A comprehensive guide to help Steam remain competitive in the modern gaming landscape.

[FOXDUDE69]

Hello, everyone!

Like many of you, I love Steam and I want to see it remain successful in the future.
There are many wonderful guides on Steam but they are typically meant to help players, so I think it's about time someone makes a guide to help Valve.

Let's Start!



𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓-𝐒𝐔𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐃 𝐀𝐂𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐒

You can't technically make an account for a child under 13 on Steam.

Meanwhile all of Steam's biggest competitors allow you to create a parent-supervised child account for your offspring.

This includes the Epic Games Store, where my offspring are already building a significantly large library of free games and enjoying matches of FORTNITE with their dad, while at the same time not being allowed to play RAFT on Steam with their dad because they haven't reached the arbitrary age of 13 despite the fact that they've been gaming since they were toddlers.

Since they aren't allowed to have an account, the only games they can play with me on Steam are shared screen or split screen games, both types of games that, let's be frank here, are more comfortably enjoyed though Playstation/Xbox on our 75" TV (Steam link introduces lag and visual artifacts so that's not a real solution).

What all of this is guaranteeing is that the vast majority of their childhood gaming memories will be dominated by consoles and the Epic Games Store.

The Epic Games Store already has the future advantage here, due to the fact that they've captured the attention of the next generation of gamers with the insane popularity of FORTNITE, a generation of gamers without an ounce of loyalty towards Valve like the Counter Strike generation had, and this backwards policy of only allowing children over 13 to create accounts is further increasing the advantage they'll have in the future.

When a child can have an Epic account stacked with hundreds of good free games and making countless, priceless childhood memories on their platform long before they are even allowed to make a Steam account (6 more years until my oldest is allowed to have an account), Valve is just letting Epic race by them while they are stuck in reverse.

Lastly, developers that lock their games to Steam are leaving money on the table because of this nonsense, too. The aforementioned RAFT has no ESRB or PEGI rating, but Subnautica is very similar in the type of content it features and it has a ESRB of 10+ and PEGi 7.

So if RAFT was on Epic or Playstation these developers would have made additional sales from parents of children 7 and up. Instead, and because RAFT is locked to Steam, these children are not technically allowed to own a game that's appropriate for their age. It's an absurd situation.



𝐑𝐄𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐏𝐎𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐎𝐅𝐅𝐄𝐑 𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐋𝐎𝐘𝐀𝐋𝐓𝐘 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐌

Another thing that Valve is sorely lagging behind is with their laughably inferior loyalty program.

Yes, it's fun to customize your profile with some silly stuff but it doesn't hold a candle to using points to redeem actual games like you can on Playstation, Nintendo and even the Epic Games Store now.

The Steam points system should be reworked to give users the ability to redeem their steam points for full games or partially pay for the purchase.

This would also naturally make Steam points far more valuable, meaning Steam Awards would become more meaningful, which is a good thing in my opinion, and the "Jester problem" would basically take care of itself.

The items currently on the Points Shop would then also have to be greatly reduced in cost as their value relative to the value of a partial or full purchase of a new game is remarkably inferior.

But what we would be left with would be a loyalty program that actually encourages users to spend directly on Steam instead of third party key selling sites like Humble Bundle.

Additionally, every purchase on the Steam store should heavily contribute towards your Steam level. It just makes perfect sense.



𝐅𝐈𝐗 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐁𝐘𝐒𝐌𝐀𝐋 𝐂𝐔𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐔𝐏𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄

Steam customer support is infamous for how terrible it is.

From personal experience and from what I've read online through the years, the average customer support experience on Steam seems to go a lil' something like this:

You write in your problem and wait multiple days for a generic answer from someone who didn't even bother reading your ticket.

Sounds familiar?

Compare this to other videogame services which allow you to livechat or even call... Services where you communicate to people who are actually trying to solve your issue instead of stonewalling you in hopes you give up and close the ticket.

This behavior reduces trust in the platform.

Valve's customer service is one of the worst I've experienced in my life and it's the main reason I've started significantly reducing the amount of money I spend of Steam and no longer recommend the service to friends and co-workers like I used to.

Trust is very important, and in the age of digital gaming, where you don't physically own the product you are purchasing, trust is paramount. So if you can't trust the entity selling it to you... Money will go elsewhere.



𝐃𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋𝐎𝐏 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐃 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍

Let's face it, the Valve we fondly remember does not exist anymore, that's why you don't have a Half-Life 3 or a Left 4 Dead 3 or a Portal 3.

Yeah, yeah, Valve can't count to 3, very funny, I know.

But the underlying issue causing this "inability to count to 3" is not funny at all, it's ugly and downright disgusting.

Instead of continuing to work on their beloved franchises and innovate and develop new ones, Valve elected the way of easy greasy money.

They elected to focus on esports and played a significant and pivotal role in the normalization of lootboxes and gambling. Vast amounts of money for relatively little work.

And I do mean little work because even by esports/live service standards, CSGO and DOTA2 are quite pathetic. Fresh content is extremely rare... But lootboxes for young teens to gamble with... That's always rolling out.

Valve should turn back and try to live up to the reputation of being "the good guy", a reputation they've long stopped deserving but could deserve once again through hard work and a decision to start once again contributing to videogame history in a much more positive way.

Valve should apologize to their fans for abandoning their beloved franchises for lootbox money and promise to do better in the future. They should cut off API access to all the gambling websites that they like to pretend they can do nothing about. Make a clean break from the sleazy stuff, and then they should take the vast amounts of money they have and make good single player and co-op experiences.

Take a page out of Sony's Playbook and buy up smaller but promising studios with talented and passionate developers and with time and money, turn them into your own Insomniac, your own Santa Monica, your own Naughty Dog.



𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐋

Quality control on Steam or the lack-there-of is an ever-present issue that we've just "learned" to accept. The Steam Store is filled with trash that couldn't even be described as shovelware and we've gotten used to seeing it so much that we "trained" ourselves to ignore it.

At least that's what we think, until we start browsing other stores and immediately notice that, while there some junk titles here and there, it's a much more pleasant experience to browse through content.

In my experience, the significantly reduced amount of trash on a store greatly helps in discoverability of smaller, low profile but legit indie titles which would otherwise be swimming at the bottom of a pool of trash. It's remarkably refreshing browsing through other stores compared to browsing on Steam.

Yes, we know those games sell because of Steam Cards, but is this worth your reputation, user experience and discoverability for smaller legit devs? The only sane answer is no.

If you care about your reputation and user experience, you have to curate your store.
You got away with ignoring this issue throughout the years, but as competition stiffens and other platforms offer a more curated experience, continuing to ignore this issue is foolish.


Thank you for reading!

[Rockets]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

And I've long suspected that some forum regulars have alt accounts to more effectively abuse the report system, one of them even openly alluded to that once.

There are many alt abusers.

Level 0 accounts and anonymous accounts should not be able to post or send friend requests.

They post months apart on posts their other alts are posting on.

I flat out just ignore/block level 0 and private profiles.

Those are the kinds of people that are on Steam that pose the most danger.
They are the primary reason kids should not be on here.

[Rockets]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Then you should be in favor of child accounts with proper parental controls! :smile_bod:

You are acting like parental controls would work. Look at my game reviews, Steam can't even stop a guy posting racist slurs. There ascii images of ♥♥♥♥♥ getting posted places.

There isn't a parent or parental control that exists that can protect kids on Steam. It would be like building 400 nuclear plants and not expecting a meltdown.

[FOXDUDE69]

Origineel geplaatst door Badass Rockets TV:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Then you should be in favor of child accounts with proper parental controls!

You are acting like parental controls would work. Look at my game reviews, Steam can't even stop a guy posting racist slurs. There ascii images of ♥♥♥♥♥ getting posted places.

There isn't a parent or parental control that exists that can protect kids on Steam. It would be like building 400 nuclear plants and not expecting a meltdown.

Nuclear power is the safest source of energy in the modern age.

There are 440 Nuclear power plants operating in the world today. The last "meltdown" occurred in 2011, because of an earthquake. Please stop spreading nuclear fear as it is the cleanest and cheapest source of energy available to man.

And parental controls means parental oversight over what kind of content the child can see, this would naturally apply to all user generated content, including reviews, screenshots, forums, you name it.

[Tito Shivan]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Yes and it's safe to assume that, because of how popular CSGO cheating is, Steam's percentage of alt accounts might be significantly higher than other videogame platforms.

Even if we took a stupidly hhigh number and accounted the whole current number of players from CSGO and DOTA2 as alt accounts (2 million accounts) it'd still be less than 7% of today's daily peak.

I also doubt the ratio of alt accounts in Valve games to be significantly larger than in other F2P titles like Fortnite or Overwatch 2.

[Boblin the Goblin]

Origineel geplaatst door Badass Rockets TV:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Then you should be in favor of child accounts with proper parental controls! :smile_bod:

You are acting like parental controls would work. Look at my game reviews, Steam can't even stop a guy posting racist slurs. There ascii images of ♥♥♥♥♥ getting posted places.

There isn't a parent or parental control that exists that can protect kids on Steam. It would be like building 400 nuclear plants and not expecting a meltdown.

You can literally turn off comments on your reviews.

[Boblin the Goblin]

Origineel geplaatst door Badass Rockets TV:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

And I've long suspected that some forum regulars have alt accounts to more effectively abuse the report system, one of them even openly alluded to that once.

There are many alt abusers.

Level 0 accounts and anonymous accounts should not be able to post or send friend requests.

They post months apart on posts their other alts are posting on.

I flat out just ignore/block level 0 and private profiles.

Those are the kinds of people that are on Steam that pose the most danger.
They are the primary reason kids should not be on here.

You literally have private accounts as friends.

[FOXDUDE69]

Origineel geplaatst door Tito Shivan:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Yes and it's safe to assume that, because of how popular CSGO cheating is, Steam's percentage of alt accounts might be significantly higher than other videogame platforms.

Even if we took a stupidly hhigh number and accounted the whole current number of players from CSGO and DOTA2 as alt accounts (2 million accounts) it'd still be less than 7% of today's daily peak.

Registered accounts and daily active users aren't the same thing, tho.

I'd really love to see the year over year percentage increase of Steam's registered accounts vs year over year increase of daily active users.

[Tito Shivan]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

I'd really love to see the year over year percentage increase of Steam's registered accounts vs year over year increase of daily active users.

The latter is quite easy to obtain:
https://steamdb.info/app/753/charts/

[Xhoas]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Origineel geplaatst door Xhoas:

My point was about the other user post, when he said something about people giving Valve the middlefinger.
And second no, not every platform on pc allow the creation of a child account. On GOG you have
to be 16 and autorized by your parent, on itch.io you have to be at least 13.

GOG is not any real competition for Steam. They don't have the size of Sony or Nintendo, nor the resources of EPIC. They don't even have a competitive drive, since they put Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam.

And who's a real competitor for Steam? For sure it's not Epic, and consoles are completely different . Even Microsoft only focus for Gamepass on pc.

[FOXDUDE69]

Origineel geplaatst door Xhoas:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

GOG is not any real competition for Steam. They don't have the size of Sony or Nintendo, nor the resources of EPIC. They don't even have a competitive drive, since they put Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam.

And who's a real competitor for Steam? For sure it's not Epic, and consoles are completely different . Even Microsoft only focus for Gamepass on pc.

And why isn't it EPIC? Because you grew up on CS and can't understand that the next generation of gamers is growing up on FORTNITE? That they'll have an EPIC stacked with games long before they can even safely make a Steam account?

And are consoles completely different? Somewhat different, arguably more convenient and certainly more affordable but they operate in the same field as Valve: videogames.

Pretending they are not in competition is remarkably foolish. Now more than ever, where you can get a Playstation 5 for each one of your kids and your wife for the same price as a Mid range gaming PC, lol.

If you ever step out of this echo chamber and check what some gamers are saying on twitter and on youtube comments, you start getting a very clear picture: Many PC gamers are dropping PC as their main gaming platform and going back to consoles, mainly the Playstation5, which is why Sony has been having a very, very strong year. They are even breaking PS2 sales records.

Even for people like me, who are Multiplatform Kings and have access to everything, even we have to make a choice between PC and all the other platforms when a new game comes out.

Do I buy this on PC? And play deal with:

Shadder stuttering
Poor optimization
Denuvo further taxing my system
Rampant cheating (which affects even Souls games)
A myriad of other possible unforeseen issues

Or do I buy this on my Playstation? And enjoy:

Adaptive Triggers
Haptic Feedback
A significantly better optimized experience

Stuff like this is why it took Spider-man a month to sell on Steam what it sold in 3 days on Playstation.

Valve is very much in competition with Playstation and Xbox, and Valve is not the top dog.

[AROCK!!!]

Origineel geplaatst door Xhoas:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

The answer to that is in the first paragraph of the original post.

It doesn't talk about people leaving Steam. And to be fair no one is really doing that...

Actually there are people doing it, and I'm one of them, and I personally know others doing the same.

As I mentioned before, for more than a decade we used STEAM because we had no other choice, and that caused a lot of resentment towards Valve / STEAM.

I personally went out of my way to ensure that Valve made as little as possible from me. Out of my 133 games, easily 95% were bought through other stores, and the ones I did buy through the STEAM store, 99% of them were marked down to at least 75% off.

Even before I stopped buying games that required STEAM, I had no problem paying a higher price on Epic, GOG or any other platform, and that's exactly what I did

[AROCK!!!]

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

Origineel geplaatst door Tito Shivan:

Every service, from Steam, Origin, Epic, Facebook, Twitter... has people owning multiple accounts, most of the time for legit reasons.

Yes and it's safe to assume that, because of how popular CSGO cheating is, Steam's percentage of alt accounts might be significantly higher than other videogame platforms.

Exactly.

Look at the fact that every time someone asks for the ability to apply individual privacy settings to games, the number one reply is, "create an alt account for the games you want to hide".

No doubt in my mind that the actual customer increase number is much, much lower than the number of accounts being created.

[AROCK!!!]

Origineel geplaatst door Xhoas:

Origineel geplaatst door FOXDUDE69:

GOG is not any real competition for Steam. They don't have the size of Sony or Nintendo, nor the resources of EPIC. They don't even have a competitive drive, since they put Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam.

And who's a real competitor for Steam? For sure it's not Epic, and consoles are completely different . Even Microsoft only focus for Gamepass on pc.

Epic is expanding its platform and library which is helping it gain more and more customers and is without question competition.
Even GOG is getting more and more new games. For example, STALKER 2 is available to pre-order on GOG, and Trepang (new release) also released there.


Consoles have advanced quite a bit, and in many cases are better than PCs, and this is from me, someone that was anti console less than a year ago.
I bought a PS5 around 5 months ago, and in that time i have bought more games for it than I have for PC in a year.

The PS5 has graphics just as good as most PCs these days (4K), unless you're the type that spends thousands on multiple GPUs and monitors.

Most console games now support a mouse and keyboard and the PS5 has gyro aiming, adaptive triggers and haptic feedback.

Superior VR

More affordable and easier to use.

Used game market.

Better optimisation.

Cheater free MP

[rysK # Dan Dan]

ahahahaha q legal!!

[Sasori Kigaru]

Alright! I now have my replies.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2994809970

In this reply to my ticket I brought up Brian's ticket and linked to it since that response was completely opposite to mine.

They feel support somehow missed the fact that his daughter is 9 which admittedly, confuses me cause I'm not sure how someone can miss that.. that aside the Steam Support reply just mentions account creation again SO I made yet another reply to my ticket. I wanted them to include the word USE because the creation side of things is handled by me, not my daughter.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2994810272

Thus I get the last response in my ticket, as my ticket is now closed after this reply and I don't intend on making more since they told me to make a new ticket only for unrelated issues.

In this reply they mention and basically triple down, that steam requires users to be at least 13 years old before they can create AND use an account. As well as telling me not to let my daughter use my account until she is of age. I'm assuming by my account they mean the one I made for her, considering it mine until she is of age to actually take it as her own.