Apparently, Valve keeps getting builds that were never run through Steam at all, which is how games end up with broken launch options or missing depots.
They should have to play, actively, to at least 2x the refund window and to record all of this and submit it along with.
Meanwhile we were so afraid to hit submit we tested for months even if we were just launching a playtest build. Sweating before every early build submission and our steam review.
Even if it was actually a rubber stamp im glad we took so much care and am glad steam is setting up more tests like this.
Edit: i would like to add our reviewers were super kind. Our unreal build had some obscure issue and they fixed it for us, pushed it for us, and showed us clearly what it was so we understood. But. Dayem. Thats good service and support ngl.
Pride in creation is so much greater for the knowledge you did it right. It’s so easy to not, but taking pride in your work as you do it is the secret to results you can be proud of.
Glad there’s some devs who do care. Do You mean any specific title here?
This new law is probably aimed against ai slops or/and super bugged self crashing crap… bethesda :V
I am a co founder of Hermertia Wars. Bunch of indie devs making our dream come true by working on an Action RTS that takes characters from our 13+ year lore playing minecraft community, and makes them heros you control while recruiting villagers, soldiers, and directing economy. Like AOE/warcraft 3 meets smash bros. Early game. We have a long project in mind. Would love new playtesters or meet folks interested in indie dev :). We are also a workers cooperative which is the best part.
Hell yeah, when it’s further along be sure to talk about it on here more
Cool will do :) we are a good year away from more openly marketing. We’ve done a few game dev conferences and learned so much but our game is ambitious as hell. Took us 2 years just to build sub systems. Finally done that and now we are on features and gameplay. Getting exhilarating. Our Monday night mini tournaments are so fun. But long way to go.
For last few days and probably few weeks more, I’m deep diving another game that I just acquired (Soulframe). Hermertia Wars got wishlisted and installed and defo gonna check, may even do some infodump about at some point.
Much thanks for doing games with passion.
You got me intrigued.
Indie, the game type, you being in a workers cooperative, aiming for a long project and thorough development sound so good.
I’m going to join the playtest!What’s the preferred way to provide feedback aside from Discord, which I don’t use.
Looks interesting, just joined the playtest!
Wow amazing! Its tricky to play against AI at this point as its an arena game so hit me up if you wanna try with people. We have a tournament coming to help with that too!
We are still easily a year away from serious marketing but with all subsystems built we are having so much fun with features and content now.
Still haven’t spun it up yet, probably give it a go tonight or tomorrow
But looking back, do you think that after you were done with testing, you could have said: “These tests we’ve run show that our game runs according to our standards” with confidence?
I suppose! Another part of it is we are indie devs. Years of programming experience but not on games. So we are learning a lot as we go! And hope to make new friends along the way looking for a platform to do the same.
Honestly surprised this wasn’t already a rule. The number of times I’ve bought something on day one and the first thing I see is a launcher error or a missing DLL is kind of absurd for a store that takes 30%.
The Steam Deck Verified stuff makes it worse, because people trust that badge. If a patch breaks the game on Deck and the badge stays up for weeks, that’s on Valve too, not just the dev. Five minutes of a human launching the actual depot would catch most of the dumb ones: wrong launch option, wrong exe, Linux script pointing at nothing.
I agree with you but also Steam has the easiest refund process in the entire industry. I’ve had old EA games become fully unplayable because of them switching origin to EAapp and had no way to even ask for assistance let alone get a refund. With Steam you just have to get past the bot and you’ll be fine once you can explain the situation to an actual employee.
Reminds me of the new Simon the Sorcerer game. The Linux build used a script to launch the actual game. The only thing the script did was to call the game’s binary. Trouble was that they misspelled the binary. Just launching it once would have shown them the error.
Four months or so Blizzard dropped a new season for Diablo 4 (along with a new game update), while being “Steam Deck Verified” and the new version of the game didn’t launch at all on Linux anymore.
The Proton team had to make an experimental Proton build which took around a day before it was fixed iirc.
So really, even AAA devs can’t seem to test launching their games for all scenarios.
5 minutes is paltry. Devs should be required to submit an uncut recording of the first 30 minutes of gameplay from launching via Steam before they can release a game or push an update.
I don’t think that’s an unreasonable demand, cause if a game can’t launch or survive 30 minutes of normal gameplay, it shouldn’t be on the store for people to waste their time and/or money on.
We are now living in time where the platform holder asks the developers to at least play their game for 5 minutes. The quality bar is that low.
heroes3 remake on Steam, few months ago :D
What was that download? Like 300KB?
Ngl, kind of surprised that something like this wasnt the case already.
Five minutes seem unreasonably paltry.
What the actual fuck
The last time I hit submit I had three thousand hours clocked on the game
I get the impression this means per specific build of the game submitted to steam, not just the game.
