Notes on a talk from GDC 2019
- To be a good platform, need to:
- Create value for players and devs
- Best experience for a given game
- Grow the addressable market
- Invent new ways for devs to make customers happy
- …over the long term
- E.g., Steam Link Anywhere automatically makes your game more valuable—no integration costs for devs
- Coming soon
- Steam Events: communicate to players when new stuff is coming; free stuff, live streams, updates, etc.
- customers choose how they want to hear about this: email, in app, push notification, iCal feed, etc.
- give people a reason to play/buy right now
- Redesigned library
- New home page to easily resume last game, show cool stuff happening in hames you already own, join in with friends
- Pull in events on individual game’s page, prompt for review
- Advanced filters for use with large libraries (like tagging)
- Steam Events: communicate to players when new stuff is coming; free stuff, live streams, updates, etc.
- Recently released
- Developer homepages where people can follow you and automatically be notified of your new games
- Livestreams directly in your store page
- Show people what it’s actually like to play your game—better than screenshots or video
- Can elevate user’s live streams to show up on your own page
- Exclude off-topic review “bombs”
- Automatically based on surges in review traffic
- Added “call for help” button to get Steam’s intervention
- New networking API
- Valve’s infrastructure for use in your game
- CDN has direct connections to 2500 ISPs; can see avg download speeds by ISP online
- For multiplayer: want stable connections, low ping, quality matchmaking, protect against DDoS
- Prioritize game traffic (latency sensitive) over downloads
- Allows matchmaking across the globe (or if you’re more latency sensitive, maybe a small number of pools across the globe)
- Available for both Steam and non-Steam versions of your game
- Free
- Emerging markets
- Regions with a growing economy, or an established market where Steam hasn’t penetrated much (like Japan)
- Challenges: expensive payment methods, esp. cash
- Invest early
- Use preferred payment methods locally: e.g., Japan prefers to buy online, walk to a convenience store, pay in cash there, come back with a printed validation code to download
- Introduced Steam retail cards to make this easier (costs Steam 10-15% of the face value of the card)
- China: 12.5% of transactions go through the five “standard” payment methods; most of the rest are cash based
- PC cafe program