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Valve really need a Community Manager. At the least...
- Thread starter ashecitism
- Start date
Zeyphersan
Banned
They won't care until it starts effecting their business, which it probably won't. The more people switch to PC gaming the more customers they get, and the less incentive they have to change anything
They definitely do. The job could just be for steam related stuff and could stay silent on the games end.
and this, too.
and this, too.
This.
NinjamicWZ
Banned
Yeah, that's like saying no one is obligated to say hello or ask you if you need any help when you walk in somewhere... this is essentially true, but an employee is required to practice customer service by most companies who wish to be successful, and companies generally try to put on a nice front to gain and retain patrons. Valve is just spoiled rotten and video game consumers are taken for granted because new markets are always the only market that matters.
it's not really. the games themselves are the service, not traditional customer service.
Valve has always looked for tech/innovation solutions to certain PR issues. In fact I'd speculate that is practically their policy; if customers have a problem, it's because they haven't structured or built their software properly, and not because they aren't spending a ton of resources on (what is effectively) administrative overhead. Why pay a human being to do something that a piece of software can do just as well?
edit: I wouldn't disagree though that philosophy may be straining to its limit with the amount of scrutiny and attention that Valve is under these days. Valve's solution in these kinds of circumstances has usually been to ignore or find a way out of being responsible for the things people are upset at them for.
I agree with this. The only way you're going to get a half-straight answer is if you corner Gabe in an alley and ask him about hiring people.
They really need to get some customer support people, and I highly doubt it's hard to find people in bloody Seattle of all places. Not to mention a PR manager as others have mentioned.
XANDER CAGE
Member
They run arguably the biggest digital games store on the market, how is traditional customer service not a part of that?
Well, you could start by asserting that there's nothing traditional about a digital game store.
XANDER CAGE
Member
It's been the standard for the better part of a decade and online stores have been the norm for other products much longer than that. Are you seriously trying to suggest that because Steam was groundbreaking, Valve doesn't need better customer service or community communication?
I kinda feel like Steam doesn't need PR or advertising because we all use it every day and Steam sales are just about the best PR you could hope for.
I've had to contact steam twice for refunds and once for a account access problem and both times J thought it was handled pretty fast and reasonable.
I can't really get worked up about white hacker justice or whatever. I doubt many other people care either.
I've had to contact steam twice for refunds and once for a account access problem and both times J thought it was handled pretty fast and reasonable.
I can't really get worked up about white hacker justice or whatever. I doubt many other people care either.
I'd argue that's exactly why they need good customer service and communication. Steam is going to have these before unseen problems and they can't deal with them by being silent.
I'm saying that Valve probably thinks it can get away without "traditional" customer service because it thinks it can avoid the need via smart business and software choices. I don't know what it needs to be successful or avoid failure, I'm not a soothsayer. It could very well be that customer service is unavoidable, in which case there are a bunch of totally viable competitors to Steam. As a PC game customer, I'm not terribly worried at the moment.
Robot Pants
Member
Some news about HL3 would be nice too
Spring-Loaded
Member
Isn't that jshackles' job
ShinMaruku
Member
Community manager is more than just marketing. I would agree that they should have one, but that comapny how it's set up will never have that.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
Please...
ashecitism
Member
Any links to discussion about this? First I'm hearing about it.
Y0j1mb0
Member
I imagined you saying this in Tuco's voice and laughed.
Yep. It's a hell of a position too. As any admin/mod on here can speak, it's a difficult task dealing with a group of diverse people who all want different things. And a Community Manger does much more than dealing with the community on a direct level. It's a pretty impressive job, and I have nothing but respect for those that do it.
theusedversion
Member
I think I've realized over the past few years that I just don't really like the way Valve does things. In my opinion, they are kind of a shitty company. But they have great sales which makes it hard to ignore them. I used to like Valve as a developer (HL2) but their aim doesn't seem to line up with my interests anymore. I wish we could get someone to really compete with them.
This seems like such a wildly false dichotomy that its tantamount to bullshit. At the most basic level the one thing Valve is absolutely not short on is money. They could hire a dedicated Community Manager so it would have exactly zero impact on their products.
Its not like this is even opinion based, Amazon and GMG often have objectively better sales than Steam. In the case of Amazon.com they're even better for most non-US customers because they dont adopt Steams exploitative currency conversions
If only you loved Valve enough youd know the answer
Valve desperately needs this IMO. So many times when Steam is down or when they managed to glitch Team Fortress 2 through their weird updates they never say anything to acknowledge the problems to their community.
And now this with banning the Dev for showing Valve the exploit is just weird.
And now this with banning the Dev for showing Valve the exploit is just weird.
Should of been first post.
bodyboarder
Member
And we are done here.
Netherscourge
Banned
What Valve really needs is competition.
They have lots of competition. Hell they aren't even the forerunner in MOBA space, league is still bigger than DOTA2.
NinjamicWZ
Banned
He could be talking about the constant flood of shovelware, prototypes that borderline on trolling, and untouched 4:3 games from the 90's and early '00s that we've seen for most of 2014, that used to only be available on bargain shelves in Wal-Mart next to such gems as Bejeweled or Serious Sam, as punishment for wanting 2D indie games, and not just buying stuff in Team Fortress like we're supposed to be doing + forcing them to do things like Greenlight.
It used to be worth going to steam store almost every day to see if anything new and interesting had been added, even if it was just some odd thing that popped up before or after tuesday... now if anything does, I probably never see it before it gets pushed down however many pages, can barely be arsed to click on 1 of 30 things that released this week, and has a nice looking logo/cool sounding title, to see if it's what would have been a 75% chance of being something like Thomas Was Alone or Stanley Parable just last year.
jshackles
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
I'd really like to see more done on Valve's blogs: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/
With the exception of one post in January from Michael Abrash (who no longer works at Valve), the newest entry between the three of them is from July 26, 2013. Their Linux blog hasn't been updated since November 16, 2012, and we all know that Steam for Linux has grown substantially since then. The entire Linux blog has a total of four posts.
This is just one example of something that would go a long way to furthering customer relationships. There are a LOT of cool things going on at Valve - why not share some of that with us on a regular basis? It doesn't have to be super-secret-half-life-3 stuff, but just the day to day things like "Hey, we've published this new change to the Steam client that lets you disable DLC for your games, and we think it's pretty cool."
I know that they have announcements like this that are made in the various "official" Steam community discussion groups, but these announcements are typically made by the engineers and are more technical in nature. Give us a blog post about your cool new thing you're working on, include some pictures, and it goes a long way to convincing everyone that there are real people working at your company.
Just my thoughts on the Valve blogs.
With the exception of one post in January from Michael Abrash (who no longer works at Valve), the newest entry between the three of them is from July 26, 2013. Their Linux blog hasn't been updated since November 16, 2012, and we all know that Steam for Linux has grown substantially since then. The entire Linux blog has a total of four posts.
This is just one example of something that would go a long way to furthering customer relationships. There are a LOT of cool things going on at Valve - why not share some of that with us on a regular basis? It doesn't have to be super-secret-half-life-3 stuff, but just the day to day things like "Hey, we've published this new change to the Steam client that lets you disable DLC for your games, and we think it's pretty cool."
I know that they have announcements like this that are made in the various "official" Steam community discussion groups, but these announcements are typically made by the engineers and are more technical in nature. Give us a blog post about your cool new thing you're working on, include some pictures, and it goes a long way to convincing everyone that there are real people working at your company.
Just my thoughts on the Valve blogs.
Exactly what I meant, the amount of unfinished games that are allowed to be sold, pushing down the actual quality games is absolutely disgusting, Steam is just as bad as the app store at this point
CheesecakeRecipe
Stormy Grey
Here's the most recent /r/globaloffensive post on the matter but it has been around for quite some time. I can't spend a lot of time digging up some of the larger earlier posts at the moment but there have been plenty of instances of this bug hitting people and screwing them for quite a lot. They used to attempt fixing it but nowadays most people who get hit by it get the same response this guy did.
It boggles the mind how this bug can still be around.
Regarding the store, I'm just gonna repost what I've posted before from http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=113202304&postcount=40
This. I think a lot of people (myself included) would be far happier with Valve as a company if they just talked about stuff once in a while. There's a difference between holding back until you've got something finished to announce and casually discussing interesting small developments to let us know you're still working on things.
That is explained in the video. The implementation will have to be seen. This was discussed again at Dev Days. They are still going forward with it. It seems obvious that this isn't a simple "cosmetic idea" when he discuss people being able to price stores out of the market. The mechanisms and input for limitation from pubs/devs are also yet to be seen. More of the waiting game it seems
SatelliteOfLove
Member
I don't want to put it all on this, but I would not doubt this is a possibility at this point. This will be much more interesting in the future as the PC Store market matures like what CCP/GoG is doing now.
I cant think of a single monoploy that exists that didn't have some form of government help, so I dont think we have to worry about that with video games.
Rickenslacker
Banned
http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffen..._supports_reply_after_market_bug_that_caused/
This was the latest I could find. I lurk the subreddit and it springs up now and then. Selling CS:GO items within the Steam client or in-game overlay seems to sometimes place the wrong item on the market, causing some big losses.
thats why origin is so much better, and uplay too, cause valve never updates steam with somehing new to leave the others in the dust like it has for all these years. seriously?
origin and uplay dont even have an excuse to why they suck so bad cause DD is nothing new.
NinjamicWZ
Banned
While all that sounds doable, it's reliant too much on people's taste and awareness for good things to not slip through the cracks and be unable to get a fair shake. Every month or so, Steam starts giving me flashbacks to 5+ years of LittleBigPlanet's community pages, and it's 8 million levels of spam, and things floating to the top to bury quality underneath things that are entertaining purely in an ironic sense. Individual stores is the equivalent of hearting a creator or forum member who has good taste, and hoping that they're active + unbiased.
It seems like financial gain would incentivize quality control from popular private curators, but it would also incentivise the same mentality that big publishers have - go lowest common denominator or go home, 'cause I'm busy showcasing the game that will get me paid.