Warning to all HN commenters who are reading this and want to find out what "Vampire Survivors" is - clear your schedule before you try it. Crazy good game that makes you forget about time longer than 30 minute increments.
Yeah, NONE of the big launchers including Steam have really perfected handling your gamesaves. I recommend this freeware to make sure they are backed up:
Even if you have a full computer backup, it is convenient to use this since every dev has a different idea of where the data should go and this collects them all into a single directory.
I tried it, but after a while it started to feel like "Cookie Clicker" where the majority of the time I'm just sitting around waiting for the next DPS upgrade/dopamine hit. Is there more to the game than that or am I just missing something?
Like, there's a whole giant list of challenges. The advice I got was, don't just play a game, always go in with a goal to beat at least one of the challenges. Because opening those up reveals more challenges.
Also it's fun to watch other people play and see what they're up to - Never Nathaniel on YouTube is great.
Survivor.io is a game that completely stole the entire gameplay loop from Vampire Survivors and added garbage mobile game things to it. Vampire Survivors has a lot more, except it's completely (actually completely) free on mobile and only costs 5 bucks on Steam.
You just convinced me to give another mobile game a try. I've tried a lot of them. But either they're free and riddled with ads and in-app transactions or they cost $5 but turn out to be quite boring or not that optimized for casual mobile gaming on the go.
The only downside of VS as a mobile game is that runs last 30 minutes (at the beginning of the game, surviving to the end of the timer is rare, but after you've done some upgrades and know the weapon combos usually you'll make it to the end.)
It works just fine to pause and come back to a run, but well... you won't want to, and all of a sudden you're burning half-hour blocks of time watching the pretty particles flash around the screen.
Really great "podcast game" though. (By which I mean it will occupy your fingers while you listen to something instead of getting distracted by HN or whatever).
Vampire Survivors is probably the best mobile game I've had on my phone since the early 10s, before the massive dump-truck of ad-ridden shovelware buried any hopes that mobile gaming would ever be any good.
It's seriously refreshing to see the way they approached turning their game into a viable mobile product. No bullshit, but there are two (completely optional) ways to watch ads for some in game reward. You can watch an ad for a free revive after a run, or to get some bonus gold at the end of a run.
I took advantage of the free revive a few times, but the game itself eventually obviates the need for this (there are various ways to get extra lives in-game). I don't bother with the extra gold as it feels unnecessary.
Either way, I spent quite a few pleasant hours over the Christmas break listening to podcasts while fighting the undead hordes. Vampire Survivors is far more fun that it has any right to be for what it is. Hope they continue to sell well and add to the game.
The Vampire Survivor game loop isn't terribly novel.
There's more to a good game than just the core loop. If I had a dollar for every game loop I've come up with that was also used by an actually successful game, I'd have like over $10.
There's art, music, level design, gameplay balancing, etc that all go into it.
The core loop just kind of defines the type of game you're making.
I'll be honest, Vampire Survivors didn't really click with me. Maybe I'm just bad at it -- I can't seem to beat the first stage, and progress through permanent upgrades and unlocks is very slow. If I don't find garlic as my first weapon I may as well just quit and start over, but garlic starts to suck a third of the way through, so ...
Amazing how a company that treats its customers respectfully, gives them what they want, avoids the usual corporate scandals and just keeps steadily delivering the goods year after year can be successful.
Yup. My steam account is old enough to vote and it's never even crossed my mind to go elsewhere (exception: Good Old Games for older or self published games). The Epic Store is never going to earn my loyalty due their exclusivity deals.
Nor should it be. Many of my friends handed over their steam accounts to their preteen sons. (As useless as those age gates really are being a separate discussion).
I think lootboxes should be regulated like gambling, but the way Valve implemented them was not as bad as what the industry at large has done.
1. Loot was cosmetic or a "sidegrade" of items that could be obtained through other means (especially TF2). That is, not pay-to-win.
2. Loot boxes and their contents can be sold on the marketplace, so there are opportunities to make your money back if you get a $400 item. You can also sell the boxes themselves without paying for keys. Free Steam credit for everybody.
That's like blaming Edgar Alan Poe for trashy modern emo slam poetry. Those were innocent times when the innate evil of the loot box was not yet known. Valve abandoned them when the truth of what they were tampering with became clear. I am willing to forgive so long as they do not return to the dark arts.
At least those boxes have possible resale value. And actually just keeping them unopened have not been bad monetary gains. Some of the oldest ones have stupid resale prices at this point.
But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company. Concurrent players & logged in users growing, with more and more gamers around the world and covid as a catalyst over the last years is probably not a good sole indicator. Those are growing for everybody, just compare them to Roblox alone.
I'd say maybe a better one could be pretty much every publisher returning or rumoured to return soon - but that could also just mean better deals for them and Valve also not making more money.
Besides that, doesn't seem all sunshine at Valve either. There were reports of a hostile work environment in the past, among other things supposedly due to the ego-fuelling bonus structure.
When Alyx arrived GabeN talked about how they'll ship two more big VR titles soon-ish, which didn't happen and which supposedly are at least on hold. We at least know that they currently work on a non-vr game called Neon Prime right now and that might or might not ship soon.
The Dota 2 and especially the CSGO community wishes for more communication and updates for their games. The Source 2 update for CSGO has more people coping now than HL3.
They let games like Artifact and Underlords just die. Especially Artifact, with being a buy-to-play title where you additionally had to buy the cards for additional real money, had quite some controversies around the game and how Valve handled everything.
At least in CSGO the esports scene is also not happy either with how Valve ignores and handles cheat & fraud cases half-assed. Their own anti-cheat in CSGO is also still shit.
They also face a more competitive environment now than possibly ever before. There are other game stores/fronts like Epic's and Activision's, and the console giants are coming for a piece of their pie (Xbox Game pass and Sony's equivalent). There's also the ever-looming risk that Apple decides to go after their market with Apple TV/iOS somehow.
If I was an executive at Valve, I'd probably be happy with the current success, but nervous for the future.
Nothing of this is "new competition" though, and the threat from console gaming was arguably much bigger in the past, yet so far Steam has weathered all storms pretty well. There are now more ports from Xbox and PS to PC than ever before that would have been exclusives in the past (e.g. Sony 1st party titles like God of War, ten years ago something like this would "hell freezing over territory").
Apple's paying a bit more attention to gaming these days, but I don't think they'll ever release an Apple TV that performs better than a midrange phone.
If they really wanted to make a big push into gaming they could; they certainly have the gazillions for it. Make a more powerful Apple TV, invest a billion into game dev studios to target MacOS and iOS, either make Apple Arcade free or beef it up for the same price. I just feel like they would've done this by now if they were ever going to.
They faced Origin and won. I'm not sure about Ubisoft, but I think some of their games are available without using a non-steam launcher. Doesn't mean they'll win but their record is pretty good.
It probably helps a lot that it's still not a publicly traded company. Steam can prioritize long-term profits and doesn't have to squeeze out its user base for every last penny. Counter example: Activision/Blizzard.
I lost respect for Valve after they discovered cash cows that are Dota and CS:GO skins, hired economists to hyper-optimize milking their customer base and subsequently abandoned making good single-player games like they used to. Their greed culminated in an "Artifact" which flopped hard in large part due to its monetization model.
It's an odd metric: all it really tells us is how many people "have a game fired up", a context in which 10 million people is basically nothing compared to how many people were actually playing games over the weekend, as well as how many people's computers with steam installed are currently on and connected to the internet, again a context in which 32 million is basically nothing.
Do these numbers actually give some kind of insights, or are they just the metrics equivalent of trivia?
Apparently it's the highest number in Steam history, meaning active user numbers have been growing, not shrinking. That at least should put the decades old meme to rest that "PC gaming is dead" ;)
Getting your hands on a graphics cards hasn't been easy in the past ~2 years either but I suppose it was still easier to get a hold of some PC (a laptop perhaps) that can run less demanding games than say, a PS5.
OEM prebuilts (Dell, Alienware, HP, etc.), while a waste of good GPUs, were somewhat available during that period. Some self-builders were turning to buy those, just to get the GPU out of them. New PC gamers would have been able to at least back-order a prebuilt PC, versus playing the indefinite refresh lottery for a console.
PS5s were always available, just at a scalping premium that could be several hundred dollars. $800 for a PS5 is probably (arguably?) a better deal than an $800 laptop, which would have trouble playing relatively modern titles well. At least if your only goal was playing games.
The question was whether a desperate gamer on a budget could get their hands on something to play games with. I'm assuming that mobility isn't a concern, and so isn't relevant to the comparison. Obviously a laptop has benefits that a PS5 doesn't offer, but then so does a desktop computer.
Yes, but mobility brings additional constraints on performance that desktop computer does not provide - simply because of focus on battery life and power performance.
Consoles are optimized for the job they are doing, so pick a PC that is optimized too.
Shitty? I would say those are relatively best consoles ever - cool, silent, and finally have fast SSDs. PS4 was a jet engine, and was extremely underpowered - it's graphics were already obsolete at launch. "Pro" version launched already three years after original one.
The supply chain stuff is real though and really hampered the adoption and prevalence of current-gen games.
If you could get hands on them, they've been best gaming "investment" you could make, compared to GPU prices.
What useful insights these stats can provide depends on what question you’re trying to answer with what other data you can publicly get, combine, and estimate from. Internally Steam keeps very detailed playtime-by-game-by-user stats but as for what’s aggregated and published publicly you just get the stats the article talks about which leads to it being the best way to monitor growth/activity. It’s been a while since Valve publicly reported MAU but I think it was something like 130 million in 2021.
Steam APIs used to report achievement statistics float-accurate. This was patched once people started using it to estimate game sales based on “launch the game” type achievements. Not sure how many data holes like this have existed. The flip to your game stats being private by default also limited scraping abilities.
They also give samples hardware stats of their user base publicly by month but that doesn’t really tell you much about the platform. Cool for other things though (mainly intended for developers to understand what the user base has).
I agree that it's a meaningless number by itself. The interesting part for me was seeing that the number of connected users went up by 50% over pandemic, from 20M to 30M. Given that Steam was pretty mature at that point, that's a big jump. Presumably it was due to quarantine. But it's also interesting that nobody is really in quarantine right now, so breaking that record means they've just grown quite a bit despite already being very large. The games they're playing are (mostly) not new either, so this just reflects a massive growth in the platform qua platform over the last couple years.
It looks surprisingly low initially but I don't think it actually is. 10 million people, that is 1 in 800 of the world population. You sleep eight hours, that makes it 1 in 533 of all people awake. Then we have to divide out the part of the world population lacking the means to use Steam, Internet usage alone seems to be about 5 out of 8 according to the numbers a quick search turned up. This brings us down to 1 in 333 at most, their might however be a correlation between Internet users and being awake. Then we have console gaming vs PC gaming even though streaming and handhelds might make this a bit fuzzy. An older number I found says 1 in 3 are playing on a PC, dropping us to 1 in 111. And people of course do many other things besides playing games including not playing games at all, but it gets progressively harder for me to come up with realistic numbers and more and more correlations will make just multiplying fractions more and more wrong, so I will leave it a that.
As primarily a Steam user it always surprises me how low the platform counts are in the grand scheme of things. In particular with Steam setting itself to auto launch by default I never would have guessed the peak in game stat would peak as high as 1/3 peak logged in if I didn’t see it. Even given that though the peak concurrent player count for all of Steam is less than 2x that of Roblox alone! I always keep Steam stats as a personal example of needing to verify what you feel you know about something with actual numbers.
Agreed! To me and all the gamers I know, Steam (and consoles) is gaming, whereas cell phone games are that scammy market full of skinner boxes, ads, and deliberately broken games designed to milk you for money. I never would have guessed that most of the world disagrees, and cell phone game sales are probably 10x the revenue of Steam game sales.
As much as us nerds would like to think otherwise, PC gaming is, and will always be, a niche market. The average person simply does not even consider it. Computers are for work, and games are something you do on your phone or a console for the overwhelming majority of people. It's why tethered VR will never be a mainstream thing, and why Carmack was so adamant about the Quest.
Plus, a gaming PC is a pretty significant investment in both time and money. Selecting parts and doing the build+software setup takes a bit of time and energy, it's far more work than just going to a store and buying a console. Plus, it takes up quite a bit more space, since it basically needs a dedicated desk.
That's simply far too much effort and hassle for many people, which is why I totally understand why pc gaming is a niche.
I think it's also a bit different compared to 10-15+ years ago. At least then, if you were someone in their teens through 30's, chances are - if you had a computer - that computer was a desktop computer. If you already have some random Dell or HP sitting in your bedroom or office, it's a bit less of a stretch to imagine the average person going out and buying a nicer GPU and maybe a bit of RAM for $300-500 bucks.
But with the move to mobile/laptops this becomes a choice between spending that cash on an Xbox and some extra controllers, or buying a whole separate computer.
I love playing on a PC (looks great on my TV!) but I can't say it would be an easy purchase if I didn't already use a fairly powerful desktop PC for other things as well.
Even if you already have a desktop for some reason adding a GPU is a much more significant expense these days and with greatly increased power requirements can potentially require a new PSU too. I can't see the market expanding a whole lot when a GPU to do PS5 level performance costs about the same as an entire PS5.
PC games are a $40 billion / year business. In comparison, console games are $50 billion / year. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that just one of those is a niche market, given how close the numbers are.
Sure, but by the same measure around 75% would be split between PC and mobile. Does the that make consoles (in aggregate) niche?
If not, why is that tiny difference decisive? And why do consider consoles as an aggregate unit? They are multiple balkanized, mutually incompatible platforms, each significantly smaller than the PC market.
(Not saying that consoles aren't mainstream. But it is really hard to make an objective case for why the niche-ness of the two would be different.)
I sometimes have this reaction, and then I reflect that Steam is still a niche that might have peaked long ago given most of the top 10 played games are really old in gaming terms.
The top 2 currently most played games were first released ten years ago.
If that's the state of gaming then that's a damning indictment of the last 10 years of gaming releases. I'd wager the top 10 are currently as old as they've ever been.
Either games have got worse, gaming as a whole has stagnated, or people are playing things which aren't on steam.
Between the "xbox live" store thing, the epic store, etc, we're seeing a fragmentation of store-fronts which likely also contributes especially since Steam is the only one that's actually open about their stats.
You also have developers like Riot and Blizzard also doing their own thing.
For "live service" games like Diablo, Valorant, or indeed Roblox, a store-front like steam doesn't feel as important because it's not all about initial sales and indeed cut-price discounts aren't how the games are sold, with in-game-purchases dominating.
This leaves Steam to cater for the single-player market, but given the discrepancy in hours played between even the single player games I've enjoyed the most and the online service games, I can understand why the latter have vastly higher concurrents.
> The top 2 currently most played games were first released ten years ago. If that's the state of gaming then that's a damning indictment of the last 10 years of gaming releases.
The card game that I play the most with my friends is Skat, a 150-year-old German card game. If that's the state of card gaming, then that's a damning indictment of the last 150 years of card gaming releases.
Snark aside, your comment is missing the point that raw playtime is not the mark of an impactful game. Some of the most memorable games can be really short to medium length with little replayability (like Journey at 2 hours, Superliminal at 2-3 hours, or Outer Wilds at 25-30 hours). Compared to that, a competitive multiplayer game like CS:GO (or Skat, see above) has near infinite replayability, so it's easy for a single player to rack up 1000s of hours of playtime.
I had the wrong impression of Steam this whole time.
I tried it for the first time recently. I attempted to play Bioshock. It was a game I never got to play fully when it came out. I couldn’t get it to launch at first. Had to read forums and make tweaks to the game installation files to get it to launch.
I had the impression that Steam was a gaming platform that ran in its own system. That any game that was available on Steam was tested and would just work. I had the impression is was like an Xbox platform or something. I thought these games also worked on Linux and that was also part of the appeal? I tried it on Windows though.
I’m sure newer games work fine. However, the appeal to me was to play some games I didn’t get a chance to play and be able to install and play without all the fuss. I have an Xbox and can get these games used, so not the end of the world.
All the paid bots here.
Steam is a POS, it's an autocratic platform where you cant resell the games you bought, where you can't criticize without getting banned, where you have 0 rights as a customer.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadhttps://www.gamesave-manager.com/
Even if you have a full computer backup, it is convenient to use this since every dev has a different idea of where the data should go and this collects them all into a single directory.
Like, there's a whole giant list of challenges. The advice I got was, don't just play a game, always go in with a goal to beat at least one of the challenges. Because opening those up reveals more challenges.
Also it's fun to watch other people play and see what they're up to - Never Nathaniel on YouTube is great.
It works just fine to pause and come back to a run, but well... you won't want to, and all of a sudden you're burning half-hour blocks of time watching the pretty particles flash around the screen.
Really great "podcast game" though. (By which I mean it will occupy your fingers while you listen to something instead of getting distracted by HN or whatever).
We'll see how long it grabs my attention.
It's seriously refreshing to see the way they approached turning their game into a viable mobile product. No bullshit, but there are two (completely optional) ways to watch ads for some in game reward. You can watch an ad for a free revive after a run, or to get some bonus gold at the end of a run.
I took advantage of the free revive a few times, but the game itself eventually obviates the need for this (there are various ways to get extra lives in-game). I don't bother with the extra gold as it feels unnecessary.
Either way, I spent quite a few pleasant hours over the Christmas break listening to podcasts while fighting the undead hordes. Vampire Survivors is far more fun that it has any right to be for what it is. Hope they continue to sell well and add to the game.
There's more to a good game than just the core loop. If I had a dollar for every game loop I've come up with that was also used by an actually successful game, I'd have like over $10.
There's art, music, level design, gameplay balancing, etc that all go into it.
The core loop just kind of defines the type of game you're making.
Now the discussion shifts to what Magic Survival ripped off. Probably some "modern" roguelike like Risk of Rain but top down and with auto aim.
Steam had one job. And it did it well.
Is there a secret voting mechanism on Steam that I'm not familiar with? Mine is 10 years old so I hope that it would get access to it :D
1. Loot was cosmetic or a "sidegrade" of items that could be obtained through other means (especially TF2). That is, not pay-to-win.
2. Loot boxes and their contents can be sold on the marketplace, so there are opportunities to make your money back if you get a $400 item. You can also sell the boxes themselves without paying for keys. Free Steam credit for everybody.
To phrase this difference (and hopefully less ambiguously)
All items, other than cosmetic-only items are obtainable via relatively reasonable gameplay.
You can purchase non-cosmetic items, and you can purchase (lootbox gamble for) otherwise non-obtainable items.
I did not get Half-Life 3 yet.
But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company. Concurrent players & logged in users growing, with more and more gamers around the world and covid as a catalyst over the last years is probably not a good sole indicator. Those are growing for everybody, just compare them to Roblox alone.
I'd say maybe a better one could be pretty much every publisher returning or rumoured to return soon - but that could also just mean better deals for them and Valve also not making more money.
Besides that, doesn't seem all sunshine at Valve either. There were reports of a hostile work environment in the past, among other things supposedly due to the ego-fuelling bonus structure.
When Alyx arrived GabeN talked about how they'll ship two more big VR titles soon-ish, which didn't happen and which supposedly are at least on hold. We at least know that they currently work on a non-vr game called Neon Prime right now and that might or might not ship soon.
The Dota 2 and especially the CSGO community wishes for more communication and updates for their games. The Source 2 update for CSGO has more people coping now than HL3.
They let games like Artifact and Underlords just die. Especially Artifact, with being a buy-to-play title where you additionally had to buy the cards for additional real money, had quite some controversies around the game and how Valve handled everything.
At least in CSGO the esports scene is also not happy either with how Valve ignores and handles cheat & fraud cases half-assed. Their own anti-cheat in CSGO is also still shit.
If I was an executive at Valve, I'd probably be happy with the current success, but nervous for the future.
If they really wanted to make a big push into gaming they could; they certainly have the gazillions for it. Make a more powerful Apple TV, invest a billion into game dev studios to target MacOS and iOS, either make Apple Arcade free or beef it up for the same price. I just feel like they would've done this by now if they were ever going to.
Do these numbers actually give some kind of insights, or are they just the metrics equivalent of trivia?
Otherwise, I agree that consoles have best bang for buck now.
Consoles are optimized for the job they are doing, so pick a PC that is optimized too.
Besides those, I only need Factorio and that runs on my work macbook.
The supply chain stuff is real though and really hampered the adoption and prevalence of current-gen games.
If you could get hands on them, they've been best gaming "investment" you could make, compared to GPU prices.
Steam APIs used to report achievement statistics float-accurate. This was patched once people started using it to estimate game sales based on “launch the game” type achievements. Not sure how many data holes like this have existed. The flip to your game stats being private by default also limited scraping abilities.
They also give samples hardware stats of their user base publicly by month but that doesn’t really tell you much about the platform. Cool for other things though (mainly intended for developers to understand what the user base has).
I am a happy user of Steam compared to pretty much all the other similar services that exists.
That's simply far too much effort and hassle for many people, which is why I totally understand why pc gaming is a niche.
But with the move to mobile/laptops this becomes a choice between spending that cash on an Xbox and some extra controllers, or buying a whole separate computer.
I love playing on a PC (looks great on my TV!) but I can't say it would be an easy purchase if I didn't already use a fairly powerful desktop PC for other things as well.
If not, why is that tiny difference decisive? And why do consider consoles as an aggregate unit? They are multiple balkanized, mutually incompatible platforms, each significantly smaller than the PC market.
(Not saying that consoles aren't mainstream. But it is really hard to make an objective case for why the niche-ness of the two would be different.)
The top 2 currently most played games were first released ten years ago.
If that's the state of gaming then that's a damning indictment of the last 10 years of gaming releases. I'd wager the top 10 are currently as old as they've ever been.
Either games have got worse, gaming as a whole has stagnated, or people are playing things which aren't on steam.
Between the "xbox live" store thing, the epic store, etc, we're seeing a fragmentation of store-fronts which likely also contributes especially since Steam is the only one that's actually open about their stats.
You also have developers like Riot and Blizzard also doing their own thing.
For "live service" games like Diablo, Valorant, or indeed Roblox, a store-front like steam doesn't feel as important because it's not all about initial sales and indeed cut-price discounts aren't how the games are sold, with in-game-purchases dominating.
This leaves Steam to cater for the single-player market, but given the discrepancy in hours played between even the single player games I've enjoyed the most and the online service games, I can understand why the latter have vastly higher concurrents.
The card game that I play the most with my friends is Skat, a 150-year-old German card game. If that's the state of card gaming, then that's a damning indictment of the last 150 years of card gaming releases.
Snark aside, your comment is missing the point that raw playtime is not the mark of an impactful game. Some of the most memorable games can be really short to medium length with little replayability (like Journey at 2 hours, Superliminal at 2-3 hours, or Outer Wilds at 25-30 hours). Compared to that, a competitive multiplayer game like CS:GO (or Skat, see above) has near infinite replayability, so it's easy for a single player to rack up 1000s of hours of playtime.
What is the point of running your pc 24/7 through the year for some marginal or not so marginal gains not really mattering at all.
Then again I doubt that it is anyway major part of the community on Steam.
I tried it for the first time recently. I attempted to play Bioshock. It was a game I never got to play fully when it came out. I couldn’t get it to launch at first. Had to read forums and make tweaks to the game installation files to get it to launch.
I had the impression that Steam was a gaming platform that ran in its own system. That any game that was available on Steam was tested and would just work. I had the impression is was like an Xbox platform or something. I thought these games also worked on Linux and that was also part of the appeal? I tried it on Windows though.
I’m sure newer games work fine. However, the appeal to me was to play some games I didn’t get a chance to play and be able to install and play without all the fuss. I have an Xbox and can get these games used, so not the end of the world.
If that's great for you then you're a sucker.