easily integrate it into their codebase. In almost all cases, sending over a little bit of state data is preferable to sending over a video stream.
Does this fit the bill (genuine question, since that isn’t my area)?
It’s nice but not enough. It’s the ‘higher level stuff’ that’s missing that makes it hard to use. What devs need is a serialization scheme that automatically sends and synchronizes the game state Probably requires code generation to be easy to use.
That’s impossible to do in a generic way for all engines and all types of games. Multi-process anything, especially over a network (because every thing can fail harder) can’t be bolted on to existing software perfectly, and gamers are demanding.
Valve’s FPS netcode (or at least a version of it) is published in the source engine I think.
Binary serialization and compression are widely used open source tools - there’s no need for Valve to publish anything for that. (And the serialization tools do do code generation)
But “synchronization” - which is inevitably somewhat faked in realtime games is just so super complex. You can’t actually “synchronise” the game state because synchronisation is slow. So it has to be custom to your use case.
Steam has a PAX AUS page up, wishlist some games from the land down under.
Not one game about kangaroos or poisonous things? This is fake.