Steam Dev Days 2016

Entry posted by Josh · October 15, 2016

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I got back last night from Steam Dev Days 2016 in Seattle. This year focused heavily on VR, with Valve mentioning they are working on a new unannounced title built for VR. Valve also announced Steamworks will begin supporting the PS4 controller, with other controller support in the works.

This was also an opportunity for me to meet with a bunch of people on the Steam dev team and chat with other developers. I got a lot done! We're getting our Steam controller integration fixed, as I presently can't upload controller configurations in the backend.

I also talked to several Valve people about the friction we're seeing in the Workshop Store. I used quotes from this forum and your comments on my blog to show them how customers were reacting and where the problems were. I hope to keep simplifying the purchase process of these items so that your Workshop Store items sell as well as our DLCs. Being able to show graphs of DLCs versus Workshop Store sales, together with customer feedback from this forum made a convincing presentation. Below are a couple of my slides.

My recommendations to Valve are as follows:

Add a Steam browser protocol call to open an item page in the Steam client.
Streamline the checkout process for inventory items.
Add a mechanism for sales discounts in item store.

The first item is the simplest to implement, and will make an immediate difference because you will be able to complete purchases through the Steam client instead of having to log into your Steam account with a web browser.

Unlike previous GDCs and Steam Dev Days 2014, which was after Leadwerks launched on Steam, at this conference everyone knew about Leadwerks. I met with ReepBlue and got to play his Blue Portals mod, and also talked to the Black Mesa Source devs about map design and art, which was awesome.

And of course the afterparty was a blast: