Hey all! 2 Sentinels articles in 1 week, how lucky, right? It's not even Christmas.

This one is slightly different through, as the article isn't actually here on the group, but instead, I was approached by a new website by the name of GBAMFS (Gaming Brethren Advocates - Mutual Aid Federation & Society) and asked if I'd be interested in doing a guest article. I thought, why the hell not, sure! So I decided to write up piece about the Steam curating system, which you can go and read on their website here[gbamfs.wixsite.com]

If you want to give these guys a startup boost, they will appreciate it, they're just starting out but have high aspirations on wanting to make meaningful change in the games industry and build a community of writers, content creators and gamers. They have a YouTube channel, Twitch channel, upcoming events, and more, all of which you can find on their link tree here.[linktr.ee]

Thanks again to GBAMFS for hosting our new article.

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https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2230980/Caribbean_Legend/

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/687800/Heads_Will_Roll_Reforged/

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2709300/After_War_Town/

Hey hey! Long time no speak! Very sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks, I've been very inundated with work, but I've finally found some time today to report on some findings I've been wanting to discuss for a little while now.

Today I wanted to revisit our old buddy Atomic Fabrik, and specifically, I'm actually wanting to do a callback to a point I raised in a previous article where I responded to Atomic Fabrik's post talking about his Steam ban. For those of you unfamiliar or new, a little background first though. Atomic Fabrik was a Steam developer/publisher that pushed out a lot of shovelware titles, but who also partook in review manipulation, deceptive marketting such as using entirely AI generated images on store pages without any gameplay, and also having a tendancy to try and remove his name from titles to prevent association and conceal how many games he was posting to Steam.

So, on August 16th we posted an article responding to some of the points of Atomic Fabrik's post regarding his ban, mainly because he talks about this group a lot in his since deleted X post, but also because there was a lot misinformation that failed to set the record straight. Now, usually when it comes to banned developers, I let them be and move on, they're not on Steam so they're not really contributing to the problems on Steam that we try and address anymore, however, since that article, I've been delving a bit deeper into some other apps that some users reported to me on our forums that they cited were still owned by Atomic Fabrik but were still on the store despite his ban. Now, I was aware of some apps that were still up on Steam by Atomic Fabrik and I even talked about those in the article on August 16th, however the forum quickly collated a lengthy list of games that were still on Steam and it was in the 50's. Granted this was out of a game count that was nearing the 300's, but it did make me question how Valve missed so many. Some of the users cited the developer associations had been removed, some were under different names citing changes in SteamDB log entries, but even then, Valve have access to a lot more information such as banking information that they use when issuing out bans. So what happened with this?

That's what I sought to try and figure out, and the results have offered some answers to at least the initial questions, but have further fueled some confusion and raised more questions from at least the close circle of people, including myself, that have been looking into this.


I'd like to now segue a bit and discuss something that I have been aware of happening on Steam for some time, but I've never had an appropriate time to discuss it publicly, and that's with regards to app acquisitions. An app acquisition is effectively a buyout of games on Steam, transferring the ownership of a Steam app and the Steamworks access to the game from one developer partner to another. And this is surprisingly more common than you think, as this actively goes on in these asset flipping circles, and it seems to be what was at least part of Atomic Fabrik's business model where they sold on some of their apps that they originally owned. It's such a common practice, Steam even have an entry in their Steamworks documentation about transferring applications. So before you ask, no, it's not against Steam TOS to transfer app ownership.

The complicated part about app acquisitions is it makes differentiating when a developer is just renaming themselves for the sake of disassociating themselves from their games or messing with Steam tools etc. vs. a developer genuinely buying a game out very difficult.

However, I am quite confident in saying that in particular with the previously cited 50 or so apps of Atomic Fabrik that these, while they originally were developed by Atomic Fabrik, have since been sold off to other developer partners. Allow me to showcase my rationale for this.


So, with that prior knowledge now conveyed, as I was sending this list to Valve, I did decide to disclose that I am aware that just because a developer's name has changed in SteamDB logs doesn't necessarily equate to the developer has changed their alias, but it could mean that another Steamworks partner has bought the game off the developer off-site or in a private deal.

I then got a response from Valve, and they reiterated this and confirmed that this is very much something that happens. While they didn't confirm nor deny that this was what had been happening in the instance of Atomic Fabrik, they reiterated that it was a correct assurance that just because there had been a name change, it didn't mean the developer was trying to hide their involvement in the title.

Following this email exchange, there was a small ban wave[x.com] that happened, and included was seven of the games that I had sent over to Steam, indicating to me that these apps had been manually reviewed by Valve and they had come to the conclusion that enough Atomic Fabrik ties remained. However, the other 53 remained untouched and available for sale.

Now, to me, my take aways from that were:

• Valve confirmed that app acquisitions and transfers do happen
  
• Valve didn't ignore the list I sent and did still decide to ban a handful of those titles.
  
• It was a conscious decision not to ban those 53 titles - as previously established with Valve cherry picking just the seven specifically. This was neither "these have escaped the net" nor was it negligence on Valve's part.

Just the fact that app acquisitions as a topic was rebounded back to me from the Steam representative, while not fully confirming, I feel heavily implies that this is what's been happening, and that Atomic Fabrik was selling his games off to other developers on Steam in some private deals. And there is further information I've found on some of the Steam pages I got linked which seems to confirm that to me, Atomic Fabrik had been doing dealings with Steam publishers Conglomerate 5, and the publisher who will be the main subject for the remainder of our article: Valkyrie Initiative


Just using the Steam titles at the top of this article, I'm going to take you through a paper trail that I followed with After War Town. After War Town currently only lists publisher Former glory studio, but this was their sole game on Steam.

Navigating to After War Town's discussion forums and to the events and announcements tab, you can see there's only one news post there promoting a game called Skelethrone: The Chronicles of Ericona.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2139840/Skelethrone_The_Chronicles_of_Ericona/

This is a game published by Valkyrie Intiaitve. Now, a lot of users on our forums have noticed this on a few apps but were unsure why this was happening. Unfortunately, Steam removed the author names on News and announcement posts a few updates ago. However, the workaround is if you visit the discussion in particular, you can hit the reply button and quoting the user's text reveals the news post was written by a Steam user known as "coffeemean"

Who is coffeemean you may ask? A quick visit to their Steam profile shows Valkyrie Initiative listed as their primary group. Granted, they don't appear to have any admin privileges there, but they are the ones posting game promos in news feeds not just on some older Atomic Fabrik titles, but also on Valkyrie Initiative games, or well "valkyrieinitiative" games.

Now, you can only post news announcements if you have Steamworks access, and then with that, I think we get a much clearer picture as to what has happened here, and it appears that Atomic Fabrik, before they were banned made a deal with Valkyrie Initiative for them to acquire some of Atomic Fabrik's apps, and that the reason those 30 or so apps weren't banned is because Atomic Fabrik is no longer the owner (I have discounted 20 as we have found they may be with somebody unassociated with Valkyrie Initiative, but that's a story for another time), but are instead owned by Valkyrie Initiative, even though this ownership is not appropriately disclosed on the store page.

But it doesn't stop there, this was the start of the rabbit hole. What if I were to tell you, even though Valkyrie Initiative, according to their store page, only supposedly owning 31 games, were in fact in ownership of almost 400 games?

It's not just Atomic Fabrik titles that Valkyrie Initiative have been buying out, but they also seem to have acquired the entirety of the Conglomerate 5 publisher's catalogue, as well as all bar 4 of the Terro Lunka catalogue.

Again, without changing the names on Steam. This is only shown by news announcements posted by the Valkyrie Initiative representative promoting Valkyrie Inititative games, and you can find these on literally all of the nearly 200 Conglomerate 5 titles, and the vast majority of Terro Lunka games.

The Conglomerate 5 publisher account has not had a new game release since September 2023, with their last release being Journey to Alien Worlds. Do you want to know when Valkyrie Initiative titles started to be cross promoted on Conglomerate 5 games? October 2023, one month after their last game release.

With Tero Lunkka, this appears to be very recent, having just occurred last month. What's important to note and also very key to showing you this is very much indeed an app acquisition is if we compare Terro Lunka's game developer homepage against the search query for their developer name.

You can see that on the homepage, it only lists 4 games, but on the query, it lists 106. Why's there such a wide difference? Well, in the aforementioned Steamworks documentation listing, in the FAQ section, it reads:

Originally posted by Steamworks:

Q. What happens to a game appearing on a Developer or Publisher Homepage when it's been transferred (aka Creator Home pages )?
A. When a transfer is initiated for an appID, the appID will automatically be removed from all Developer or Publisher Homepages that it is currently listed on. Once the transfer is complete, the appID can be listed on the new Developer/Publisher Homepage.

So...Steam automatically remove games from the developer homepages when an app transfer has occurred, but the new homepages need to be assigned manually, which clearly hasn't been done. If you visit the 4 games on Tero Lunkka's homepage, none of them have any ads for Valkyrie Initiative. The only ones that do, are the ones that aren't listed on the homepage. In other words, the one that have been acquired.

Now, in addition, I will also say I received a tip off from a user back in May this year, who claimed to be an insider of Valkyrie Initiative, and they said they weren't able to share all the details, but they stated that Valkyrie Initiative had a scheme at the time to profit off of fake games without tarnishing their brand reputation or flooding their library with bad games. At the time I first received that, I couldn't quite work out what the user was referring to, but with me bearing that in mind and then discovering this just this month, it further fuels the suspicions of this scheme, and adds yet another layer.

Please do, share this article. It's important that this gets known. Valkyrie Initiative are acquiring apps and chosen not to list themselves as the owners, for what appears to be the motivation of to further monetise their scheme while not tarnishing their company's reputation and the seemingly "good" games they list on their main homepage. They are also actively manipulating reviews and deceiving the consumer, as showcased by the Games with Paid Reviews curator. This practice needs to be called out and exposed to the wider community, this publisher is in ownership of almost 400 apps and is only disclosing their involvement with around 30, and review manipulation is shown to be a consistency across all of their titles. Consumers need to know who they're buying games off, and Valkyrie Initiative are showing outright contempt for this.

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https://steamproxy.net/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/4578559379959234051

First of all, apologies that this may be a little shorter than usual. I have a lot of work this week but I still wanted to get an article up this week anyway, so here we are!

Two weeks ago, we spoke about some planned changes Steam were implementing with regards to the store page written descriptions. You can find the article we did on that here. In short, the announcement was mostly welcomed, with one exception, and that was the announcement Steam made in that they were going to stop allowing developers to promote their other titles on store page announcements and in the game description amongst other areas. Basically if you were an indie developer and you had 3 games and you wanted to maybe promote an upcoming release in your description or in the announcements to try and push more traffic to it, this was going to do a number on you. Many indie developers reported that those tactics generate a large volume of traffic and as a result, were very concerned to hear that this change was coming in.

Fast forward August 29th (I'm a bit late to this too!) and Steam appears to have listened to those criticisms, as they made a new announcement on Steamworks entitled "New options for featuring related content on your store page". In it, they address that they heard and understood the criticism coming mainly from developers with regards to announcement and description promotion. Steam however said they weren't going to walk back on it as they wanted to find a good balance for users being able to find relevant information about the games they were viewing without being bombarded with other games, while still allowing developers freedom to promote their games. Steam have addressed this by rolling out a couple of new additions to store pages.

First of all, they're adding a panel to the store page which directly promotes games from the developer, as exemplified here. This area does not feature the DLC from developers, however, that brings us on to the second change that Steam announced.

Second of all, they are now also rolling out an option for developers to feature their DLC to make it clearer to players what the newest DLC release is, or those that are on a sale.

Overall, the response to this change seems very positive. While the first new widget isn't as prevalent as it gets pushed to between the description and the reviews, developers have still seemingly all welcomed the change. Users have also welcomed this change as well and many people in our Discord were even saying that it's one of the best changes that Steam's ever done. And it all came from taking on feedback from the community and listening, so hats off to Steam from me.

Do let me know what you think of this change in the comments. Again, apologies for the short length, but I am strapped for time this week and I just wanted to get something up quick and this was a very convenient topic and a good means to highlight Steam listening to feedback.

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https://steamproxy.net/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/4354502761472444570

Today I wanted to talk about Steam’s new changes to Steam user reviews. This is kind of a part two to my previous article talking about the changes coming to Steam’s store page descriptions as both were announced on the same day.

So, what’s happening to Steam user reviews? Well, on August 14th, Steam released a blog post entitled ‘Update to User Reviews: New Helpfulness System’. Now, again, I’m not going to sit here and just read the blog post out verbatim, but in short, they’re going to be making changes to how Steam sorts user reviews. At the moment, Steam has a helpfulness rating algorithm when it comes to user reviews where it looks at a variety of things. These include how recent the review is, how many users upvoted the review and what the aggregated rating of the game page is. If it’s say 90%, it’ll default show you the 9 most helpful positive reviews and the 1 most helpful negative review, if it’s at 40% it’ll show you 4 positive, 6 negative, you get the idea.

However, unsurprisingly, users don’t just use Steam user reviews to review games. They use it to share memes, jokes, ascii art, and not only that, but those reviews get upvoted and marked as helpful by other users. Steam have decided to act on this and to try and make user reviews more helpful, saying that while those reviews are fine on paper and fun, it doesn’t help new players make an informed purchasing decision.

Steam says that the way they’ll be targeting these reviews is by prioritizing what they call ‘informative reviews’ and an informative review is classed as a review that isn’t just one word, or a meme, or posting ascii art, or isn’t trying to do one of those meme things, like Crikey Cameron . See, I’m in on memes ! Those types of reviews will get filtered behind the informative reviews. How do they detect this? Well, they mention in the FAQ it’s a myriad of different things such as machine learning algorithms, user reports and some manual checks by Steam moderators.

Now I know what a lot of you are thinking, you’re sat there crying yourself to sleep thinking “where can I get my ascii art fix now?” Well don’t worry, because Steam say that if you do want to see those more ‘unhelpful’ types of reviews there is going to be a feature to include them when you’re browsing them.

They do make mention though that those types of reviews will still be taken into account in the aggregated rating of a game, so it’s not like if a review gets marked as a meme review, then that review gets taken out of the equation when Steam calculates a game’s rating, so, to any dodgy developers thinking they can start flagging negative reviews as meme reviews, you’re not going to have much luck there.

Some of you make also be thinking ‘if these reviews aren’t helpful, why aren’t they just deleting them instead, might they quantify as spam in some cases?’ Well Steam also address that, saying that they’ve found players like to express an opinion about the game, but don’t have the words to describe the experience, or aren’t interested in writing, so just the sheer fact they’ve recommended or not recommended a game Steam say is valuable data for them.

So, similar with the Store page description announcement, I went ahead and made a poll, asking both my community and the wider Steam community what their thoughts were on these new changes. The poll showed me that, out of the almost 100 people that responded, 62% thought that it was a positive change, 31% either were unsure, didn’t know or were indifferent, and only 7% thought that it was a negative change.

Those that seem more critical of the system seem to claim that, once this was implemented, apparently it prioritized rising positive reviews more than negative reviews, however other users have rebuked this, so there doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence that this is the case. It seems that the same system I mentioned earlier where it displays 6 positive and 4 negatives for a 60% game still applies.

Personally, I like this change, and I like that users ultimately are given the choice of which system they want to choose, or if they want to hop around and compare, Steam gives them the choice. So, if you’re still wanting to get your fix of Ascii art or memes, then you can still go to the Steam user reviews no bother. If you were sick of those reviews though, then you do now have the option of filtering those out.

The only thing I will say, addressing the elephant of the room with regards to your Obzor esque reviews, while I have been given assurances Steam are still actively investigating games that partake in this kind of review manipulation as shown with the Atomic Fabrik ban, I do suspect that this change will allow for the fake reviews we discussed in our Obzor article to start rising to the top and being more prevalent. So please do keep a watchful eye out, and I'll once again remind you to join the Games With Paid Reviews group and follow their curator. There will be an update in the few weeks where I'll talk more about some developments with the Obzor cases.

What do you guys think, do you think this is a good change? A bad change? Do you not care, please do let me know!

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https://steamproxy.net/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/4201376568915048836

Been a long while since I've done one of these hasn't it? Partly because of my lengthy hiatus of 2022/23 but also partly because there hasn't been too many major changes that have happened on the Steam Store. Well that changed last week as the Steam Team had not one, but two major changes they were bringing about. We're only going to talk about the one for this week, and that is changes to Steam store page descriptions.

I've broken this down into three sections. Firstly I'll describe what these changes are. Then, I'll go into what the wider community response has been to this change and then I'll let you know what my thoughts are.


Steam opened their announcement with the following:

Originally posted by Steam:

Our primary goal with store pages is for developers to be able to provide information about their game in ways that help players make educated purchasing decisions. Recently, we've noticed a trend that makes that experience a bit challenging, with some developers using the space to present information or links that (though often creative) distract from learning about the game itself.

We want players to be able to learn about your game! And so, to make for a more positive experience on Steam (for devs AND players), we're introducing new rules beginning in September.

So the generalised overview is basically Steam have noticed some at times irrelevant information and contents that unnecessarily clog game descriptions and that act as somewhat of a barrier for users to learning about games. What exactly are Steam talking about? Well, they break these down as:

• The presence of links to other websites (including social media websites)
  
• Images that resemble and mimic Steam store UIs and/or buttons (such as gifs that mimic a mouse clicking on the "add to your wishlist button")
  
• Images, links and widgets that are promoting other Steam games

The announcement basically says that, starting in September, none of these features will be allowed in the following areas of a game's store page:

• The "About The Game" section
  
• The "Short Description" section
  
• Any "special Announcement" sections
  
• The "Awards" section

Steam then go on to talk about why they're choosing to implement these rules now. Amongst the reasoning, there are some quite obvious ones such as with regards to no linking to external websites/social media being because there is a designated field for this on the game's store page's side bar, and including these in the game description just clutters an area that's meant to be describing a game. They write:

Originally posted by Steam:

We didn't like the trend of store pages linking prominently off to other store pages.
We have been seeing more and more store pages that are effectively advertisements for OTHER store pages on Steam. This meant that on some game pages in the Steam store, you would find lists of 2, 3, or even 8 other games before you even got to read the description of the game you were looking at. We don't think that's great for customers trying to learn about a game on Steam and so we wanted to update the rules to prohibit games from using the written description area for linking to other games on Steam. However, there is one particular interesting use case of this cross linking that we wanted to continue supporting, which is the 'prologue' scenario.

Conintuing on Steam's talk specifically about "Prologue" games:

Originally posted by Steam:

We saw game developers releasing 'prologue' games on Steam, which was fine except that they were confusing for players.
We've seen developers doing novel things on Steam to help build an audience though a separate app that most call a 'prologue'. In these examples, developers are buying a secondary appID and releasing it as a stand-alone free game to promote the upcoming release of their full premium game. This has been fine with us, but we've seen a few ways that it causes confusion for players and unnecessarily requires devs to pay a second app fee. With a few changes to how demos work, we can replicate the positive benefits of a separate 'prologue' while also creating a tighter connection between the two entities so that customers are clear on how to learn more about the full game and to wishlist the correct thing. The changes already made to demos should make it unnecessary for developers to purchase a separate appID to use for prologues, and can instead use the demo appID that is already associated with their game.

That's 2 out of the 3 points with regards to these changes, and it does appear to mainly be in response to the Prologue games we've seen surface.

Even as of the time of writing, so far in August, there have been 20 Prologue apps released on Steam, and looking back to July around another 27 Prologue apps were released. So it's at a rate where there's roughly one prologue app releasing on Steam/2 days which isn't a large amount, but it'd certainly be enough for avid Steam browsers to start to notice the trend.

Originally posted by Steam:

We have had an outstanding list of improvements that we've wanted to make for demos since they have become a key part of events such as Next Fest.
When we consider the kinds of things that developers have been attempting to accomplish with 'prologue' apps, and with the feedback we've gathered from players and developers about how demos behave on Steam, we ended up with quite a list of improvements we could make to demos that would make a lot of things better for all parties. So, we shipped those updates last month and it seems like everyone is pretty happy with the results (of course we're paying attention to the feedback we're seeing and will be continuing to refine how things work).

Steam close out the announcement with an FAQ. I'm not going to go over all of it here, but rather just a couple of major takeaways for me, those being:

Originally posted by Steam:

Q. Does this mean that "Prologues" are officially banned?
A. We're not banning your ability to name a product as "Prologue" but you'll find that demos have become a much better path for building an audience and directing players to your full game.

Originally posted by Steam:

Q. How do I get visibility for the other games I make?
A. There are a couple options for helping players find other games you make.
You can create bundles of related games, which will appear on the store page for each included game. See Steam Bundles Documentation for more info.
You can set up a franchise page with all the games that take place in the same creative universe. A franchise will appear above your purchase options. See Franchise Documentation for more info.
You can set up a developer or publisher page with all the games made by the same entity. See Developer/Publisher Homepage Documentation for more info.

The reception to this announcement is interesting to me, as it seems that your regular Steam user sees this as a big positive, however some developer responses are mixed with some applauding the move, others reacting with concern and frustration.

To gauge some general feedback, I made a poll on X this week asking what people's responses were to the announcement with me sharing this poll across X, Steam, Discord, Steamworks and Steamgifts. The results found:

• 55.2% of respondents saw the announcement as a positive thing
  
• 25.4% were neutral or indiferent
  
• 19.4% either saw it as a negative thing, or were at the very least concerned about the potential impacts of the announcement

Now, I didn't just want to leave the feedback as some stats and numbers, but I asked peope to respond on their desired social media to elaborate their thoughts further, and I got around 100 responses (some acknowledging they didn't fill in the poll due to an X boycott hence why responses are higher than the voting tally of 67) so this is only going to be some of my personal highlight responses which I feel sum up the general thoughts and feedback people have on this news.

In Support of:

Originally posted by Yamaraus:

I'm for the description and demo changes. I use Steam a lot to find aggregated review thoughts and descriptions of games, and the descriptions have gotten kind of ridiculous.

Originally posted by Matwyn:

The prologues got so annoying. More then 90% (personal estimate) are just demos but you can´t filter them out as such. They just clutter the upcomming and new release games lists. I do not need someone asking me if i am sure the game interstest me multiple times! which this basically does.

Originally posted by PsyKo:

main reason devs said they do that [prologues] was how shitty demos were on Steam. Valve changed demos lately, so there's chance such Prologues will disappear.

Originally posted by Fluffster:

Everything they mention seems like a positive change to me. I wasn't personally confused by prologues but I guess they hit a point where Support was being flooded with "why can't I play the whole game I got for free??" tickets and decided to make the change and I love demos so I'm all for it.

Generally speaking a little formatting is always a good thing on a site with so much information and so many pages to read. It makes it easier to find what you're looking for. As long as it doesn't come at the cost of freedom of expression and this doesn't seem to be too restrictive imo

Originally posted by LunarPriestess:

Oo finally free to play tab will not be full of demos

Mixed/Unsure opinions

There were also some people with mixed thoughts on the subject matter as well:

Originally posted by Adelion:

I mean most of this sounds reasonable and simple enough. Personally, I haven't been on store pages where i noticed this to be an issue. But I don't buy that much to begin with.

The only argument that irritates me is that Steam/Valve claims that developers link to several other store pages first which makes finding information for the actual game more tedious. However, their suggestion is to do bundles and franchise packs instead ...... which has the exact same issue. They are standing at the top of the store page and just push down actual game info.

So, if Steam wants an improvement in that regard, they should make the store page with an in-build tab system. The default is game info and then they can add a second tab "Additional Content" and/or "Bundles". Sure, this might mean that the user will not notice bundle/franchise discounts on first look but I would assume the prior interest of most users is the game information.

Originally posted by Myrsan:

Not against it personally, but I get the criticism by indie devs.
The other games section should be limited, but not be removed completely.
A better solution against the scrolling would have been to add a "More" link at the end of the short description which would take you directly to the long description.
The native social media links are pretty small and boring, even people who are using Steam a lot forgot about them. I'm not a fan of social media, but I get how much new devs rely on it (especially Discord). Thus Valve should offer a better presentation style.
Demos instead of prologue/demo mixture? Gratifying.

Originally posted by AmanoTC:

Sounds reasonable and the new rules are fine with me. They won't impact me or change anything for me at all.

Steam developer YaekoGames sent in a particularly lengthy response which broke it down into looking at it from 2 perspectives. I won't be including the full response but here are some notable sections:

Originally posted by YaekoGames:

My perspective as Customer:

A good change since it forces store pages "to get to the point", which is: informing me about the game I just clicked on.[...]

Games could have bundles, then an Early Access Box, a Demo and additional links added to the store page, announcements, in addition to decorative images, which makes things "not enjoyable" to work through. (Of course, that is a "worst case example", it didnt happen regularly.)

And, I mean, stuff like "dont fake steams buttons" is a no-brainer to forbid, since players Trust steam. (and we all know the shady things that some people tried to pull off on steam.)

My perspective as Creator of Stuff:

Links on the store page were never allowed to begin with, and even something like the Creative Common License at the very end of the store page made the Store Page Review fail.[...]

some relied on the "cross advertising" between un/related games to make their money, but I think: If you rely on that, why are you relying on it?

Any half decent game will sell enough without doing this, or just by using the (legit) tools that Steam already provides.

I also think, that "some doing this" puts pressure on others to also do this, otherwise they will fall behind in terms of visibility.

This "change" (enforcing of existing rules) is one of the cases where Valve stepped in because people "overdid it". Happened a few times in the past, where things got limited (keys, trading cards etc.) because some actors decided that everything valve provides needs to be abused.

Steam developer GraphXGames also with a mixed response to the announcement saying:

Originally posted by GraphXGames:

I can understand banning links that lead outside of Steam or even to other dev's games on Steam, but banning links to own games on Steam is just madness.

The Negatives

A lot of the negative arguments against the announcement was coming from developers who were frustrated that they were now more limited in how they could advertise their games.

Originally posted by YottaTobi:

I think a widget pointing to the next game at the end of the about section is vital for many of us.

GE-0 from the Steam developer and publisher MY.GAMES made also quite a lengthy post that had mixed thoughts but made some quite compelling points arguing against, not that Steam were trying to be tighter on prologues and tidying up Store page descriptions, but disliked how they were going about doing it, stating:

Originally posted by GE-0:

i disagree with the way they're trying to fix this: especially the overall strictness of those changes and the lack of decent alternatives. Dev/pub/franchise pages + bundles aren’t a good enough alternative. Seems more ways to customize the store page is needed, something like showcases for devs, like users have on their profile pages.
Also i'm still waiting for them to clarify some bits: from one side it sounds like all links are prohibited now, but from another it reads as you can still use in-Steam (not external) links if they’re pointing at something related to THIS game. For example still allowing links to announcements[...]and DLCs of that same game would be reasonable, and i think should be technically possible to implement. Then at least i could shove all those extra socials in an announcement and link the announcement on the store page for example. So it's an extra click for the user but less clutter on the store page.

Summary

So in general it seems that there is praise for Valve's intention of wanting to tidy up descriptions, praise for wanting to clean up the prologue games and wanting to migrate them to be demos rather than a standalone app, and both developers and users have cited that the way Steam's means of promoting demos has drastically improved enough that they feel it's in a good state to be able to do this. The reaction to links in the description, and the means of promoting unrelated apps on store pages does seem to have gone down a little worse, especially with developers.


So in general I feel that the majority of these changes particularly the intentions Steam has behind them are good, positive and proactive, with some caveats.

I have seen frustration over prologue apps from users as they were effectively game demos that were getting marketed as games, which I feel Steam was right to point out that this was causing confusion with users. While Steam have said they aren't banning these games, they are now advising developers against this practice which I think is certainly a start and we'll see over the next few months how this change has impacted the releases of those kinds of games.

However, Yaeko points out, if this change is preventing developers from linking to necessary licenses, because it's classed as an off-site link, then that I feel needs to be addressed. These agreements in most cases are compulsory for developers to disclose somewhere, and the description was, I feel, obviously the most appropriate place to paste this. Yaeko even suggests putting a tab in for those where the EULA is often displayed, which I feel is an appropriate suggestion.

The concern raised on promotion of developers' other games I am more mixed on. While on one hand, I can see why Steam would see that as clutter, especially in cases where I've seen these games be linked in announcements that get displayed even before you get to the description. However, Steam's suggested alternatives to this, while on paper I think are good, in execution, I think you and I both know the pages they suggest the developers link those games to instead will get far less traffic than the store pages. I feel why a lot of developers are concerned about this is because while it is clutter, it has worked for a lot of them. There's even been cases where I've been browsing a game and found other games I've purchased because the developer has linked them on their announcement tab, which the perceptive of you will note this is one of the areas Steam are clamping down on cross-promotion on. I think that would be an area I'd say "come on, cut some slack Steam." I do frequently read the announcements that come up on my Steam library, and see announcements of developers of games I've played promoting their next game and checked it out from there. I don't use the developer page because my emails are cluttered enough anyway, so I don't get notified properly when a developer I follow releases a new game. Not only that, but the announcements are visually more appealing and are more eye catching than a plain generic email written by Steam.

Overall, I think this is a good change, with some improvements I would like to see. I think the desire and actions to decrease the amount of prologue games and to try and encourage developers to releases them as demos are good. I think most of the measures to reduce store page clutter (Steam UI buttons in particular) are good. I think in most cases, stopping links being posted to the description is good. However, I'd suggest adding an area where developers can post their additional necessary legal licenses that aren't an EULA should be needed. And plus, the means Steam offer as substitutes, I do agree with the developers that they by no way generate the same results of effective marketing, but I suspect Steam are aware of this and are just choosing to bite that bullet. And I'm actually okay with games being promoted in announcement tabs, what do y'all think?

Comment below and let me know what you think of Steam's latest changes. Are they good, are they bad, do you not care? Do you think we'll see a decrease of Prologue titles? Do you think developers should be allowed to promote their newer released games on their older store pages?

Next week, I'll be doing an article talking about the second bit of news from Steam regarding changes to user reviews. I'll be posting in the comments of this article here as I'll be collecting more input on this change both in a poll and for more detailed thoughts as I have done for this one, so keep an eye out for that!

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