At the end of each year, Steam likes to take the time to assess the work accomplished over the past twelve months and to plan for the future. This is an informal internal process and normally the platform does not communicate on this sort of thing.
“But when we started to look back on the work we did on Steam in 2018, we realized that not everything was visible to our partners. So this year we thought it would be interesting to share some of this information with you. "
Shop
“You might not remember it (or maybe you do), but Steam's first two years were pretty tough. We only had a very sketchy client, a way for users to buy games and servers to deliver those bits (most of the time). Flashback to 2018: The challenges we faced for this year alone were way beyond what we could have imagined when we first launched the store. We were faced with the reality of what an open platform means, as we are committed to building it. Ninety million people visit Steam every month. The store must therefore be dynamic enough to meet a diverse set of interests and give games created by developers, large or small, a chance to find their audience.
So we made the list of upcoming releases more useful, expanded our content filtering tools to support adult content (and make sure only people who wanted to see it see it), put restrictions in place to handle fake games and removed (and we continue to do so) the “troll” developers. We have worked on all the features for the Steam curators, which provide users with alternative approaches to the store from people they trust. We have added home pages for developers and publishers, so that you can have a space on Steam where customers can browse your games and be notified when you release new games. And to help you better understand the inner workings of the store, we've updated the tools that allow you to analyze navigation traffic relating to your games.
In addition to dealing with the increase in content, we have made improvements to the wish list, and made game pages richer by allowing you to integrate Steam broadcasts or Animated gifs (it's official !).
Beyond the more visible new features and improvements, we've made Steam more accessible to players around the world. We (finally) added the Australian dollar to all 40 available currencies. We continued to monitor currency fluctuations, as in the case of the turkish lira and we've updated some suggested regional pricing where applicable, to keep games affordable in those regions. We've added dozens of payment service providers, bringing the total number of supported providers to over 100 (including HappyMoney in South Korea). We also launched Steam Wallet Cards in Japan and Poland. We therefore now accept cash payments in 45 countries. And we added Latin American Spanish and Vietnamese to the list of 26 languages supported in the Steam client. "
Steam community
“The biggest Steam community feature set we released in 2018 revolved around the redesign of the Steam chat, which aimed to provide users with everything one would expect from a modern chat program. This update brought a lot of featuresincluding a vastly improved group chat, a more flexible friend list, a deeper and more detailed enriched presence, and a completely rewritten voice chat system that uses WebRTC over our private network (which provides a voice chat experience safer and better quality). We then combined much of the Steam chat technology with the Steam broadcast to release a first version of the Steam TV that we tested during The International and with Artifact at PAX. "
“As with any major online hangout, discussions within the Steam community sometimes escalate into disagreements that poison the mood. It can be difficult to strike a balance between letting players talk to each other freely and making sure the discussions don't escalate and get out of hand. So we built other moderation tools and created a team dedicated to moderation to ensure that your gaming forums remain healthy; and to handle reports of harassment and user-generated content. Since we started moderating gaming forums at the end of September, our team has received 113 reports, most of which were resolved in less than a day. The team also reviewed 290 user-generated content reports across all gaming community hubs (332 million pieces of content were posted last year).
And because the community around a game can be quite large, sometimes there is content that may be inappropriate for a larger audience. For example, suppose someone installs a mod for your game that “re-imagines” your characters and turns them into adult content. Hardcore fans may find that it does not respect the spirit of the game or is not appropriate for a consultation at work. Some customers may well not want to see such a screenshot on your game's community page, while other people may be okay with it. So we took advantage of Google's Vision API and Amazon Rekognition (yes, it really spells like that) to identify inappropriate images and blur them by default (customers can still deactivate this feature).
We also worked on other features. For example, we gave users more control over their privacy settings, we have complied with the rules set out in the GDPR, and made it easier to add friends. We have also organized events to bring the community together like the Big spring cleaning, Saliens game during the summer sales, the extremely cozy house for winter sales and Steam Awards annual. "
Other ways to play
“In August, we released a new version of the Steam play. This feature allows customers to purchase a game once and play it on any supported OS. With the latest update, Linux users can now play many Steam games that previously only worked on Windows, without requiring additional development work from the developers. We first launched a beta version, which supported around 3 games, but the community quickly got down to testing which games might work, and discovered over 400 compatible games (we are a little over careful before adding games to the official whitelist, as even small differences will fail our compatibility tests). We want to make it easy for you to support the different platforms your customers prefer to play on. This is why we have continued to invest in Vulkan and builds features like the shader caching.
Using a controller as opposed to a keyboard and mouse is an increasingly widespread of playing games. Our latest statement indicates that 36,7 billion video gamers worldwide. used a controller to play a game on Steam. It is largely for this reason that we have continued to work on Steam Input, which now supports more than 300 devices, including the controller Nintendo Switch Pro (and dance mats!). If you have integrated Steam Input, your game will support all of these devices without any additional work on your part. "
“In 2018, we continued to improve and evolve the high-end PC VR experience in a number of ways. We have introduced you SteamVR Input, which provides an abstraction layer over the inputs for developers, so you don't have to worry about all the different types of controllers SteamVR supports (we've also updated the SteamVR Unity plugin to support SteamVR Input). We then released SteamVR Skeletal Input, which allows VR controllers to capture the posture of the user's hands as precisely as their sensors allow, and transfer it to VR applications as an animation data stream that developers can use to animate the hands of the user's avatar and allow him to interact in the virtual world with his hands. And in November, we published the smoother movement of SteamVR, which allows more gamers on more different PCs to enjoy high-fidelity VR games and experiences. When SteamVR sees that an application will not support the frame rate (there is a loss of frames), the movement smoother comes into play. The process is as follows: we look at the last two images displayed, we estimate movement and animation and we extrapolate a new image.
We've updated SteamVR Home several times, and we've added the ability to spawn new Steam panels and the ability for content creators to use resource packs to personalize their environments (long live the reuse of content!). And we've released a lot of content for SteamVR Home as well, including collectibles from games like Moss et Skyrim VR, and environments like super-villain lair straight out of Team Fortress 2,the candy store (Candy Emporium) and Winter peak.
We have also updated the app Steam Link to run on Android and Raspberry Pi, and to let customers stream and play your games on their big screen TVs or small phones. "
More Steamworks Features
“In 2018, the Steam Inventory Service, the technology that makes it possible to create permanent objects for games like PUBGWas update. Now all games on Steam can have items with unique and dynamic properties. This means that, with a few simple configuration scripts, you can implement things like flaming purple hats that keep traces left by headshots. We take care of everything else. Also, 3,8 billion items were created last year between all the games that used the Steam inventory service (surprisingly, it wasn't just hats).
We also took into consideration what we learned about mitigation of denial of service attacks with our own games and made it available for multiplayer games on Steam. And since you publish your games on multiple platforms, we made the library open source GameNetworkingSockets[github.com] and Steam independent. The Steam version of your game can take advantage of our private network and get the same DoS protection as Dota 2 or CS: GO. This means that we will relay all of your game's network traffic, keeping the IP addresses of your game servers and clients anonymous and safe from script kiddies. In the coming year, we plan to allow you to use our private network for the non-Steam version of your game as well. "
Behind the scenes
“In 2018, we did a lot of infrastructure work. For example, we did a major upgrade to the Solr servers which are responsible for store research, user reviews, and the Steam Workshop. We have continued to work on our disaster recovery plan so that Steam does not sink if our main data center is hit by a meteorite. We deployed new SQL servers, now with 2,7 petabytes of FAST SSD storage, to match the 1,7 billion trading cards issued, 488 million transactions completed, 245 million emoticons created and the 218 million screenshots posted last year.
Since 2015, we have been building and operating our own global private network. We are partnering with leading internet companies around the world to build this network, which connects directly to over 28 regional and local networks in 000 cities in 28 different countries. This private network allows us to distribute games and transmit high-speed, low-latency game and voice chat data, as well as other data, to users in over 21 countries. The capacity limit of our network is now 229 Tbit / s, and it is increasing by 12% year after year. We sent over 50 exabytes (15 billion gigabytes) of data to our customers in 15. By comparison, total internet traffic in 2018 (the year Steam launched) is estimated at 2003 exabytes. "
“We have improved security across all Steam websites which are now all HTTPS-only. We also launched a bug bounty program with Hackeron[hackerone.com] in May, to help reduce and address security issues quickly. To date, we have paid more than $ 471 to security researchers who help us keep our platform secure.
In May 2017, we talked about the state of Steam Support and our efforts to improve it. We then made public some statistics related to requests for assistance as part of our commitment to create a better customer service experience. In 2018, Steam Support handled over 44 million support requests created by both customers and game developers. And it's not just about requests for assistance; in 2018, our audit team processed 46 audit requests, played 200 games (or DLCs), and reviewed 11 store pages.
We have paid nearly 10 partners over the past twelve months, of which 000 were new to our platform. We also have modified the Steamworks distribution agreementto reward games that reach certain revenue levels on Steamworks, and also to make it clear that you can share your game sales data however you want.
We also paid 1 Workshop contributors for the approximately 668 new items that were released in 4 different games in 700. The Steam Workshop is now used in almost 16 games, with almost 2018 million items. downloaded for the past year alone.
We have accumulated a lot of miles with our trips to more than 35 cities around the world: from Level Up![levelupkl.com] in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia at Indigo[www.dutchgamegarden.nl] organized by Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht, The Netherlands, we have met thousands of partners at events and conferences to answer questions and receive feedback on the Steam platform. "
2019 and beyond
“Having this kind of retrospective helps us as a team because it helps us better understand what we've been up to and choose which direction to take. While we feel like we've accomplished a lot in 2018, we still have a lot to do, features to develop, and tough issues to solve. Here's a look at some of the most important things we plan to deliver this year:
- Store Visibility: We're working on a new, machine-learning-based recommendation engine that lets players play games based on their personal tastes. However, algorithms are only part of our solution to getting people to experience games. We're building more curation and delivery features, and we're constantly re-evaluating the overall store design.
- Steam in China: We've partnered with Perfect World to make Steam available in China as well. We will give you more details on this in the coming months.
- Steam Library Update: We will be making some long overdue changes to the Steam client, including a reworked Steam library built on the technology we used for Steam chat.
- New Event System: We are in the process of updating the Steam Community Event System, which will allow you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, broadcasts or weekly challenges.
- SteamTV: To support all games, we are going to expand the Steam TV beyond simply broadcasting specific tournaments and special events.
- Steam Chat: We're launching a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends wherever you are.
- Steam Trust: The technology behind CS: GO's Trust Factor-based matchmaking is being updated and will become a Steam-specific feature that will be available for all games. This means that you will have more information that will help you determine the likelihood of a player being a cheater.
- The Steam PC Café program: We are officially launching a new PC Café program for gamers to have a great experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of Internet cafes around the world. "