i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
This.i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
Consumers aren't obligated to continue doing business with a company that frustrates them. It's in Valve's best interest to evaluate the way they engage with their audience.
They're not "obligated" in the sense that sure, they can do whatever they want. But they run a service, and it's pretty important to have good communication surrounding that service.
it's not really. the games themselves are the service, not traditional customer service.A company that preaches about a games as service future, yet has terrible customer service and communication.
Thats an oxymoron.
i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
it's not really. the games themselves are the service, not traditional customer service.
Well, you could start by asserting that there's nothing traditional about a digital game store.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.
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'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.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?
Benefits of Steam as a benign dictatorship monopoly:
- all games available in a single library, not scattered across multiple storefronts
- single universal client and username, bringing a 'universal login' service connecting all Pc gamers to Steams social functions
- Single account reducing security concerns of having multiple username / passwords for multiple sites, and multiple attack vectors to be concerned about
- consolidated game userbases; how many people playing x on steam right now = representative of game active userbase
- guarantee that all games are patched / updated concurrently, rather than waiting for a patch from one service and being unable to connect to those patched from another
- pressure on publishers to maintain operability of titles or risk delisting, and being unable to get around that by selling on alternate storefronts
- DLC parity, and DLC purchased in local currency / steam wallet rather than moonbucks
Please...Nope.
There is no benefit to monopolies.
But Christ, maybe they could tell people Diretide isn't coming? Maybe when they extended Operation Phoenix they could have told us for how long? How about personally addressing the many situations where people lost hundreds of dollars because Steam's UI told them they were selling $1.50 gun skins instead of their factory new StatTrak knife that was immediately snapped up by a bot before they could do anything about it?
The Diretide incident is already the major story around how Dota is handled. Hopefully the market UI bugs get some more attention as well, because we're taking about people losing hundreds of dollars due to a bug.
Professional bullshitters, mostly.
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.
I would love more communication, but not at the cost of inferior products, and I think that would ultimately be the tradeoff.
This is massively reductive, but whatever.
Sales start on the 19th, bump this to bitch about how bad they are then.
They run arguably the biggest digital games store on the market, how is traditional customer service not a part of that?
i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
i do wholeheartly believe valve just really doesn't give a fuck
They have lots of competition. Hell they aren't even the forerunner in MOBA space, league is still bigger than DOTA2.What Valve really needs is competition.
Valve needs a lot more than that, Steam has gotten really bad
Pretty sure SteamGAF would up to do it for free :lol
Elaborate please.
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.
Any links to discussion about this? First I'm hearing about it.
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.
It IS too late for steam to turn back. Are you aware of what Valve ultimately are transitioning Steam into?
The basic gist is for Steam to become completely open to self publishing, but to have multiple users and groups creating their own curated stores within steam. This has been discussed since 2012. So as well as Valve, there could be a Yahtzee store, TotalBisucuit Store, GiantBomb Store, Ubi Store, Cyberpunk Store, Bag of Shit store etc. Users, Devs, Pubs or whoever make stores would get a cut of the sales they create just as other people creating content do in TF2, Dota2 and a like. Gabe has explained the idea in previous years such as here: http://youtu.be/t8QEOBgLBQU?t=43m42s
As for worries of the quality dipping with the inevitable dumping of shit on to Steam, as we are already seeing, that has not been made clear too clear. However, a few weeks back some indie devs went to Valve to see where Steam is going. One of them is at least perfectly happy with how it's going to be particularly with those issues in mind and visibility of their own content: http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2014/05/10/the-future-of-steam-vr-and-other-seattle-stuff/
For a while, a lot of indies have been panicking about steam. There are more and more indie games being released though greenlight and people are worrying that the ‘average’ indie game on steam is making less money. The phrases you hear are ‘floodgates are opening’ and ‘race to the bottom’.
I’ve seen what valve have planned and I really do not think anyone has to worry. Actually I do. If your plan is to dump your first unity hobby game on steam and then retire rich, and that game is a clone or unpolished, or incredibly unoriginal, then yeah, you are so fucked, but frankly I don’t care.
Valve are approaching the ‘floodgates’ problem in exactly the right way. The steam experience for everyone is going to get so much better. I can’t fault their plans in any way. I’d love to attract loads of web traffic with a clickbait ‘valve are about to wreck steam’ blog post, but that would be complete bullshit.
My advice to indies uncertain about steam’s future is just to make a really cool game and don’t worry. That sounds like PR bullshit but it’s actually true for once.
Still, we'll have to wait and see how it goes. One dev at Steam Dev Days claimed Valve have told him that greenlight would be gone by the end of the year, which would make the new store implementation likely before then. Right now though, Steam is a mess. The only explanation I can think of for how messy it is could be that they purposely "open the flood gates" to a lot of shit content specifically to test internally how their new system handles it... otherwise I have no idea
The basic gist is for Steam to become completely open to self publishing, but to have multiple users and groups creating their own curated stores within steam. This has been discussed since 2012. So as well as Valve, there could be a Yahtzee store, TotalBisucuit Store, GiantBomb Store, Ubi Store, Cyberpunk Store, Bag of Shit store etc. Users, Devs, Pubs or whoever make stores would get a cut of the sales they create just as other people creating content do in TF2, Dota2 and a like. Gabe has explained the idea in previous years such as here: http://youtu.be/t8QEOBgLBQU?t=43m42s
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.
I find this really hard to believe. The average joe just can't make a storefront and any game sold they get money. The storefront is more interface/cosmetic idea.
Valve has been used to getting nothing but compliments from the press and the community up until this year. I think they simply don't know how to respond to controversy.
Nope.
There is no benefit to monopolies.
http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffen..._supports_reply_after_market_bug_that_caused/Any links to discussion about this? First I'm hearing about it.
Valve is just heartless.
Seriously tho, they made some of my favorite games, but they moved on, I don't think they are interested in the same things anymore. They are all about user generated content, new business models, whales, multiplayer, f2p, etc. They also don't seem to care much about Steam being a polished product, for the size of the service they don't seem to invest enough into it at all, their costumer service is ice cold(one of the worse I ever seen).
Maybe Steam should be its own company separated from Valve.
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