steam – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "steam"

from the beyond-clickbait-to-just-utter-nonsense dept

When tragedy strikes, it’s human nature to search for answers. But when you’re Fox News, it seems that the answer is always the same: blame video games, social media, or anything else that fits your preconceived notions, facts be damned.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I idly wondered how long it would take before someone tried to blame the shooting on social media, smartphones, or video games.

It took just slightly longer than I expected. On Thursday, ever reliable Fox News blasted this headline:

Trump shooter used gaming site that features presidential assassination game

And then they also mention, for good measure, that he “also had a Discord account.”

Image

Incredibly, it took two whole reporters to come up with this story.

And let’s be clear, almost the entire story is false, and the parts that aren’t false are stupid. This is some of the worst reporting I’ve seen in a while.

The “gaming site” in question was Steam. Anyone should know it has a ton of games. Listing the “Presidential assassination game” in the headline is basically an admission of just how dishonest Fox News is because five paragraphs into the article, they mention:

“there is no evidence Crooks ever played it.”

So what’s it doing in the fucking headline, Fox?

Also, it’s even worse than that because other reporters who actually understand what “reporting” means did the research and found out that the reported Steam account that some people claimed belonged to Crooks was fake. CBS reporters had that story:

A new analysis shows an online account that was believed to belong to the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump — and where he had purportedly called the date of the attack his “premiere” — was fake, a federal law enforcement official told CBS News on Thursday.

A law enforcement official and an additional source familiar with a briefing given to U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday previously told CBS News that the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had an account on an online gaming platform on which he posted: “July 13 will be my premiere.” But the federal law enforcement official says further investigation determined it was a fake account.

I saw some other reporting suggesting that the account on Steam was one where someone changed their username to pretend to be Crooks.

Watching the Fox News crowd get so desperate for anything to blame the shooting on is pretty pathetic. But I have no doubt that someone will bring this up in the future as if it were factual, and seeing the story morph to claim not just that he was on Steam, but that he played this supposed “Presidential assassin” game. Because facts no longer matter.

Filed Under: blame, blame video games, donald trump, steam, thomas crooks, video games
Companies: fox, fox news

Two Decades Of Content In ‘Garry’s Mod’ Taken Down, Possibly By Nintendo Impersonator

from the nintendon't dept

The capricious nature of Nintendo’s IP enforcement practices are, if you’re a regular reader here, quite legendary. In this case, however, it seems like Nintendo’s reputation is what played a part in some copyright fuckery, rather than the company engaging in said fuckery itself.

If you’re not familiar with Garry’s Mod, then you obviously weren’t much of a gamer in the mid-2000s. Built off of Valve’s Source engine, the “game” is essentially a sandbox game with all of the physics of the engine, but in an open “world” in which players can more or less do whatever they want. It also allows for all kinds of user-created mods and content to be added. And, because Nintendo was and remains quite popular with a sizable segment of the gaming population, some of that user generated content created over the past roughly two decades included content and characters from Nintendo games.

The past tense in that sentence being important here, given that it was only recently that Kotaku reported that Nintendo demanded and got all of that content yanked down from the game entirely.

In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”

The update continues, “Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”

So why would Nintendo do this now, after years and years of the content in question existing? It obviously cannot be that Nintendo is suffering some form of irreparable harm due to its own fans having fun creating Nintendo-y things within Garry’s Mod. Were that the case, surely all that harm would have come to Nintendo’s attention somewhere over the course of the last eighteen-plus years. But for all that time, Nintendo was silent.

And, it appears, Nintendo has remained silent. Truth be told, there existed a version of this post taking Nintendo to task for being a bunch of nonsensical copyright assbags. That post has since been rewritten into this one, however, after we noticed some interesting contributions from our awesome community on our Techdirt Insider Discord channel.

Brewster T. Koopa was one of the modders who had content removed from Garry’s Mod. They were adamant from the jump that it was unlikely Nintendo was actually behind the takedowns, based mostly on the above timeline. Then came the answer, with a screenshot from another person explaining just what happened.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. And, frankly, the story here is the same as it was in that previous case with Bungie. The reason these bad actors are able to pull this sort of crap is due to two things. First, and least important, is Nintendo and Bungie’s reputations for being absolutely draconian when it comes to copyright enforcement. That’s something fairly close to victim blaming in this instance, to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine someone being able to pull this off with a CD Projekt Red or a company with a reputation for being more lenient on copyright matters.

But the real culprit here is Valve’s DMCA review process. If some folks on the internet can figure out in fairly short order that these takedowns are coming from an email address and domain that are not actually owned by or associated with Nintendo, then someone on Valve’s end could have figured this out as well. Instead, the content just came down. And if we’re going to have a DMCA process that looks anything remotely like it does today, that’s a pretty damned big problem. Collateral damage when it comes to matters of speech are simply not acceptable.

So, Valve needs to do better. And, sure, it would be nice if Nintendo turned over a new leaf and was better on copyright matters generally, but the company in this case was also something of a victim here.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, garry's mod, steam
Companies: nintendo, valve

City Builder Game Taken Down By DMCA Abuse Back Online After Several Weeks

from the damage-done dept

It was a couple of weeks back when we highlighted the story of how one game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, was suffering as the victim of very clear DMCA abuse. If you don’t recall the post, you can get all the details in the link. The short version of it is: a fan of the game and member of the game’s community wrote a guide for making the game more realistic, the publisher liked it so much that they wanted to incorporate some of it into a new “realistic” game mode they were already creating, they offered to give him credit after the game mode was released, and then everything went sideways.

This community member, who the publisher claims is a lawyer, began DMCAing everything about the game, from the website for the game to the game listing on Steam. And… it all worked! The sites went down. The game got delisted from Steam. The studio’s YouTube videos for the game got taken down. All fraudulent, none of it legit. That was middle February.

Finally, in early March and the gamegot re-listed on Steam.

Dear Community and Players,

We are pleased to announce that our game is now back in the store! We thank you for your patience, support and understanding as we navigated this tricky situation.

We want to apologize to those who were looking to purchase the game and were unable to. We realize that we underestimated the situation, and it quickly escalated to a point that posed a threat to our game. We greatly wish that this had not been the case.

But we are now back on track and you can fully enjoy the game! We are excited to get back fully to the development and put this matter behind us.

How many potential sales were lost due to this whole episode? It’s impossible to say. How much reputational damage was done due to it? Also impossible to say. But the answer to both of those questions is absolutely not zero, that much is sure.

And more to the point, this highlights that the system is freaking broken. For a game to be disappeared for 3 weeks as a result of one person’s ability to take advantage of the DMCA takedown process shows the flaw in the system. It’s way, way too open for this kind of abuse. The sites are too quick to comply with takedowns, clearly. The online stores likewise.

But that is how the system currently works, unfortunately. And nobody seems all that keen on fixing it. So instead you get a publisher apologizing to its customers for being the victim.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright abuse, dmca, steam, workers & resources

Rockstar Releases Same Buggy, Broken ‘GTA Trilogy’ Game To Steam… But On Sale!

from the well-that's-one-solution dept

Over a year ago, we discussed an annoying and strange set of actions taken by Rockstar and Take2, the companies behind the popular Grand Theft Auto series of games. Two actions were taken in sequence by those companies that were clearly related. First was that they worked to get a fan-made GTA 4 mod taken down, after learning that the mod essentially brought the cities and some of the gameplay from previous GTA games into GTA 4. Shortly after that was done, Rockstar released GTA Trilogy, which was a re-release bundle of those same older games the mod was incorporating. The problem is that GTA Trilogy was such a broken mess that the company had to pull the games out of online stores almost immediately. The launcher for the game was broken, the games were buggy as hell, and so on.

So why are we talking about this again? Well, GTA Trilogy is getting released again, on Steam first. But if you thought the bugs had been worked out and all is well with the title… LOL, no. Instead, a buggy version is being released again as is, but this time on sale!

Today, after some leaks and rumors, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition on Steam. The good news: It’s on sale, meaning you can grab all three classic games for cheap. The bad news: It’s the same infamously messy remaster that hasn’t received a substantial update since nearly a year ago. As you might expect, folks ain’t too happy about the situation.

Rockstar ultimately had to apologize to the community because the remasters were so awful. Eventually, Rockstar and Grove Street Games did fix some of the problems players had cataloged online. But the last major update for the game was in February 2022. Since then, the remastered trilogy has remained in a fairly rough state. So it doesn’t seem like the best time to release it on a new platform and yet, here we are.

$30 for three games really should sound like a good deal. But the public fully knows how buggy these games are and it’s completely tone-deaf to release those buggy games with the only give-back being a discount on price. And if you want to speculate that Rockstar has some patch in the works to un-break the games, keep in mind that the trilogy has been off the market for over a year now. There was plenty of time to fix the title before re-releasing it. I also imagine that buyers would prefer to have a completely working game rather than a discount on a broken one.

While some hold out hope that Rockstar will still swoop in, patch these games up and fix all the visual bugs and other problems, that seems more unlikely after today. Instead, it seems this is as good as things are going to get. Not to mention that Rockstar has plans to release these games on the Epic Store later this month, too. It does seem as if the time to fix GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas has run out and Rockstar is ready to move on. What a shame.

It’s not just a shame; I struggle to understand how this move makes any sense at all. Discount or no, the release of a buggy game is going to get Rockstar absolutely murdered in terms of customer responses to this whole situation. It’s making the mistake it made over a year ago all over again, but telling the public to be satisfied with a discount on the game.

As they say, when you’re in a hole, the first step is to stop digging.

Filed Under: bugs, gta, gta trilogy, steam, video games
Companies: rockstar games, take 2, valve

Valve Briefly (Accidentally?) Shows Off Steam Deck’s Useful Ability To Use Emulators

from the whoopsie! dept

Buckle in, because there are essentially two ways to write this post but both of them start off the same way. Regular readers here will be familiar with Nintendo’s now years-long war on emulation. The whole thing is ultimately quite stupid, because there is no indication that emulator and ROM sites ever really had a negative impact on Nintendo’s business. Despite that, first with the release of Nintendo retro-consoles and then back catalog games on modern platforms like the Switch, Nintendo went on a legal and DMCA spree trying to end Nintendo emulation on the internet so it could, in some cases, release its own far shittier product. The point here is that, no matter the context, Nintendo hates the idea of having its games emulated.

So imagine the company’s reaction to when Valve released a video showing off how useful its Steam Deck handheld console is, while including a cameo for a Nintendo Switch emulator!

You had to be pretty eagle-eyed to spot the reference in the less than three-minute YouTube clip, but Twitter gaming insider Nibel did, and pointed it out in a tweet that immediately blew up. The Yuzu thumbnail on the home screen is only visible for a split second, but it’s absolutely there, and presumably was downloaded by whoever at Valve assisted in making the YouTube video.

Before the end of the day, Valve removed the video and swapped it with a new one in which the Yuzu thumbnail has been replaced by art for Portal 2. But the damage was done: One of the biggest gaming companies in the world had officially broached the taboo subject of video game emulation. “Streisand effect is strong with this one,” wrote one commenter. “I will definitely be emulating Switch on the Steam Deck.”

And here’s where we could choose a path on what we believe or don’t believe about how this all went down. On the one hand, Valve was very quick to remove the video and replace it with one sans the emulator appearance. It’s also entirely reasonable to think that whoever had put the video together in the first place hadn’t really paid attention to the icons that were appearing on the Deck and didn’t think anything of releasing the video. And we’ve seen many, many times that even tech companies don’t understand the Streisand Effect, or attempt to elude it.

If the above is true, then Valve accidentally notified the world of a useful feature of the Steam Deck: the ability to run emulators. This also doesn’t really represent a major threat to Nintendo, as emulating the Switch on the Deck is not really a replacement for a Switch generally. At most, you’ll have some really dedicated pirates, but far more tinkerers and hobbyists, checking out how it all works. One big happy accident that doesn’t really harm Nintendo.

Or, if you’re the tin-foil hat type of folk, Valve did all of this on purpose and only pantomimed the scramble to replace the video to take advantage of the Streisand Effect. It’s not like there isn’t a market already for emulation on the Steam Deck, after all.

The Steam Deck, meanwhile, has become a hotspot for all types of other emulation besides the Switch, including the Game Boy Advance, GameCube, and PS2. If you’ve ever heard anyone espouse the virtues of Valve’s new Switch competitor, its capable emulation abilities have likely been listed among its main perks. Normally Valve doesn’t make that explicit, however. I can only imagine how quickly founder Gabe Newell started getting phone calls from Nintendo’s lawyers, though of course we don’t currently have any evidence the latter was involved in getting the video taken down.

Personally, I don’t believe this was done purposefully. As they say, it’s always better to assume incompetence as opposed to malicious intent. But at the end of the day, emulation on a Steam Deck simply doesn’t replace the console versions of Nintendo’s products. I do expect Nintendo to freak out about this… but it shouldn’t.

Filed Under: emulators, steam, steam deck, video games
Companies: nintendo, valve

Indie Game Dev Decides To Leave Industry Due To Steam Returns On Short Game

from the predictable dept

It has now been over six years since Valve finally put in a refund policy for video games purchased on its Steam platform. At the time of its announcement, I was very much in favor of this move by Valve, given how previously the prospect of buying games on the platform was laughably tilted in favor of publishers and developers. On top of that, a whole bunch of the outcry from publishers and developers over the policy seemed to mostly center around it existing at all, meaning such concerns were mostly just requests to go back to the one-sided policies that favored them. Some developers even saw large numbers of refunds as a good thing, arguing that those refunds were likely largely from people that never would have tried their games out if a potential refund weren’t in place.

But going way back to that first post over its announcement, one concern brought up by developers seemed legit. Given that the refund policy required the buyer to have bought the game within the past two calendar weeks and to have not played more than two hours of it, well, what about very short games that can be completed well within that timeframe?

That exact scenario has now impacted one indie developer such that it is quitting the game development industry altogether.

Summer of ’58 is the latest first-person horror title from indie developer Emika Games, which was released in July and features a video blogger investigating an abandoned and supposedly haunted Russian children’s camp – which of course goes very badly indeed. At £6.19/$6.92 on Steam it’s a cheap purchase even full-price, and it’s currently 23% off.

The game’s Steam page makes it very clear that Summer of ’58 only has an average play-time of around 90 minutes. However, according to Emika Games, Summer of ’58 has received “a huge number of returns” – despite being rated ‘very positive’. The developer blames this on the fact that its game “does not reach two hours of playing time” – under Steam’s return policy, any game under two hours can be refunded.

As a result, Emika Games announced on Twitter that it is leaving the games industry entirely for an “indefinite time”.

Now, we could have a discussion about whether this is an overreaction or not. We could talk about how Steam’s refund policy is completely public, meaning that Emika Games knew what it was getting into when it put its 2 hour game on the platform. We could talk about business models and all the other ways the game could have been sold to the public other than via Steam, or other ways the developer could have made money from it.

But whatever side of those arguments you’d want to come down on, it wouldn’t change the simple fact that this is an obvious flaw within Steam’s refund policy. And, frankly, it’s one that developers and industry commentators saw coming a mile away. Hell, in my first post on the announcement, I managed to come up with a simple solution to this myself.

It might be an even better solution to simply allow game-makers to have options on the game-time of their refund policy. Say, two hours, five hours, or thirty minutes. Then consumers could decide for themselves if less game-time was worth the risk of purchase. I imagine that would create more administrative work on Steam’s end, but it ought to keep the indies happy.

It seems Steam decided not to keep the indies happy. And now one of them is leaving not just Steam, but the entire industry. Why? Because Steam caters primarily to the AAA publishers? That’s probably part of it. Because Steam didn’t want to give up that kind of control over its policies and platform to developers? Probably another part of it. Because this would have created work for Steam that it didn’t want to do? Likely yet another part of it.

But whether it is one of those explanations or the trifecta, a good indie gaming scene means this policy has to be altered to make it workable for those making shorter games.

Filed Under: return policy, returns, steam, video games
Companies: emika games, valve

Steam Still Can't Seem To Keep Its Hands Off Some 'Sex Games' Despite Hands Off Policy

from the pron-store dept

It’s been three or so years since Valve announced a new “hands off” approach towards approvals for games on its dominant Steam storefront. This new “policy” was unfortunately rolled out in an extremely Steam-like manner: vague and largely indecipherable, full of holes, and all with a caveat baked in that Steam could still do basically whatever it wants. Later, the company clarified that the chief goal with all of this was to allow for more adult-oriented games while still giving Steam the ability to disallow “troll games“, as though that actually clarified anything. Predictably, this new policy set off confusion all over the place, and even years into the change its application appears to be aggressively inconsistent.

Three years in and it’s still a problem. The developers of Holodexxx, a VR sex game featuring VR-rendered real-life porn stars, has expended thousands of dollars to try to comply with Steam’s policies only to find the game banned from the platform. Interestingly, the developers of the game appear to have intended this to be less of a gross or trollish look at a sex video game and more as something that is both adult-oriented but a “sex positive” experience.

Holodexxx is a game in which simulated versions of real adult performers interact with the player in virtual reality, with AI guiding elements of the performance. Its creators bill it as an ethical, sex-positive game being made in conjunction with and featuring real sex workers. Steam, at this point, carries a plethora of games that include adult content—some of which venture into much dicier thematic territory than Holodexxx. But that didn’t stop Valve from chasing Holodexxx off its holodeck.

On pre-2018 Steam, this is a game that would absolutely not be allowed on the platform. But the whole point of the change in policy was supposed to be to allow for more content of this nature, so long as it didn’t dive into “troll” territory. And, to some extent, that policy shift achieved its goal. There are a great many adult sex games on Steam these days, with the level of raunchiness in those games playing across a spectrum for that sort of thing. But in this case, the game has been rejected several times, no matter what the developer tries to do to comply with Steam’s policy.

In a recent lengthy blog, the game’s developers outlined everything they’ve tried over the course of multiple months. To begin, they submitted a “PG-13 experience” to Steam starring a clothed version of adult film actress Riley Reid, along with a censored video of live adult stars. Valve, say Holodexxx’s developers, blocked the submission “with a boiler-plate explanation that video pornography was not allowed on Steam.” So then the developers spent additional time creating a new demo without video of adult stars, in which the player could instead look at a model of adult film actress Marley Brinx in a virtual environment. Again, Valve blocked it on the basis that it was “pornography.”

At that point, Holodexxx’s developers went back to the drawing board and spent “months” on Holodexxx Home, a more elaborate interactive experience with dialogue systems and direct physical interactions. It involves undressing a character, but so do other games on Steam, so in theory, it doesn’t necessarily activate any of Valve’s tripwires. However, you can probably guess what happened next.

“We submitted Home and waited a few weeks,” wrote Holodexxx’s developers. “After poking Steam via help tickets, our build was reviewed two days later… and banned. The explanation was again, that Steam does not allow ‘pornography’ on their platform.”

In all, the developer claims that it has spent something like $20,000 just trying to get a version in place that would meet Steam’s guidelines. Unfortunately, that effort appears to have failed as that last rejection once again simply regurgitated the anti-pornography stance previously iterated.

Now, let’s be clear on a couple of things. First, you may not like the idea of adult games showing up on Steam. That doesn’t really matter for this story. Steam shifted policies to allow for more of them and they can run their platform as they choose. Secondly, I’ll reiterate that point: Steam can block this game from its platform if it wants.

But the problem here is the lack of clarity in the policy and the inconsistency with which it is applied. If you need this broken down further, I’ll put it this way: when a developer can spend five-figures trying to comply with a platform’s policy and can’t manage to do so, the problem is on the platform’s end. Either the policy isn’t clear enough for developers (check!), hasn’t been applied in a way that’s consistent enough to allow it to be interpreted (check!), or the communication in feedback to developers about the policy as it applies to their specific games hasn’t been handled well (check!).

In this case, Steam has failed at all three levels. Again, the platform can do as it pleases with its property, but if the platform is going to have a policy, it might as well make it one that actually works.

Filed Under: adult content, content moderation, holodexx, steam
Companies: valve

The EPIC Effect: Microsoft Changes Revenue Split To Match EPIC Store, Steam Holds Firm

from the competition-is-amazing dept

Way back when Epic released its Epic Store PC game storefront, the release of this new competitor to Steam focused on two major selling points. The first was timed exclusives that it shelled out tons of money for, allowing it to sell games the public couldn’t get anywhere else for a certain period of time. This pissed off lots of people, as the public generally doesn’t like exclusives. That said, Epic did mention that it would end its exclusivity practices if the rest of the gaming storefront world, especially Steam, mirrored the Epic Store’s second key selling point, which was a far more favorable split offered to game developers than the “industry standard” 70/30 split that sees places like Steam getting nearly a third of game revenue just for hosting the game on its platform. Instead, Epic’s store has a 88/12 split, meaning the platform is willing to take less than half of the revenue Steam extracts from gamemakers.

In other words, Epic positioned its exclusivity program as merely a method to get the other storefronts to take less money away from game developers, which softened the blow with the public and surely made it a great many fans in the gaming industry.

Well, Steam hasn’t caved yet. But Microsoft did just announce that it is moving to match the splits offered by the Epic Store, marking some movement in the industry and perhaps an indication of things to come.

“As part of our commitment to empower every PC game creator to achieve more, starting on August 1 the developer share of Microsoft Store PC games sales net revenue will increase to 88%, from 70%,” Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty wrote on the Xbox blog. “A clear, no-strings-attached revenue share means developers can bring more games to more players and find greater commercial success from doing so.”

The move is the latest in a bit of a sea change for game revenues. In a survey released yesterday by the Game Developers Conference, only 3% of respondents thought the once-standard 30% take by a platform was justified. The Epic Games Store broke onto the scene by notably only taking 12% of the revenue. Over the last year, both Apple and Google have lessened their cuts for games making under $1 million. Steam, meanwhile, has held more or less firm on its 30% take, with the cut lessening the more money a game makes, a system that makes more money for larger, richer publishers, while penalizing smaller indies.

Funny what a little bit of competition can do. While it is certainly notable that Steam is watching all of these changes with its proverbial arms folded, doing no sort of splits-changing of its own, maybe that’s okay and maybe there’s a place for that. Or maybe the pressure continues to build and the Epic Store does end up being the preferred storefront for smaller titles and indie developers and Steam eventually does have to come down from the 70/30 split.

All I know for sure is that without Epic entering this arena and pushing the envelope, be it for altruistic reasons or otherwise, it seems unlikely that even Apple, Google, and Microsoft would have made any of these changes. That’s why, whatever you think of the Epic Store, the added competition certainly is nice.

Filed Under: competition, epic store, steam, video game stores, video games
Companies: epic, microsoft, valve

Platform Wars Update: Epic Store Losing $330 Million Per Year To Acquire Customers

from the oof! dept

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on how the PC gaming platform war is going. If you’ll recall, the Spring of 2019 saw a new entrant into this ongoing battle, with Epic releasing the Epic Store. Epic’s plan appeared to be essentially a PR battle at first, drawing in the public by proclaiming that Steam’s revenue splits with developers and publishers were bad for the gaming industry and by drawing in publishers and developers with a better version of those splits for them. On top of that, Epic used those splits to gobble up a bunch of exclusive or timed exclusive releases of games, which ended up pissing off many in the gaming public and, of course, Steam. Then came Epic’s free game releases, where the platform worked out deals with publishers to offer up AAA game titles for literally no money as a method for getting gamers to adopt the platform.

All of this didn’t come with zero fallout from what Epic was doing, of course. The public doesn’t like exclusives generally. Crowdfunding got weird due to the exclusivity. And the launch of the Epic Store in the early days was not without its hiccups, either. Now that we’re 2 years on, how has this all shaken out?

Well, Epic is getting a decent chunk of market share with its tactics, even as the platform takes on major losses in doing so. The reason for those losses? Well, largely they have to do with all of those free games and timed exclusives. And we have Epic’s battle with Apple to thank for the information.

The raw numbers, as reported in a “Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” document Apple filed last week, show massive incurred and projected losses for Epic’s game download hub, which launched in late 2018. Documents and testimony from Epic itself show a 181millionlossforthestorein2019andprojectedlossesof181 million loss for the store in 2019 and projected losses of 181millionlossforthestorein2019andprojectedlossesof273 million in 2020 and $139 million in 2021.

You might think Epic is incurring those losses because it only takes a 12 percent cut of third-party game revenues, compared to the industry-standard 30 percent cut on other digital storefronts. On the contrary, though—in its own court filings, Epic says that 12 percent revenue chunk has been “sufficient to cover its costs of distribution and allow for further innovation and investment in EGS.”

The main driver of EGS’ losses, instead, is Epic’s generous program of “minimum guarantees.” These encompass the advance payments Epic has used to attract so many timed exclusives to its storefront and seemingly also cover the free games Epic makes available to Epic Games Store users every week.

Now, while this isn’t precisely the type of method for using “free” as part of a business model as we’ve talked about in the past, it’s close enough to count. The upshot of all of this is that commentary from Epic’s folks makes it clear that they’re well aware of these monetary shortfalls… and are largely just fine with them. The whole point of all of this is to make as big a dent in market share in a short time period as possible. And, of the two ways Epic saw to do that, taking on initial losses like this was the better option.

“There are two ways to bring users into something,” Epic Games co-founder and CEO Tim Sweeney told Ars in 2019, just after the launch of the Epic Games Store. “You can run Google and Facebook ads and pay massive amounts of money to them. But we actually found it was more economical to pay developers [a lump sum] to distribute their game free for two weeks… We can actually bring in more users at lower cost by doing all these great things for great people rather than paying Google and Facebook.”

That effort is starting to work. Last June, Sweeney told PC Gamer that EGS had about 15 percent of the PC gaming market. That’s not great, but it’s not bad considering the near-monopoly power Steam has in PC gaming downloads (Sweeney estimated Steam’s share at 90 percent in 2019, though that could be a bit inflated).

In court documents, Epic went on to note that it expects its storefront to start turning a profit in 2023, so it looks like it has some runway there as well.

So, what does this all mean? Well, at the very least it’s an interesting experiment in using free loss-leaders to gain customers and give them reasons to buy elsewhere on the platform. Epic hasn’t pulled some magic trick to suddenly unseat Valve’s Steam platform as of yet… but it’s also apparently playing the long game here.

Filed Under: epic store, platform wars, steam, video games
Companies: apple, epic, valve

2 Years Later, Valve's Hands Off Approach To Adult Games Is Still Confusing, Still Very Much Not Hands Off

from the bright-shiny-lines dept

Back in 2018, after a year of truly hammering down on independent game studios producing what many would consider “adult” or “porn” games, Valve finally relented and said its Steam platform would be more open. As part of the announcement, Valve indicated it would take a hands off approach to game curation and allow more adult-style games generally, later clarifying that it intended to prevent only “troll” games. If all of that sounds incredibly vague and ripe for creating a massive and confusing mess, well, that’s precisely what happened. Developers saw the chance that Steam would accept their games as a crapshoot, with some making it through and others not. The reasons for denials were equally vague and arbitrary.

The dust has settled somewhat in the subsequent years, but the lack of clarity for developers in what is allowed or not continues to rear its ugly head. One recent case is with Super Seducer 3, a game that appears to now be fully denied from Steam despite the developer being way open to working with Steam on any perceived issues.

Valve has refused to approve controversial pickup artist game Super Seducer 3 for sale on Steam. The company says the game breaks a rule, saying that Steam does “not ship sexually explicit images of real people,” according to messages posted on Twitter by game creator Richard La Ruina.

The first game in the series was suspended from Kickstarter and then barred from the PlayStation store back in 2018, but that game and its sequel continue to be available on Steam to this day.

To get it out of the way, Super Seducer 3 sounds almost precisely like the kind of game that I would absolutely not want to play. That being said, just because something is not my cup of tea neither makes it full on pornography, nor does it mean it runs afoul of Steam’s supposedly new lax restrictions. Adding everything up, actually, nothing about what Steam is doing here seems to make sense.

As noted above, the first two games in the series are currently for sale on Steam. It’s also worth noting that the feedback the developer got seemed to indicate that the issue with the game was a brand new standard of not showing any sexually explicit material featuring images of real live people.

In the case of Super Seducer 3, Valve seems to be citing a newly articulated standard of “not ship[ping] sexually explicit images of real people” on top of the “illegal” and “straight-up trolling” standards of the past. The vast majority of games listed under Steam’s “Sexual Content” store page feature hand-drawn 2D or computer-animated images of the scantily clad characters in question, rather than photographs or filmed images of real actors. On the other hand, titles like “Bad Ass Babes” or “iStripper” that do feature nude images of real actors have recently been removed from the Steam Store (though extremely NSFW discussion pages still remain on Steam to commemorate their brief availability).

Notably, the developer claims that the actual images included in the game would pass the Instagram test. This generally means that, while they may be sexual in nature, the images don’t contain anything crossing the arbitrary naughty-lines of nipples, penises, or vaginas. Also notable is that in February the developer and Steam were working together to get the game in a state where Valve felt it could approve its release, before Steam suddenly indicated that, no, all parties were at an impasse and Steam’s decision not to allow the game was now final.

Later in February, La Ruina said he had received “clearer guidelines” from Valve on what changes needed to be made to get Steam approval for Super Seducer 3 and later said he had begun making “targeted cuts” based on that guidance and “lawyer advice.” But over the weekend, La Ruina said that Valve told him they were “at an impasse” and that “we are not going to sell the game or re-review it… this decision is final.”

“I do not feel like we are at any kind of impasse,” he wrote in a message to Valve. “I’m ready to take a butcher knife to the game and take weeks to make all kinds of edits.”

It seems as though he will not have that opportunity, with Steam digging in its heels for whatever reason.

Content moderation sucks and is extremely hard to do in a sensical way. We’ve discussed this over and over again here at Techdirt. But, if you are going to do any kind of content moderation, particularly under the guise of having a mostly hands-off approach, it sure would be nice for developers to have a general idea for what will get approved and what won’t. Otherwise, well, you get this.

Filed Under: hands off, steam, super seducer, video games
Companies: valve